The Passenger Pigeon: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Passenger Pigeon, credited to William B. Mershon, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Passenger Pigeon by William B. Mershon. Read in English by Maria Kasper "For the last three years I have spent most of my leisure time in collecting as much material as possible which might help to throw light on the oft-repeated query, 'What has become of the wild pigeons?' ... I am merely a business man who is interested in the Passenger Pigeon because he loves the outdoors and its wild things, and sincerely regrets the cruel extinction of one of the most interesting natural phenomena of his own country. ... It is hard for us of an older generation to realize that as recently as 1880 the Passenger Pigeon was thronging in countless millions through large areas of the Middle West. ... They were slain by the millions during the middle of the last century, and from one region in Michigan in one year three million Passenger Pigeons were killed for market. ... The American people are wasteful. They are just beginning to learn the need of economy in the use of that which Nature has flung at their feet." (from the Introduction to The Passenger Pigeon by William B. Mershon, 1907) On September 1, 1914, just seven years after Mershon's book was published, the last known passenger pigeon died at the Cincinnati Zoo.

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Passenger Pigeon
• Author credits: William B. Mershon
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 20
• Listed recording duration: 6:13:22

Catalogue topics

• birds
• passenger pigeon
• endangered species

Track guide

1. 00 - Introduction — 7:24
2. 01 - My Boyhood Among the Pigeons — 13:06
3. 02 - The Passenger Pigeon - from American Ornithology by Alexander Wilson — 27:01
4. 03 - The Passenger Pigeon - from Ornithological Biography by John James Audubon — 25:53
5. 04 - As James Fenimore Cooper Saw It — 9:56
6. 05 - The Wild Pigeon of North America - by Chief Pokagon in The Chautauquan — 21:08
7. 06 - The Passenger Pigeon - from Life Histories of N. American Birds by Charles Bendire — 22:37
8. 07 - Netting the Pigeons - by William Brewster in The Auk — 4:21
9. 08 - Efforts to Check the Slaughter by Prof. H. B. Roney — 26:25
10. 09 - The Pigeon Butcher's Defense - by E. T. Martin in American Field — 21:19
11. 10 - Notes of a Vanished Industry — 23:35
12. 11 - Recollections of Old Timers — 32:30
13. 12 - The Last of the Pigeons — 36:17
14. 13 - What Became of the Wild Pigeon? by Sullivan Cook in Field and Stream — 16:05
15. 14 - A Novel Theory of Extinction by C.H. Ames and Robert Ridgway — 9:18
16. 15 - News From John Burroughs — 11:21
17. 16 - The Pigeon in Manitoba - by George E. Atkinson — 23:48
18. 17 - The Passenger Pigeon in Confinement - by Ruthven Deane in The Auk — 13:56
19. 18 - Nesting Habits of The Passenger Pigeon - by Dr. Morris Gibbs in The Oologist — 12:54
20. 19 - Miscellaneous Notes — 14:28

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.