I’ve
remarked in an earlier blog about how things that happened 100 years ago were
either real world shakers or just interesting personal happenings. Seems
difficult to imagine that my grandmother (my mother’s mother) was a young adult
in 1914. She would truly marvel at life today if she were still here, particularly
as she turned 20 years old in 1914. To put that into a personal perspective, my
sons are now a generation older than 20. Since the decade marker-years seem
to be noteworthy, I imagine Grandmother looked back on 1914 with wonder from
the vantage point of several additional decades.
CBS
Sunday Morning, the TV news magazine, aired a segment on World War 1, later
known as the "War to End All Wars" which began in 1914. Oh how wrong that
title phrase was. Americans generally credit President Woodrow Wilson with the
phrase, but it actually came from H.G. Wells’ pen. Such intelligent fellows
should have thought a bit more about the phrase before using it. Unfortunately,
as long as this particular earth exists, inhabited by fallen man as it is,
whenever one group of people has something another group wants, there will
be war.
However,
this post isn’t principally about war—it’s about happenings of significance, at
least to someone or something, 100 years ago. Another segment aired on the
above-mentioned TV show was the demise of the carrier pigeon, once the cheapest
source of protein available in America.
Martha, the last carrier pigeon, who was carefully housed in a zoo, died on
September 1, 1914. She was encased in a block of ice and shipped to the
Smithsonian where I suppose if you are so inclined, you can view her in her
lonely, stuffed splendor.
Because
of the birds’ tendency to clump together on a branch it was easy to pick off carrier pigeons for supper using your trusty rifle. Additionally, the telegraph made
communication easy and telegraphers could easily let hunters know where the
migrating birds were roosting for the night, thus making the extinction of this
breed possible in an eye-blink, historically speaking.
At
any rate, now that DNA testing, gene splicing, etc. has come so far, scientists
are considering a method of infusing
some carrier pigeon DNA (from Martha) into a cousin-type pigeon. They hope to eventually breed a carrier pigeon back into existence. If that is
possible, what’s next? A woolly mammoth/elephant or a tyrannosaurus rex/iguana?
