Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" conveys the eerie power possessed by a flock of birds. But Hollywood's fantasy is nothing compared to the reality of Wisconsin birds long ago.

Flocks of passenger pigeons containing literally millions of birds criss-crossed the Midwest when settlers arrived, sometimes darkening the whole sky when they flew. At one time, they estimate that 136 million existed in my state of Wisconsin alone, possibly 5 billion throughout its living range. LaCrosse, Wisconsin resident L.H.Bunnell was canoeing on the Mississippi in 1842 when he "saw clouds of pigeons" so large that they broke the limbs of trees. "Crash would fall an oak limb" he wrote, "and then a noise would follow like the letting of steam..."

Native Americans had always lived in harmony with pigeons, never disturbing their nests until the youngs reached a certain age. The Sauk, Potawatomi, and Menominee used nets to capture them on the fly. "Under our manner of securing them," recalled an aged Iroquois chief, "they continued to increase".

At first, white settlers also hunted only enough to feed themselves. But the spread of railroads in the late 19th century enabled hunters to ship carloads of pigeons from rural Wisconsin to urban restaurants, getting about one cent a bird. For days, towns neglected all other business to shoot pigeons for sale to Chicago and Minneapolis restaurants. During the same decades, Wisconsin was cleared of the huge forest tracts where the pigeons had always raised their young. By 1916, the one remaining passenger pigeon, Martha, died in a Cincinnati zoo. And then there were none.