The Catskills once held passenger pigeons in such vast numbers that their flocks darkened the sky, along with wolves, cougars, martens, elk and other wildlife no longer found here.
That vanished world was the focus of a March 21 lecture at the Olive Free Library, where ethnoecologist Justin Wexler explored how Indigenous communities lived alongside those animals and how extinction and extirpation reshaped the region’s forests.
Wexler said his work draws not only on formal study but also on years of learning from Lenape people whose ancestors once lived in the Catskills.
When he first began reaching out 13 years ago, “I was nervous,” Wexler said, “that people wouldn’t want to deal with a nerdy young white guy and would be unwilling to share cultural knowledge. Boy, was I wrong!”
Instead, he said, he found them “warm and willing to share their traditions, language and culture.”
Wexler told the audience that passenger pigeons, now extinct, were once so numerous that their flocks could darken the sky. He said the Lenape hunted them in a way that did not threaten the species’ survival.
Their nesting season came when other food was scarce, he said. The Lenape would shake squabs from nests in oak and beech trees, harvesting thousands. But strict hunting rules limited that harvest to only a few days each year, and adult birds were not killed. Afterward, the pigeons would lay new clutches of eggs.
Wexler said passenger pigeons went extinct in the early 20th century, driven in part by technologies including the telegraph and refrigerated railroad cars. Professional hunters learned by telegraph where the birds were nesting, killed them in large numbers, and shipped them by rail to urban markets. Eventually, he said, the birds became “too paranoid to nest.”
Wexler also described the Lenape pigeon dance, once performed to give thanks and ask the birds’ forgiveness for eating their young. Today, he said, the dance remains a social event and a surviving cultural record of how the birds once sounded.
Passenger pigeons and heath hens, another extinct species, relied on beech and oak forests as well as clearings and forest edges where blueberries, huckleberries and pokeweed grew. Pokeweed, Wexler noted, is still called “pigeonberry” by some people, a name that points back to the vanished bird.
He also traced the region’s ecological history back to the Ice Age, when elephants, ground sloths and other large animals lived here and created clearings that helped shape forest ecology. After humans drove those animals to extinction, Wexler said, the Lenape used fire as a substitute.
That practice kept clearings open and promoted fire-tolerant plants such as blueberries, huckleberries and oaks. Fire-intolerant species such as beech and hemlock grew deeper in the forest, away from the open spaces.
Wexler said fire suppression is one reason the Catskills ecosystem has become less balanced. Another, he said, was the extirpation of apex predators, which once limited deer populations and kept them healthier by preying on the sickest and weakest animals.
He said martens, a species of weasel, preyed on smaller animals such as the heath hen, which ate beech nuts. As beeches became less common and the heath hen disappeared, Wexler said, martens also died out in the Catskills, though they still live in the Adirondacks.
The eastern wolf, larger than a coyote but smaller than a gray wolf, lived in the Catskills until the mid-1800s, Wexler said. Hunters were paid bounties for killing them because they preyed on livestock. Related to the red wolf in the Southeast and the Algonquin wolf in Ontario, these wolves generally would not prey on humans except during periods of starvation, he said.
Wexler also discussed the eastern cougar, or mountain lion, another apex predator extirpated from the Catskills by the 1830s. Its disappearance, he said, contributed to serious deer overpopulation.
Like wolves, cougars “were mercilessly persecuted because they preyed on livestock,” he said.
Today, Wexler said, deer face few predators beyond cars and a limited number of hunters. Reports of mountain lion sightings still surface from time to time in the Catskills, though no confirmed evidence has established their presence in the region.
Audience members continued the discussion after the lecture, asking about predators, forest health and the possibility that mountain lions still live in the region. Wexler urged anyone who spots a possible mountain lion to take a photograph.
Margaret Tomlinson is a contributing writer. You can send her an email at reporting@theoverlooknews.com.