Brett Ostby: Must we repeat the same mistakes?

Column from the Rochester Post Bulletin

The passenger pigeon was once so common, it seemed inexhaustible. Today, many think the great blue heron is common and that it can thrive somewhere else. Our past should teach us such thinking is a fallacy.

Written By: Brett Ostby | 11:00 am, May 11, 2021

On Dec. 27, 1929, Dr. William J. Mayo wrote a letter to Minnesota’s foremost ornithologist, Thomas Sadler Roberts. Dr. Roberts considered it so important he published it in his book “The Birds of Minnesota, Volume 1.”

In that letter, Dr. Mayo recounted what he knew of the last roost of a once common bird that frequented Olmsted County every spring and summer. Some 50 years earlier, he and his brother, Charlie, visited a roost of passenger pigeons in a “large track of timber” some 12 miles northwest of Rochester, in a hamlet called Genoa. Passenger pigeons were so abundant that they blocked the light of the sun when they took to the air.

People traveled from miles away to shoot and even club these birds “by the handful.” The Mayo brothers knocked birds from trees and filled sacks to take home for dinner. This was common practice across the United States in those days. There were billions of passenger pigeons.

The last passenger pigeon died in a zoo alone in 1914.

The passenger pigeon was once so common, it seemed inexhaustible. Today, many think the great blue heron is common and that it can thrive somewhere else. Our past should teach us such thinking is a fallacy. As we destroy habitats, one at time, we cumulatively drive this and other species closer to extinction. According to the North American Breeding Bird Survey, the great blue heron has experienced significant and steady declines in Minnesota since 1967.

We have a choice to protect our great blue heron rookery in Olmsted County. Do we learn from the Mayo brothers or allow a development to destroy the rookery for which we are all responsible?

The letter is on p. 583 in Roberts, T. S. 1932. The Birds of Minnesota, Volume 1. The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.

Brett Ostby is a Rochester, MN native. He is a senior biologist with Daguna Consulting LLC— a firm that specializes in endangered species management. He has authored and co-authored several studies on endangered species in peer-reviewed journals and has partnered with agencies and academic institutions to further our knowledge on freshwater ecosystems.

"Heron Flight", photo by Brett Ostby