passenger pigeon

English
Martha, the last known living passenger pigeon (d. 1914)

Noun

passenger pigeon (plural passenger pigeons)

  1. A bird of the extinct species Ectopistes migratorius, formerly endemic to North America.
    • 2012 June 27, Helen Lewis, “Sense of an endling”, in New Statesman‎, archived from the original on 2012-07-11:
      Martha was a remnant of a species that had once dominated North America; it is estimated that there were as many as four billion – yes, billion – passenger pigeons when the Europeans arrived.
    • 2020, “Life Finds A Way”, in Jonathan Elmore, editor, Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction, Rowman & Littlefield, →ISBN:
      Revive & Restore, a branch of the Long Now Foundation, is currently attempting to de-extinct the passenger pigeon in a project called The Great Comeback.

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