The passenger pigeon is sometimes called a 'wild pigeon' or 'blue pigeon'.Picture courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Mark Catesby's 1754 illustration of a passenger pigeon. The first published depiction of the species is believed to be by Mark Catesby, in The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands volume 1, in 1754, although he called the bird Palumbus migratorius, the pigeon of passage.He mistook the birds he saw for the wild pigeons he was familiar with in Europe but it was later agreed that what he had seen were passenger pigeons. Journeying along the shore of Prince Edward Island, Cartier noted in his journal: 'an infinite number of wood pigeons'.The first recorded mention of the passenger pigeon was by ship captain Jacques Cartier in July 1534.Ectopistes means 'moving about or wandering' and migratorius means 'migrating'.It was later re-classified as Ectopistes migratorius because of its longer wings and tail, and larger overall size, than the dove family Columbidae. It was officially described by Carl Linnaeus in 1766 as Columba migratoria.The scientific name for the passenger pigeon is Ectopistes migratorius.To commemorate, I (with some invaluable help and contributions from my Museum colleagues, the Smithsonian Institution, and Joel Greenberg's book A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction) have compiled a list of 100 passenger pigeon-related facts. After the dodo, it is one of the most famous examples of human-caused extinction in the world. Today is the 100th anniversary of the death of the last living passenger pigeon.
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