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The notes for the environmentalism unit are located in this folder. The quiz will cover: Introduction to Environmentalism/Historical Context Henry David Thoreau Aldo Leopold Rachel Carson Response to/Criticism of Environmentalism
Probably the most terrible example of mass slaughter in the history of wildlife was not the bison but the passenger pigeon – a
story that almost defies belief. The early Europeans in North America frequently commented on the huge numbers of blue, long-tailed, fast and graceful pigeons in the country. One of the first settlers in Virginia wrote that, `There are wild pigeons in winter beyond number or imagination, myself have seen three or four hours together flocks in the air, so thick that even have they shadowed the sky from us.’
Their roosting sites were correspondingly enormous- some covered an area five miles by twelve with up to ninety nests in a single tree – branches broke and whole trees were toppled by the sheer weight of roosting birds, often standing on top of each other, and leaving a pile of droppings several inches deep under the trees. The exact number of passenger pigeons in North America when the Europeans arrived is not known but the best guess is 5 billion- about a third of all the birds in North America at the time and the same as the total number of birds to be found today in the United States.
The notes for the environmentalism unit are located in this folder. The quiz will cover: Introduction to Environmentalism/Historical Context Henry David Thoreau Aldo Leopold Rachel Carson Response to/Criticism of Environmentalism
Probably the most terrible example of mass slaughter in the history of wildlife was not the bison but the passenger pigeon – a story that almost defies belief. The early Europeans in North America frequently commented on the huge numbers of blue, long-tailed, fast and graceful pigeons in the country. One of the first settlers in Virginia wrote that, `There are wild pigeons in winter beyond number or imagination, myself have seen three or four hours together flocks in the air, so thick that even have they shadowed the sky from us.’
Their roosting sites were correspondingly enormous- some covered an area five miles by twelve with up to ninety nests in a single tree – branches broke and whole trees were toppled by the sheer weight of roosting birds, often standing on top of each other, and leaving a pile of droppings several inches deep under the trees. The exact number of passenger pigeons in North America when the Europeans arrived is not known but the best guess is 5 billion- about a third of all the birds in North America at the time and the same as the total number of birds to be found today in the United States.
