traveller pigeon still in the Billions
- Thread starter Byzantion
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How is this achieved again? Even if nobody kills the pigeons, expansion of industrial America is bound to cut their numbers. It's also very hard to imagine a scenario where the pigeons don't get hunted.
Them still existing is possible, but them being in the billions seems much less so.
Them still existing is possible, but them being in the billions seems much less so.
i came up with a POD for this for my own TL project. it actually has to do with a later invention of the cotton gin, which encourages tobacco as the main American cash crop instead of cotton (at least at first) and the butterfly effects from there mean that there isn't as much habitat loss and, as a result, the passenger pigeon (and the Carolina parakeet, for that matter) lose slightly fewer than IOTL and survive as endangered species. iirc, i also wrote in that there are some earlier conservation efforts which save them in the long run similarly to the American bison. notably, though, the passenger pigeons don't survive in such huge numbers as when they were hunted to extinction: iirc, they were actually far fewer in the pre-Columbian period and experienced a population boom after the Interchange. ITTL, after being saved from extinction, they return to their pre-Columbian numbers in equilibrium with mankind and the rest of the ecosystem, and are a shining example of a successful conservation movement alongside the bison (and several other animals which are extinct IOTL that survive ITTL, including the great auk and heath hen)
This is a bit off topic, but I've wondered if it would be possible, using present DNA technology, or maybe in the near future, to clone Martha, a la Jurassic Park? Obviously to reproduce a dinosaur is far out science fiction, but if it could be credible enough to make a series of films about it, and the Jurassic epoch was 100? million years ago; it should be much easier to get usable DNA from a bird that has only been dead for 102 years. I keep hearing about the possibility of cloning a mammoth, again, this was many thousands of years ago when mammoths lived; in comparison, 1914 was yesterday.
i doubt it, but you might be able to genetically-engineer modern pigeons to resemble passenger pigeons. it's already been proven that a facsimile of some dinosaurs can be engineered simply by reactivating dormant genes for teeth, lack of feather/shorter feathers, and long tails in chickens, so it's not outside the realms of possibility. Crichton himself said that he wished he'd come up with this kind of genetic-engineering and "de-extinction" since it's much more plausible than extracting DNA from amber.
True. We can avoid extinction but it is totally impossible that there would be even one billion passenger pigeons. Urbanisation spreads so effectively that pigeons would lost much of their enviromnent. I don't think that there could be even millions passenger pigeons.
I am far from an expert but what if the Passenger Pigeon adapted to life in cities as has been the case with other pigeon species OTL .If that happened then I could see their population reaching the billion mark ,if just barely .