Historian Caleb Atwater observed in 1838 that passenger pigeons still passed through Ohio in huge numbers in the spring and fall, adding that "[f]ormerly the pigeons tarried here all summer, building their nests, and rearing their young, but the country is too well settled for them now; and so, like the trapper for beaver, and the hunter, they are off into the distant forests, where their food is abundant, and where there is none to disturb them in their lawful pursuits." Actually, large nesting colonies survived in a few spots in the state after the middle of the century, even though there were growing numbers of humans who continued to persecute them.

By 1882, Wheaton, born in 1840 and author of Report on the Birds of Ohio, observed it had become "much less abundant and irregular." Less than twenty years later its extinction in the wild was complete. Lawrence Hicks in 1935 summed up its former abundance in "immense numbers in every section of the state and presumably breeding generally, though usually locally and in very large colonies," citing confirmed large nestings historically in rural Licking, Pickaway, Morrow, Huron, Wayne, Medina, Columbiana, Portage, Trumbull, Ashtabula, and Geauga counties.

Last Records of the Passenger Pigeon:
Still extant is a mounted specimen, now at the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus, collected in the state in 1900, thought for many years to have been the last pigeon verified in the wild. Martha, a pigeon kept at the Cincinnati Zoo until her death in 1914, is considered to have been the last of all her kind.

Ohio places likely named for the Passenger Pigeon:

- Pigeon Knob in Gallia County

- Pigeon Town in Logan County

- Pigeon Run in Stark County

- Pigeon Ridge in Carroll County

- Pigeon Creek in Summit, Stark, Vinton, Jackson, and Gallia counties

- Pigeon Branch in Washington County

- Pigeon Hollow Cemetery in Lawrence County

- Pigeon Point in Belmont County

Ohio highlights:

Archaeological remains demonstrate that native Ohioans used pigeons as food for centuries prior to the arrival of Europeans.

Early explorers (Zeisberger in the 1770s, Harris 1805) often remarked on the vast gatherings of pigeons they encountered in the forests. There are records of large bald spots persisting in the forest for decades where large nesting colonies had been established.

The capital city, Columbus, was visited by a ninety-mile-long flock that passed over for most of a day in the spring of 1855; such passages remained fairly common in the state in this era, and this one was remarkable mostly for the number of human witnesses involved.

Collectors here and to the east were surprised to find undigested rice in the stomachs of such migrants, which suggested the birds had passed through rice country in the Carolinas and Georgia just the day before, thus averaging around sixty miles per hour in their voyage.

As late as Wheaton's time (ca. 1882), a dozen living pigeons in the city market could be purchased for as little as five cents, while a pair of Northern Cardinals cost two dollars. Kentucky and Ohio were at an early date the locales for the most spectacular recorded gatherings of pigeons, but with the hewing of the forests and increased local hunting pressure, large concentrations of pigeons were found farther north, in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan after the Civil War and into the 1880s. At one time, an Ohio nest site such as the Bloody Run Swamp in Licking County could justly be called the largest in the state, while sites 300 miles northwest in Michigan were many times more extensive.

Ohio locations known to have Passenger Pigeon skins, mounts, or skeletons:

Akron: Summit County Historical Society (1)

Bay Village: Lake Erie Nature and Science Center (1)*

Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University

East Liverpool: Beaver Creek Wildlife Education Center (1)*

Cincinnati: Cincinnati Museum Center (12; three mounts, one egg, the rest skins)*
Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens*; Ed Maruska

Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Natural History (1)*

Columbus: 1) Ohio State University Museum of Biological Diversity (16); 2) Ohio Historical Society (3)*

Dayton: Aulwood Audubon Center (1)*

Dayton: Boonshoft Museum of Discovery (6)*

Delaware: Ohio Wesleyan University (1)*

Huron: Old Woman Creek National Estuarine Preserve (2: one juv.)*

Indian Hill: W. Roger Fry

Norwalk: Firelands Historical Society (1)*

Oberlin: Oberlin College (1)

Oxford: Miami University Museum (1)

Portsmouth: Portsmouth Public Library (1)*

* If an asterisk appears, at least one passenger pigeon is known to be on display; this list is mainly based on Hahn's Where is That Vanished Bird (1963). Please let us know of any changes including additional locations and/or birds on display, name changes of institution, if birds are no longer present, etc.

- See more at: http://www.ohiobirds.org/site/news.php#sthash.V2oJIaeZ.dpuf