Passenger pigeons were once the most numerous bird on the planet, a swarm of Tiny beasts covering the sky. Get three extinct animals raised to life as monsters in D&D: https://store.magehandpress.com/products/book-of-extinction-preview

Episode transcript: https://scintilla.studio/monster-extinction-passenger-pigeon/

Guides:

Steve Sullivan, Director of the Hefner Museum of Natural History, Miami University

Stan Rachootin, Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at Mount Holyoke University

Appearing courtesy the Beneski Museum of Natural History, Amherst College

"Extinction Theme" by Alexandre Miller, The Boy King of Idaho

Like this stat block? Did I miss something? Let me know on Twitter: www.twitter.com/SparkOtter

It's a biological storm, fire that shoots across the skies.

this magnificent pearlescent, skydiving bird.

Passenger pigeons, as they passed over our head would darken the sky like twilight.

It was said that they would blot out the sun

when they would fly over you.

The thundering of their wings would frighten horses.

When they would land, sometimes their nesting colonies were miles square.

And you hope you have an umbrella at the same time, too.

The feces that they would drop would be so

potent that it would destroy the trees that they were nesting on.

In the 19th century, they are by far the

commonest bird in the world.

And today?

Welcome to Making a Monster: Extinction.

This is the companion podcast to Book of Extinction, a "monster manual" of animals

lost to the natural world, but given a second life through Dungeons and Dragons.

Natural history is already a part of the DNA of fantasy games.

Many of our favorite monsters began as tall tales of exotic animals.

Bringing extinct species into D and D is one way to honor their memory and

move people toward action in the climate crisis and accelerating mass extinction.

We covered the story of the passenger pigeon a little in

the introduction to this series.

But in this episode, I get to show you how I turned it into a D and

D monster for Book of Extinction.

If you want to follow along with this build, you can go to

scintilla.studio/extinction right now to download a digital preview

of the book, which includes a step block for the real passenger pigeon,

as well as the magical version we'll be creating at the end of the show.

Go ahead.

I'll wait my voice in your phone!

Hit pause, come back.

Our guides.

This episode are Steve Sullivan, director of the Hefner Museum of

Natural History at Miami University.

First of all, to define extinction: functional extinction

is when all possible reproducing individuals of a species are gone.

If we look at the passenger pigeon as an icon, when that one female

passenger pigeon, Martha, was left alive in the Cincinnati Zoo, the

species was not "extinct," we might say in quotes, but in fact it was.

It's functionally extinct.

Now extinction tends to be accepted as meaning no individuals of

that species exist on the planet.

I'd also like you to meet Stan Rachootin, Professor Emeritus of

Biological Sciences at Mount Holyoke University on a tour of the Beneski

Museum of Natural History at Amherst college in Amherst, Massachusetts,

it was recorded in April of 2019.

And we can start with this one, the passenger pigeon.

Now, if you're reading in the middle of the 19th century about anything

about nature and people, lots of people talk about passenger pigeons.

Darwin writes about them.

Wallace writes about them.

But the thing that's important about passenger pigeons in the

19th century, they are by far the commonest bird in the world.

Incredibly, incredibly large flocks of passenger pigeons.

So let's sit back and look at North America prior to 1914.

In fact, let's look at North America prior to the 1600s.

There were certainly people here.

They were certainly managing the forests in very sophisticated ways.

In fact, Ohio is pretty neat because as Ohio is covered in trees, and there are

a handful of prairies here and there.

From what we understand, the prairies that are in Ohio are anthropogenic - that

is to say they were created by humans.

So the Native Americans that were here recognized the value of diverse habitat

and have what we call edge habitat.

That is the habitat that is right between the forest and the prairie,

that edge where things like to live.

So they would go in, they would burn trees or otherwise get rid of trees,

which would encourage prairies to occur.

So from what we understand, all of these prairies were created

by Native Americans early on.

So the forests were managed, but the feel was very much like a tropical rain forest.

Think Mirkwood.

Sometimes deep, dark dense, frightening to some people.

Some of the trees there, the chestnuts, were 12 people linking arms in diameter,

so big that a family that moves in, a family of colonists, could live inside

a tree while they're busy building their log house or their sod house,

or clearing their fields or whatever.

What were passenger pigeons doing that they could

have so many huge, such huge flocks of passenger pigeons?

What do passenger pigeons eat?

Well.

They are, they are strong fliers.

They are flying all over the place.

In fact, there's a record of a passenger pigeon being shot, I think

it was shot in either New York or New Jersey, and the contents of its crop, the

place that it stores its food before it goes into its stomach to be ground up, the

contents of its crop contained fruits that were only fruiting in Florida on that day.

That shows you how far and how fast they can fly.

There are estimates that they're flying as much as 60 miles an hour, maybe more.

Other birds?

No.

That it would be very difficult to have a flock of a billion birds that

are going "Oh, okay, I see a lot, I see us sparrow, let's go guys!"

And then the billion birds dive down onto the sparrow.

You know, or even an ostrich at that point, you know, you, you know, you're

not going to get very far with that.

No, their specialty was acorns.

The composition of this deep dark forest was oaks, that

we're very familiar with that drop acorns; various kinds of, of hickory

and pecan and walnut, these large shelled nuts; then beech trees.

Beech trees have very small fruits.

The trees are towering with this smooth silvery bark.

It's it's frankly, the bark that people like to vandalize when they're on hikes,

you know you're in a beautiful, pristine place when the beach trees are smooth,

like elephant skin, rather than scarred with "so-and-so loves so-and-so 1992."

Um, beech trees are still around, but they're not as common.

But in earlier times, if you've heard of things like beech nut gum, or, beech

nut baby food, things like this, it was recognized that beech nuts are really

important because nuts in general are very fatty and calories are expensive.

It's only become, in recent decades, basically my lifetime, that calories have

become so cheap and easy to get ahold of.

So when beech nuts would, would have their, their fruits, what we call

masting, it would be an unusual time.

And acorns do something called mast, which is spelled M A S T.

For those of you taking down notes, which you shouldn't be doing, because

this won't be on the test probably.

Um, okay.

So mast fruiting is when oak trees decide and tell each other and they've not let

us in on their code, we're all gonna make a vast number of acorns just this season.

They don't mast every year.

They mast when they're they have enough energy and then they put all

their energy into creating hundreds of nuts, ankle deep from as far as

you can see, beech nuts everywhere.

And so I've been here long enough in my 140 years at Mount Holyoke.

In the last 35 years at Mount Holyoke, there've been about three or four

years where you walk around Upper Lake and it feels like you're out in, you

know, in World War One and they're shooting machine guns at you from all

directions, because there are so many acorns falling all over the place.

And then you walk around in a normal year, around Upper Lake

of ping, ping, ping, ping, ping.

You know, you hear the acorns falling, but it's not hundreds of acorns falling

every, you know, every 10 seconds.

So people would scoop those up.

Native Americans, colonists would scoop those up, and

use them as a protein source.

And importantly, they lack tanins.

And so we can eat them.

Now, have you ever had a walnut that just, you know, at like Christmas

time when people are sitting around shelling walnuts, but then, and

it just makes your mouth pucker?

Or worse yet, take a little nibble of an acorn.

There's a reason we humans don't use acorns as food, but squirrels do.

They have so much tannin in them.

It's like you take all the teabags in your, in your box, you soak them in your,

in your teacup, you boil that down and for a day, and then you try to drink that?

Your mouth is going to pucker up and that's from the tanins..

So the mast fruiting, why would the oak trees be into mast fruiting?

Does anybody eat acorns?

Squirrels, chipmunks, deer, mice, deer, all the things that carry Lyme disease.

Deer mice and deer.

So a big year for acorns, that's going to be followed by a big year for deer

mice and a big year for Lyme disease.

So, you know, it really gets under your skin in some way or another.

Now, as passenger pigeons are skimming that cream of

nuts off the top of things, passenger pigeon are suppressing deer mice.

Now there's a hypothesis - this is a difficult hypothesis to substantiate,

but it's, people are working on it - there's a hypothesis that as, passenger

pigeons in New England are skimming the beech nuts and acorns, they're

suppressing the deer mouse population.

The deer mouse population is suppressed, that means the

tick population is suppressed.

That means the Lyme disease population is suppressed.

That means Lyme disease, wherever it evolved, has to stay localized.

As soon as we lose the passenger pigeon due to human caused extinction,

deer mice now have all that food to eat, which means they're reproducing

nearly monthly and their babies are spreading everywhere with ticks.

And now all of a sudden humans are not only getting chronic fatigue syndrome

and other maladies they're even becoming allergic to meat in some cases, because of

these diseases that are being carried and it may be able to trace its roots back to

the extinction of the passenger pigeon.

But in a year that no one, no predator of acorns can predict,

there are vast numbers of extra acorns.

There aren't enough weevils or deer mice or deer or chipmunks

to do much damage to them.

That's the year the acorns will be able to germinate because there's so many extra.

So if there are these nuts, like beech nuts, like black walnuts,

like pecans that have low tannins, we humans really want to use those.

The other nut that was there was the chestnut and it's extinct

thanks to a fungal blight that kills them from the ground up.

So these trees that were 12 men linking arms in diameter, they're gone.

However, they were so huge.

even though they've been extinct for a century now they're still

sending up shoots and trying to grow.

But as soon as they get above ground, every so often they flower and fruit,

but then they die because the fungus that exists only from the ground up.

So here's, this is the ecosystem that we're looking at with passenger pigeons.

Ah,

that was a journey.

Um, okay.

Okay.

I'm with you.

Okay.

And, and all the oak trees get the message that we're going to do it

together that same year, but nobody else has gotten in on the message.

And so nobody knows, oh, this is the year I should have 20 extra babies

because you know, we're going to get to September and there's a vast amount of

food for getting us through the winter.

So a lot of the acorns just survive.

So the environment, the passenger pigeons are living in

is this dense, dark, human-managed but massive forest, like Mirkwood,

that includes trees that today over there, this one is masting.

It's producing tons, literally tons of fruit, but then for the

next four or five years, nothing.

But next year, the ones over there are fruiting.

And so passenger pigeons develop as what we call cream skimmers.

This is a group of organisms that can come and take the

best things and then fly away.

We see this in say African antelope, when the grass is tall and green and,

and very nutritious, some species will come through, but then eventually the

grass dries and becomes very short.

There are other species that will be able to take advantage of that.

And these two species, the ones that are gleaners and the ones that

are cream skimmers, they cannot survive off of one another's food.

We see this with horses all the time.

If you feed them too rich food, they actually get sick, they

founder, they don't function well.

So passenger pigeons are the species that just takes this cream off

the top, and then it disappears.

But how do you find the cream in Mirkwood forest when only 5,000 miles

to the west is fruiting right now.

And in a couple of weeks, it's 3000 miles to the east.

Well, what you do is you have lots of eyes that are looking and

those eyes can move very fast.

The trick of the passenger pigeons was, "We are willing

to fly anywhere in North America, it has all oak forest everywhere, to find

the forest that is doing mast fruiting.

And then, yeah, I will settle down with 40 million of my closest friends

and we're going to eat all the acorns.

And so we're going to start at Missouri.

And then if the next one is in Wisconsin, we'll fly to Wisconsin.

And then, okay guys, everybody up to Manitoba."

And you know, you follow the season, you follow the acorns and everybody gets

lots of acorns because you're willing to go where the mast fruiting is.

You're strong fliers and you'll find, and if you have that many of

you out flying, you're going to find the forests which are doing that.

It's the principle of satellites today.

And so in this context, the passenger pigeon is not so much a species

or an individual, the way that we often like to look at things.

"Oh, what, what species of pet lizard do you have?"

Or, "Oh, I like your dog so much."

In fact, the passenger pigeon is more like an ecological phenomenon.

It's a biological storm.

Passenger pigeons, as they passed over our head here in Oxford, Ohio

would darken the sky like twilight.

Sometimes their nesting colonies were miles square.

The feces that they would drop would be so potent that it would destroy

the trees that they were nesting on.

It would over nitrogen them.

Have you ever spilled nitrogen fertilizer on a lawn?

It creates a giant brown patch of death.

That's what passenger pigeon poop is doing.

And while they're doing all this, they're simply scooping up the beech

nuts, scooping up these chestnuts much like the Chinese chestnuts that we get

at holiday time in the grocery store.

These are golf ball sized things.

They're just popping them down their throat and eventually digesting them.

They're also, sometimes they die in flight.

So now they become this little fertilizer packet filled with seeds

to help the forests grow back up.

So where are we seeing a story like that in this class?

Periodical cicadas?

The 17 year cicadas, mass numbers of them, the predators can't do anything

with them are so many of them.

And so they have the trees and the forest to themselves.

And then 17 years later, there's nobody around who remembers, oh, I remember no

grandparent is telling the kids about the year of magic cicadas badges, cicadas,

actually, uh, who came out and provided vast amounts of food for three weeks.

You just can't remember that because nobody in the forest around here

lasts more than a couple of years.

So that was their trick.

And then we came along and cut down all the oak trees and put in corn and

wheat and so the passenger pigeons, who have one egg per mating for

every time they mate, and will only feel comfortable mating surrounded

by several thousand of their closest friends doing the same thing.

So you put 14 of them in a single cage in the Cincinnati Zoo, they

look at each other and say, "Okay, we all take vows of chastity."

And then they die one after another.

And that was the end of them in the early 20th century.

Look around the country.

How many places are named after pigeons?

They're not named after city pigeons, who have their native

range in the Mediterranean Sea.

Those are named after our unique species, the passenger pigeon, as the

French say, you can criticize my French accent, the pigeon de passage, Ectopistes

migratorius, the migratory pigeon.

Pigeon Forge, Tennessee?

Passenger pigeons.

And frankly, it's rich because of passenger pigeons.

All that passenger pigeon poop?

It may have killed the trees, but it also increased the productivity

of the soil over the years.

Next door over there in Gatlinburg, they could only grow, say, two or three ears

of corn per given unit .Over there in Pigeon Forge, they could , grow five or

six or 10 years of corn in the same area.

So now they have time for banking and for commerce and for art.

This is not necessarily a true historical example I've given here of these places,

but it's the kind of example that you get when passenger pigeons poop and die in

a place, it becomes more rich like that.

And so all these pigeon places they're named because pigeons were so important,

this biological phenomenon of pigeons.

Dungeons & Dragons already has a name for this phenomenon: a swarm.

Usually these are Medium, or roughly person-sized, swarms of Tiny

creatures, but that's completely inadequate to describe the "bird-nado"

of a passenger pigeon swarm.

We're about to dive into designing this creature for D&D.

But before we do everybody take a deep breath, because at this point you

might be thinking, "Man, people suck".

So far, everyone I've told this story to has said some version of that to me.

In fact, you might describe your feelings as a "generalized sense that

the ecological foundations of existence are in the process of collapse."

There's a name for that now.

The American Psychological Association recognized it as "eco-anxiety" in 2017.

And I have stared at my bedroom ceiling unable to sleep because of this feeling.

It's not a medical diagnosis, but it is a rational response to what's happening

and the best way to respond to it, to relieve that anxiety, is to take action.

Every conservationist I've spoken to on this project believes that

"people suck and we're all going to die" is not just the least helpful

response you can have, it's flat wrong.

People are amazing.

Our decisions as a species, society, and yes, as individuals change the face of

the world, decide what lives and what dies, and that means we can choose life.

The technologies and solutions to preserve habitat and biodiversity already exist,

and they're getting better by the day.

So here are two ways you can take action in the climate crisis.

First, donate to conservation through Book of Extinction.

Go to scintilla.studio/extinction, or follow the link in the show notes to go

to the Mage Hand Press store and download the preview of Book of Extinction.

You can pay what you want for it, and whatever you pay will be

donated to conservation efforts to preserve endangered species,

habitat, and biodiversity.

I'm currently meeting with conservation organizations to select

a project and organize a grant.

And there's a lot of details, but if you want to know more follow this

podcast or join my email list and I'll give you details as they unfold.

Second, share these stories with the people you play games with.

Just telling people these animals existed and what they represent

begins to reverse the sliding scale of decreasing biodiversity by helping people

to realize what we've already lost.

The Book of Extinction preview has short articles on the real world history of

these creatures alongside the in-game lore I've written for fantasy worlds

where magic is a selective pressure.

So it's a great way to talk about it.

You can also recommend this podcast.

We get to spend the better part of an hour on each animal and go into

way more detail than I could fit into a monster manual style entry.

All right, everybody.

Okay, stick around to the end of the show to hear about the de-extinction

project for passenger pigeons.

For now, let's make a monster

In the fantasy world of D&D, passenger pigeons would be called "The Feathered

Tide", a swarm of Tiny birds guided by a single instinctual mind.

For starters, let's talk size.

Creatures in D&D are either Tiny, Small, Medium, Large, Huge, or Gargantuan.

Medium is the size of an average humanoid and occupies a one inch

square on the game's grid at a scale of one inch to five feet.

Tiny is half a square, or anything under two and a half

feet by two and a half feet.

So this would include a single passenger pigeon.

Gargantuan, the game's largest size category, is anything that covers a floor

space of 20 feet by 20 feet or more.

We know from Erol Fuller's book The Passenger Pigeon that roosting sites

could cover anywhere from a few acres to hundreds of square miles, the

largest being recorded at Sparta, Wisconsin in 1871 at 850 square miles.

Pretty much the entirety of Sparta's surrounding county to a depth thick

enough to break the limbs off of trees.

So we know Gargantuan is inadequate.

But how inadequate exactly?

It's time for pigeon math!

So first we got to figure out the volume of a pigeon.

A 1995 study on bird collisions with aircraft measured the volume of rock doves

or domestic pigeons, both when dry and wet, in order to determine their density,

which is just such a gift to the world.

And I know it didn't have my name on the tag, but it feels

like it's for me somehow.

So we know that the volume of a modern domestic pigeon

is 498.5 cubic centimeters.

Let's assume that the passenger pigeon is the same and that the swarm occupies

exactly a 20 by 20 by 20 foot cube instead of a sphere or some random murmuration.

Let us further assume a cubic pigeon, which would occupy this ludicrous cube

in the most efficient way possible.

Under these conditions, a Gargantuan swarm of passenger pigeons

would contain 453,977 birds.

Half a million isn't quite the billions we need to represent the species in its

prime, but it's a good place to start.

So how does this swarm obtain this kind of biomass?

This is D and D.

So the answer is magic.

Of course.

The feathered tide has a feature called "create passenger": Any Medium or

smaller beast that enters the swarm's space or starts its turn there must

make a DC 14 Wisdom saving throw.

On a failed save, the beast is magically polymorphed into a passenger

pigeon and absorbed by the swarm.

The swarm gains half the beast's current hit points, rounded down,

which is the only way the swarm can regain hit points or heal itself.

On a successful save, the beast is immune to this effect for the next 24 hours.

So this swarm will be absorbing other birds, cattle, livestock, or

wild beasts potentially up to, and including the biggest beast currently

in the game, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, so bye bye Sue, I guess.

It forces them to become a passenger pigeon to survive.

It's a new take, I think kind of consistent with modern zombie

stories where loss of identity is one of the major themes explored.

It's also as much as I prefer to avoid this dichotomy, a

kind of "us or them" statement.

Once again, from Fuller's previously cited book, "The plain truth is that the lives

of the Passenger Pigeons and technological humankind were incompatible."

Which brings me back to de extinction.

There are no living passenger pigeons, although

people are making arguments.

Do we have enough of their DNA kicking around in dried up specimens

that we might be able to get one, you know, get some made up again?

Uh, maybe, maybe not.

So a lot of times when we talk about extinct species,

I'm often asked about de-extinction.

In my parents' generation, that was unthinkable.

Watson and Crick, that was what, 1952, when we discovered, what DNA looked

like thanks to their, piracy, a little bit of Rosalind Franklin's work?

Uh, but, uh, however that history happened, we finally understood

really not just that as Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin showed,

that species can change, but we then also began to understand the genetic

makeup of how things could change.

And now today, with, with CRISPR technology, we can kind of cut up

genes and chuck new bits in there.

And, in fact with the mammoth, that's been in the news recently, we

can take Asian elephants and we can take some of these, frozen mammoths

that have been in the permafrost for so long, which thanks to climate

change, the permafrost is thawing, so we're able to find these, but so

well-preserved, we can even eat the meat.

We can find the genes within those organisms.

We can splice them into Asian elephants, and it is entirely

conceivable that we can make a mammoth.

So I think this is gonna probably be harder to do this

one than to do, uh, mammoths because mammoths, we have a lot of DNA and Indian

elephants are really close to mammoths.

Now, there are some technical hurdles to overcome and some

biological hurdles to overcome, but, you know, Star Trek was conceivable back

when the technology was inconceivable and nowadays we're kind of like,

yeah, I guess we'd just have to find enough titanium on some asteroid

to finish making the main saucer.

So we can at least conceive that this could happen.

There are a couple of ways that we can accomplish de-extinction.

One is, as I've said, the sort of transgenics, and we can sort of fill in

the gaps of a, of an existing species so that it becomes the extinct species.

With the passenger pigeon, there have been proposals to take the band tailed pigeon,

which is from a taxonomic perspective, probably the closest relative of the

passenger pigeon, and to simply cut out the parts that make it distinctly band

tailed pigeon, and plug in the parts that make it distinctly passenger pigeon.

In fact, um, years ago, I was managing a collection where we donated a very small

sample of passenger pigeon tissue to a program that was analyzing their genes.

And, you know, we can, we now have the sequence.

We can create that sequence out of functional amino acids.

We could plug that in.

So some of that technology literally exists and the

hurdles need to be overcome.

And to some extent it's a matter of time, expertise, and the money to pay for it.

Now the question comes, let's say we've achieved de-extinction.

So if I de-extinct a pigeon and it hatches out in my hand and it's this so

homely, it's cute little altricial bird.

And it grows up to this magnificent pearlescent, skydiving

bird, and there's one of them.

And I've got it in a cage in my lab, or I've got in a cage in a

zoo, or I've got it in an aviary.

Maybe I've got a hundred birds.

At what point have we actually de extincted the passenger pigeon?

Are we going to be okay with passenger pigeons, thundering across the sky,

maybe 10 times a year, maybe no times a year, who knows when, pooping on

all our cars, ruining our paint jobs, making our cities stink for a time?

Are we okay with that biological phenomenon today?

So the answer is yes, de-extinction is awesome.

The other answer is de-extinction is problematic and we still need to have

a big community conversation about it.

I would say that passenger pigeons, even when a real one can perch

on my hand will never be de extincted as I'm calling it now.

Special thanks this episode to Fred Venne and the Beneski Museum

of Natural History at Amherst College for contributing the recording

of professor Rachooti's tour.

Thanks also to Steve Sullivan at the Hefner Museum of Natural History,

whose storytelling skill and passion for conservation education are a

gift to this project and the world.

Thanks for listening to Making a Monster.

If bringing D&D to conservation matters to you, please visit

scintilla.studio/extinction to download the Book of Extinction preview.

You can pay what you think it's worth, or you can just have it, but

whatever you pay through that page will be donated to conservation

efforts to preserve endangered species, habitat, and biodiversity.

If you really like what I'm doing, consider supporting the show on Patreon.

Making a Monster patrons get access to a ton of extras, including music,

cut tape, bonus episodes, and a master list of all the stat blocks,

discounts, and other extras past guests have given to listeners of the show.

I'll see you next week with a brand new monster.