This is the 100th anniversary of the last known passenger pigeon. That's her--Martha--who died in 1914. It seems remote in history, but today in San Francisco a woman saw her first major league baseball game--she is nearly 108. On her first day of school there were still passenger pigeons.
The extinction of a species is in some ways a technical matter. There are other pigeon species that probably share genes with the passenger pigeon. But each species extinction lessens the genetic diversity that keep populations healthy, and these losses eventually lead to the disappearance of what we non-scientists would describe as types of animal or plant life. Not just one kind of tiger, but tigers, something that's in the cards as effects of the climate crisis combine with the other human-causes of lethal poisons, industrial hunting and destroyed habitat and range.
Martha was a harbinger of a century of extinction that rivals any period in Terran history. That we mourn these extinctions and have made the passenger pigeon their icon is (as Elizabeth Kolbert notes) relatively new outside of indigenous cultures, and laudable. That scientists are trying to figure out how to revive Martha's breed is in itself interesting but suggests our all too prevalent techno-fix response, which demonstrates our ignorance as well as our feeling. Far better would be to do the hard work of cleaning up our chemical act, and restoring habitat and range for existing species.
Because extinctions in the 21st century may well make the 20th look innocent. All primates are threatened, a lot of large animals and a large number of bird species: some 1300 may go extinct, according to this National Geographic article, including the one pictured below, an African fish eagle.
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