The Laden Oaks | 11" x 17" | watercolor, gouache, and colored pencil on paper
the laden oaks
antler gallery
portland, or
january 2025
Portrait of the passenger pigeon for BRINK, a group exhibition highlighting endangered and extinct species, to benefit Bird Alliance of Oregon.
“Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons; trees still live that, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a few decades hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know… Today the laden oaks still flaunt their burden at the sky, but the feathered lightning is no more. Worm and weevil must perform the task which once drew thunder from the firmament.”
-Aldo Leopold, 1947
Though the extinction of the North American wild pigeon is a well-known story, it’s hard to overstate the magnitude of their presence, or their persecution. For 20,000 years, these social and nomadic birds travelled in flocks by the billions, moving in tandem with the yearly fluctuations of nut-bearing trees they relied on for food. Their bodies in flight could block out the sky for hours at a time, “flowing over from horizon to horizon, like a mighty river in the sky, widening, contracting, descending like falls and cataracts, and rising suddenly here and there in huge ragged masses like high-splashing spray” (Muir). Their roosting dramatically altered the landscape of the northeast — Audubon wrote of a roost site: “dung lay several inches deep, covering the whole extent of the roosting place, like a bed of snow. Many trees were broken off at no great distance from the ground; and the branches of many of the largest and tallest had given way, as if the forest had been swept by a tornado.” The result was soil that was nutritionally rich but with plant growth suppressed, and woody debris that fueled low-intensity forest fires and maintained bur, black, and white oak habitat for a wide diversity of species.
For thousands of years the birds lived alongside indigenous societies, who sometimes hunted juvenile pigeons but made no impact on their overall population, with some cultures considering it a crime to disturb adult pigeons or their nests. Settlers arriving from lands already stripped of wildlife did not believe, or perhaps care, that their intensive hunting and trapping methods could make an impact on the massive pigeon numbers, and brought with them agricultural practices that viewed wildlife as competition to be eradicated. The birds depended on large networks to locate food, and their population collapsed quickly under relentless hunting pressure and habitat loss. The Ohio state senate turned down early conservation efforts in 1857, insisting that “no ordinary destruction can lessen them or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced”. The wild pigeon is believed to have become extinct in the wild by the mid 1890s.
With one commodity exhausted, the bird-hunters turned their attention to decimating once-plentiful shorebirds like the godwit, the plover, and the curlew, who also once soared in flocks that darkened the sun.