September 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the extinction of the passenger pigeon – the most infamous and most astonishing of all bird extinctions, as well as the most damning for the hunting cause.

Also known as the migrating dove, the passenger pigeon was the most numerous of all bird species, numbering into countless millions. Huge flocks could take three days to pass overhead, sometimes at the rate of three million an hour.

The demand for these pigeons was phenomenal. A shooting club might use 50,000 birds during a week’s competition, nearly all of which would die either by being shot or having their wings or necks broken after being hurled from the catapult traps.

After 1860, pigeon hunting became a full time occupation for several hundred men. The birds were searched out, harried and destroyed. Hundreds of railway boxcars were sent with the hunters and waited to be filled with the carcasses.

Local part-time hunters generally used guns, clubs, poles and even fire to kill the birds at nesting sites. The best professional hunters used huge, specially designed traps and nets.

By 1896, there were only 250,000 passenger pigeons left. They came together in one last great nesting flock in April of that year outside Bowling Green, Ohio.

The telegram lines notified the hunters and the railways brought them in from all parts. The result was devastating: 200,000 carcasses were taken; 40,000 were mutilated and discarded as waste.

On March 24, 1900, in Pike County, Ohio, the last passenger pigeon seen in the wild, was shot by a young boy. On September 1, 1914, in the Cincinnati Zoo, ‘Martha’ – a passenger pigeon born in captivity – died at 29. She was the last of her species. The impossible deed was done.

“When a species becomes extinct, it will never come into being again. It will vanish for ever like an exploding star.”