Unfortunately, based on recent discovery of epigenetics I don’t think we will be bringing any extinct species back anytime soon, if ever. According to epigenetics there is a whole other chemical instruction set that operates the dna, that determines how living multicellular organism develop, and these chemical instructions are provided by the mother, the environment and other factors, not captured in dna.

As to posters quoting 1491 as arguing there where far few passenger pigeons;; I am unconvinced Mann’s speculation that North America, where PP ranged, was home to a massive native human population, and thus controlled animal population. Mass human settlements rivaling Europe, Asia, Africa, Central America going back centuries would surely have left far more evidence, even if as oral history among remaining North American tribes, especially in relatively untouched Canada and Alaska. I think lack of human-pigeon interaction was because moderate number of native americans didn’t need to target, or even avoided, massive flocks of always migrating passenger pigeons to live on, as there was enough uncultivated land shared by human and creature alike (think of african savanna).

Cochrane04

If you love to kill animals, leave some for others to kill, have respect for your fellow and future hunters or youre not a true hunter.

If you like animals, protect them for future generations to like.

Who knows? the cure for terminal illnesses may be buried with the last of a dead species.

The people who shot the last lot of birds new they were going to be extinct but did so anyway.
We havent changed a bit and we havent learned a thing, only very very recently we killed an etire species of black rhino.

Trying to convince some people that a species has the right to exist is like trying to convince Hitler that Jews have a right to exist, and had he succeeded there probably would have been people posting messages stating how they find it hard to have sympathy for the extinct people.

Its better to hunt and eat a wild animal that has had a life of freedom than pay people to raise battery farmed animals fed on hormones and steroids, but do so humanely in respectful moderation.

If anything I have said has been hypocritical I don’t care, if I were scared of being a hypocrit I would be scared to change my mind and would thus be narrow minded.

This discussion reminds me of the film “hard target”, where men were hunted for sport and scenes in the film featured john woo’s trademark pidgeons.

There are many tales in the de-wilding of the New World that are largely un-reported since basic biology, let alone ecology as we know it, were yet to be practiced scientifically. A tremendous example has been documented in Farley Mowat’s “Sea of Slaughter” in which he recounts the exterpation of the Esquimo Curlew , just one of many less well known than the famous Passenger Pigeon,which at one time likewise numbered in the billions following a migration path that reached from Alaska to Newfoundland to the Caribbean.

The way I see things is that believing in God or not is what really distinguishes people. For example, If you do not believe in God than we are just really smart Apes!! So what right do we have to take land away from other animals or kill them or make them our slaves? If you do believe in God than you believe all animals were created for us and we have rights that they don’t have like the right to not be killed.

I wondered this myself. So I looked up the scientific name for this creature. It is Ectopistes Migratorius. The breakdown of the Latin is as follows – Ecto means “outside” while piste is Italian for “trail”. Thus you could say that Ectopistes roughly translates to wanderer. Now the second word Migratorius is Latin that translates as “to move or change location periodically.”

So why is it called/described by this name as the migratory wanderer. As noted in the article the population of a single flock could deplete the resources of anyone area in a short time, so a new nesting ground would have to be found. This is a classic example of a species out-of-control. As noted by another poster the scientific community believes, based on evidence (or lack thereof, of pigeon remains in pre-European Native American communities. With such an easy and plentiful food source, there should have been heaps of pigeon bones in community offal or fire pits, which there is not. There are signs of other birds and small animals though) that this animal flourished due to the demise of its main predator.

Anyway the flock would have no main nesting ground as other migratory birds do. Thus would wander from site-to-site, which is unusual for an avian. This still did not clear up the name for me. So I explored the various European groups and discovered that the French called them “Pigeón de passage” that translates into Pigeon of passage, which they referred to them due to the astounding number of birds in the sky at anytime. English speakers later mispronounced the name as the Passenger Pigeon.