Second Chances

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?