Bizarre Beasts
The Extinction (and De-Extinction?) of the Passenger Pigeon
2025 • E11 Oct 13, 2025 14m
Martha died on September 1st, 1914. She was 29. Martha wasn’t your average Hollywood starlet – she was something even more rare: an endling, the last member of her species. Just a few hundred years earlier, passenger pigeons flocks were so large that they could literally darken the sky for hours. So how did we get from those numbers to extinction? And are they really gone for good?
