TellZall's object for June is the passenger pigeon.

Press Southward, who lived on a farm near Sargents in Pike County, Ohio, first saw the bird eating corn in the barnyard. The fourteen-year-old talked his mother into letting him take a shotgun and shoot the robber. "I found the bird perched high in the tree," he recalled, "and brought it down without much damage to its appearance." Neither Press nor his parents realized it at the time, but he had just killed the last passenger pigeon living in the wild. The date was March 24, of 1900.

When Europeans first arrived, huge flocks of passenger pigeons amazed them. "There are wild pigeons...beyond number or imagination," one Virginia immigrant recorded. Their population numbered perhaps 5 billion. In 1813 naturalist John James Audubon witnessed a flock near Louisville, Kentucky, that was traveling a mile a minute and blocked out the sun from noon until sunset. In 1870, when the numbers had greatly declined, a flock flying over Cincinnati was estimated to be a mile wide and 320 miles long, containing more than 2 billion birds.

The passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) was a native North American species. The name was coined by early French settlers who called the bird pigeón de pâsságe, or migratory pigeon. The birds migrated in the spring and autumn and traveled in great flocks in search of food. The main nesting area was the Great Lakes region, and wintering sites ranged from Arkansas to North Carolina south to the Gulf Coast states. The birds depended upon the great forests to supply their diet. When a supply was exhausted, they flew to a new site.

From the earliest settlement days, passenger pigeons were hunted as food and sport. The birds were a cheap source of meat, and their feathers were used in pillows and comforters. One New York City merchant sold 18,000 birds a day in the 1850s. In Michigan in 1878, 50,000 pigeons were killed daily for nearly five months. Near Bowling Green, Ohio, in 1896 hunters killed 240,000 adult birds, and some 100,000 chicks, too young to survive alone, died. Perhaps 5,000 birds escaped.

Some birds were taken alive and then released for hunters to shoot as live targets. To capture the birds, their human captors would take a live pigeon and nail its feet to a stand. Other pigeons would hear the fluttering captive, come to investigate, and themselves be captured. The decoy bird was known as a "stool pigeon," a word that survives and means "a person acting as a decoy or informer."

Between unregulated hunting and the destruction of forests, the numbers of passenger pigeons declined very quickly. Press Southworth surely had no idea that the passenger pigeon that he shot on his family's farm that day was the last in the wild. Indeed, no knew that for certain. But officials at the Cincinnati Zoo knew that passenger pigeons were endangered, and they tried to breed some captive specimens. Unfortunately, the birds failed to mate. On September 1, 1914, the last passenger pigeon on Earth, a female named Martha after Martha Washington, died in her cage at the zoo.

In a very short period of time, a bird that had one made up perhaps 40 percent of the birds of eastern North America was gone - extinct. Except for man, the passenger pigeon had few natural enemies and had found a niche that seemed to ensure survival. Today, the few stuffed passenger pigeons that reside in museum and zoo collections are grim reminders of what can happen.