Passenger Pigeon Set (boxed)

The boxed set includes the following:
- Mesh passenger pigeon male (2 land impact)
- Mesh passenger pigeon female (2 land impact)
- Museum specimen with glass disply box (2 land impact)
- Bonus victorian cage with feeder (6 land impact).

Both the male and female come with a scripted version that gives a call at random intervals, as well as a silent version.
If you want to rezz a larger number of birds, you can bring the land impact down by linking them. Two linked birds will have a total land impact of 3.
Everything included in the boxed set is copy & mod though the birdcall script iself comes as copy only.

Enjoy!

HISTORICAL NOTE:
The Passenger Pigeon (as the name suggests) was a migratory pigeon species found across most of North America east of the Rocky Mountains.

In the fall, winter and spring, this bird mainly ate beechnuts, acorns and chestnuts. During the summer it ate mainly berries and softer fruits such as the fruit of dogwoods. It also ate earthworms, caterpillars and snails, particularly while breeding — in addition to cultivated grains, particularly buckwheat, when it found them.

They usually wintered from Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina south to Texas, the Gulf Coast and northern Florida, while their primary breeding range was in southern Ontario and the Great Lakes states area. The breeding colonies, known as "cities", were large: ranging from 120 to thousands of acres in size. Pairs of passenger pigeons were monogamous, with each female laying a single egg.

At the start of the 19th century this migratory pigeon was the most numerous bird species on earth. It was estimated that in the early 1800s four out of ten of the birds living between Mexico and Canada were Passenger Pigeons.

Naturalist and painter John James Audubon, an eye witness, has described a migration of passenger pigeons in the 1830s in the following way:

"Suddenly there burst forth a general cry of ‘Here they come!’ The noise which they made, though yet distant, reminded me of a hard gale at sea. The pigeons, arriving by thousands, alighted everywhere, one above another, until solid masses as large as hogsheads, were formed on the branches. (...) I found it quite useless to speak, or even to shout to the persons nearest to me. The air was literally filled with pigeons, the light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse (...) Pigeons were still passing in un-diminished numbers and continued to do so for three days in succession."

Due to their large numbers, the pigeon were hunted on a commercial scale. The birds were shot in their thousands during their migrations or killed en masse using poisoned grain. Local shooting competitions were organised in which upwards of 20,000 kills needed to be recorded to claim a prize.
Another way of hunting them was to lure flocks using captured pigeons (the so called stool pigeons) to the ground where they would be be caught in nets.
The birds were also harvested in their nesting colonies, often by cutting down the trees containing the nests or by asphyxiating them using sulphur fumes. Many thousands were shot simply to protect crops from the ravenous flocks.
Another important pressure came from the changing landscape - the widespread deforestation by farmers clearing woodlands areas for new fields.

While it is not entirely clear which of these factors caused the extinction of the species, it is clear that the population crash occurred during the 1870s. At the start of this decade, huge flocks still existed. By its end the bird became a rare sight.

After a bill was brought forth to the Ohio State Legislature seeking protection for the Passenger Pigeon, a Select Committee of the Senate filed a report stating the following:
"The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced." These words would come to haunt some of their authors.

The last fully authenticated record of a wild passenger pigeon took place in March of 1901. The last two males would die in captivity by the end of summer 1910. The last surviving female, named Martha, lived for 4 more years alone in her cage in Cincinnati Zoo. I can't help but wonder how alien and eerie these last years must have been for a member of such a social and gregarious species. She died on September 1st 1914.

The species, which just one generation before numbered hundreds of millions, was gone forever.