Once more unto the Beech: Beech trees, Passenger pigeons and the struggle to survive in Northern Michigan

By Jess Piskor

First in a two-part series

“I will not be able to send you any provisions,” read 13-year-old Etta Boizard in Glen Arbor.  It was Oct. 18, 1865, and the letter was from her father, Oliver. Mustered out of the United States Army after the Civil War, Oliver lived away in Illinois hoping for paid work. Enclosed with the letter was $3, a paltry sum and far less than the $50 needed for winter supplies.

Etta, who often filled in correspondence when her mother Ellen was ill, wrote back that, “Our flour is out and we will have to eat corn bread until we can get the means to get some.” With no meat and unable to procure the stovepipe necessary to move their stove inside for the winter, she still wrote reassuringly, “I have 14 quarts of beechnuts gathered for the winter.”

It wasn’t unusual to rely on beech trees for survival. They grew thickly near the Crystal River where Etta and Ellen lived. Beechnuts were long a favored forest forage sought after by small mammals, birds and humans. With the exception of our cedar swamps, all of Leelanau County was covered in Beech/Maple/Hemlock forest. There were no open fields. Native peoples would place woven mats under the trees to gather nuts for winter storage in large underground caches.

The beechnut is a reliable, if irregular survival food, forageable in autumn for hard nuts and spring when the tender young sprouting shoots were gathered. The nuts can be toasted and ground as a coffee substitute. 1865 was one of the roughly quadrennial “mast” years when the tiny three-sided beechnuts dropped in quantity. Etta would have spent a long time shelling the nuts, as it takes approximately 1,500 nuts to make a pound.

They survived.

Four years later, Etta, now 17, married Charles A. Fisher and her fortunes improved to the point she no longer wrote about depending on the beech. The trees produced heavily again in 1869 though, and this time the nuts provided for another migrant species desperate for sustenance—a great flock of passenger pigeons who visited the region in Spring of 1870. They timed their arrival just as the snow in the forest melted, exposing the nuts not quite germinated on the forest floor.

The long-lived birds knew from experience when a good mast year was on the horizon. Reports tell of birds being absent four, eight, or even 20 years from a solid stand of hardwoods, only to arrive from all directions seemingly overnight when conditions warranted. Their uncanny ability to find and share the location of good forage led many to speculate the pigeons had a secret means of telepathic communication.

Passenger pigeons were a native species, Ectopistes migratorius, 18 inches long and wild, unlike the now common feral European and rock pigeons today. Flying 60 miles per hour in flocks that defy description, there was universal awe engendered in native and settler accounts when they flew overhead or arrived at their nesting sites.

“It was proverbial with our fathers that if the Great Spirit in His wisdom could have created a more elegant bird in plumage, form, and movement. He never did,” wrote Chief Simon Pokogon of the Potowatomi. For most Eastern American Indiginous people, the pigeons were a valued and respected food. Oral traditions guided indigenous people to responsible harvesting of the birds.

John Audubon, writing of a flock that passed overhead, describes three days of birds, numbering in the billions so thick they darkened the sun. Alexander Wilson, another eminent ornithologist, saw their flight overhead as “glittery undulations, [that] marked a space on the face of the heavens resembling the windings of a vast and majestic river.” Perhaps the highest population of any migratory species ever to live, they were an integral part of the entire Eastern American Hardwood Forest ecosystem.

Back in Glen Arbor, Etta’s husband Charles Fisher netted a coopful of live birds and shipped them via steamship to his father-in-law in Chicago, where they were wanted for sport shooting. The hapless Oliver sold them to a flooded market in haste, explaining, “[My friend] told me to sit on them till he saw his Pigeon man at the Stock Yards. He said they had 11,000 more in coops there to shoot soon and I got tired of waiting.” He sold the lot for $1.50 and suggested next time a barrel of dead birds on ice would fetch a better price.

That year, 1870, and the next, when the great fires burned Chicago to the ground and lumberjacks cut down the northern forests to rebuild the city, started the last decade for these great flocks. Railroads with refrigerated ice cars and telegraph lines reached north and professional hunters chased the birds across the nation. They were a commodity to ship out to Chicago, and soon, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Their numbers seemed infinite.

Every extinction is like a setting sun. When the sun is at its lowest, it may be majestic, but it casts the longest shadows. And before they went out their numbers seemed to swell, filling the sky with scintillating color. They looked like “a Blue Meteor falling to the sky,” wrote Chief Pokegon.

It was a fading glory. Their numbers weren’t growing, it was the remaining birds concentrating in their last few refuges. But to those in their midst, the numbers are shocking.

The Petoskey News, reporting on a massive colony of nesting pigeons just south of the city reassuringly wrote in June 1878:

Pigeon Business.

“We have been trying this week to find out how many pigeons have been caught and shipped from this point during the past 7 weeks, but have not been able to do so with any certainty as to the correctness of the report. There has been packed at the packing house of W.L. McCormick to the present time of writing 40,000 dozen, which is probably about one-half of all that have been packed here. Then when we take in consideration the large numbers of live birds which are being shipped here daily, it must swell the total amount caught to the present time fully 100,000 dozen. One who is not acquainted with these birds might naturally suppose that the race of pigeons would soon be annihilated, but there is every reason to believe that there has not been as many caught as has been hatched out at this one nesting. When we say that this nesting is nearly forty miles in length, and from three to eight miles in width, and from ten to fifty nests on every tree, one may possibly get some faint idea of the magnitude of the numbers of birds who for the time being are residents of this county. The present catch of the pigeons must have brought into this country, and put into circulation somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000.”

The huge number of killed birds is the record of those shipped out. The numbers purely killed were even larger.

“Men,” writes Annie Proulx, in her novel Barkskins, “when confronted with a vast plentitude of anything, feel an irresistible urge to take it all. And to smash and destroy what they cannot use.”

That urge explains what happened next to the passenger pigeon.

When the last big pigeon flock flew to Northern Michigan in 1880, they sought refuge where they best knew they could find it—the beech and maple forests where they’d been before. Killed nonstop for centuries, they were hunted out of the East Coast, had fled the Appalachians and found no succor in the Plains. Deep in our hardwood forests they made nests in numbers so thick their weight broke branches. They sought beechnuts along Lake Michigan, amidst the dunes and the lakes. Thrice daily—twice the males and once the females—would fly across the county in sky darkening flights for food, taking turns sitting on the nest of their typically singular egg. Crop full they’d return to a 40-square-mile forest along the Platte River, where they sought to raise a last brood.

They found no refuge. One can imagine a typical spring morning’s stillness broken by perhaps half a billion birds taking wing as the sun rose. They could arrive in Northport, 50 miles away within an hour with a sound like rolling thunder. Shot at and hunted wherever they went, in Northport, Payson Wolf, a noted Civil War sharpshooter and the grandson of Odawa Chief Joseph Waukazoo, was known for shooting 1,000 daily before breakfast. A single shot could drop dozens. He wasn’t alone. Payson’s gun may have been the morning wake-up call, but according to his daughter Etta Wilson, nearly every man old enough to shoot would come out. Everyone took all they wanted with no limit.

When the surviving pigeons filled their crops with nuts from the bluff by Peterson Park, they flew south down West Bay. Alerted by telegraph, Traverse City had filled with upwards of 3,000 gun-wielding men who rented every spare bed.

According to a first-hand account, one group of tired, half-dazed birds attempted to alight near Franke Road—an area we call The Pines, where humans seek refuge today. Making two ruinous passes, the pigeons took repeated shotgun blasts from a long firing line. One young boy, too young to shoot, remembered being sent running to the Hannah & Lay Store to fetch another 25 pounds of #6 shot before the killing was over.

The reduced birds flew on to their nests and fledglings along the Platte River. And still they returned in such numbers that they were easily clubbed from the air with sticks. Then, Chief Pokogon of the Potawatomi witnessed men he described as “outlaws to all moral sense” setting fire to copses of birch. The corpses of roasted flightless squabs fell to the ground as the mated pairs of adults flew off amidst the smoke.

After one calm and fogless night, residents woke in Northport to see the bay covered as far as the eye could see in floating dead birds, washing ashore in mounds. Etta Wilson, was so moved by this experience that she became a renowned ornithologist. To her and other Odawa, it was as if the passenger pigeon had “flung themselves into the waters of oblivion, and committed suicide. Their persecution more than any living thing could endure.”

By 1882, the Petoskey News was wondering, “Where are the pigeons?” A few years later it was just a single hopeful question: “Pigeons?” Rumors persisted that the huge flocks flew to remote Canada, or over the Rockies, perhaps South America. But they’d been destroyed. Only a few solitary wild birds remained.

Finally alerted to their plight, Michigan legislators passed the nation’s first law that outright banned the hunting of passenger pigeons, 20 years later, in 1898. Way too late, it set the stage for the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which was at least in time to save ducks, cranes and Canada geese.

The last pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914—the first species we precisely know the time and place of extinction. The name given to her by humans was Martha. Anishinabe called them O-mii-mii—the friendly sound of their call.

Of the Beech Maple forest that sustained native people, pigeons and the Boizard/Fishers, only a remnant remains. Much fell to the lumberjacks for wood and the rest was burned by the farmers. A hint of old-growth forest is preserved along Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore where the steep slopes and sand-impregnated wood kept the lumbermen away. Most is gone, including all the big trees. Some of the forests have grown back. This second-growth returned in places along the Lake Michigan Shore. There will be no second growth of the passenger pigeons.

The second installment of this story, in our May 8 edition, will examine the Beech Tree and its role in our ecosystem.