This was the first part of a joint presentation made with one of the founders of North Country Wild Care, a regional wildlife rehabilitator member organization, to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Glens Falls in Queensbury, New York, on December 14, 2025. The second part, which is unfortunately not mine to share, highlighted some of the ways humans are shifting their views of wildlife and ways we can continue to renew the relationship. The story I refer to was shared earlier in the service. I summarized the story in a blog post entitled “St. Francis and the Wolf.”
The wolf in the story of St. Francis was an Italian wolf, scientifically known as Canis lupus italicus, a subspecies of the grey wolf, Canis lupus, and cousin to other subspecies, which include the Arctic Wolf, the Eurasian grey wolf and the North American grey wolf, the same grey wolf mentioned earlier in the land acknowledgement, one that was once a New York native. There are some differences between the grey wolves in North America and those in Italy, like size and coloring, but the most startling difference to me is that the Italian efforts to bring their wolf population back are working where ours, not so much.
In the land acknowledgement we mention truth-telling, so here it is: European settlers are responsible for total and regional extinctions of several North American species. So I begin there, with truth-telling, as a first step towards repairing and renewing our relationships with wildlife.
The passenger pigeon’s may be the saddest story I can tell. In the 18th century, passenger pigeons were the most abundant bird in North America. There are no exact counts, of course, but research indicates they numbered in the hundreds of millions, maybe even billions. Two hundred years later, most people don’t even know they existed. But we should know, if only as a cautionary tale.
They were pretty birds, looking sort of like mourning doves but much bigger, with red eyes and feet. Before the Civil War, passenger pigeons could be found almost everywhere east of the Rocky Mountains. Then they were hunted out of existence.
Passenger pigeons had a strategy to avoid predators – sheer numbers. Each flock had many thousands of birds. When they migrated, the flock could take hours to pass over. It was said the flocks blocked out the sun and were noisy enough to make conversations difficult. While a natural predator might be deterred by the huge crowd of birds, settlers took advantage of the tightly packed flocks to hunt them easily. Since we’re truth-telling, I will admit that, had those settlers just taken enough birds to sustain themselves, the passenger pigeon might still be here today, especially because their migration patterns were unpredictable. They just went where the most food was that year. But after the Civil War, the railroads and use of the telegraph expanded. Suddenly professional hunters could find out quickly where the pigeon flocks had ended up and hop on a train.
They weren’t very sporting about hunting passenger pigeons, either. Amateurs and professionals alike used brute force to take the pigeons. They shot them, caught them in nets, set fire to the trees they were roosting in, asphyxiated them with burning sulfur, and poisoned them with corn soaked with whiskey. They attacked them with rakes and pitchforks and, by one account, potatoes. Then they packed the bodies on trains and sent them back to the cities for cheap meat.
The passenger pigeon needed those big flocks. By disrupting them, the hunters interrupted breeding, so there were never enough new pigeons hatching to replace those lost. At the same time, the settlers were clearing huge swathes of eastern forest, destroying their habitat. By the end of the 19th century, their populations had collapsed beyond recovery. The last known wild passenger pigeon died in 1901. The very last individual, Martha, lived at the Cincinnati Zoo until she died in 1914, having never laid a fertile egg in captivity. And then they were gone.
Another species mentioned in the land acknowledgement is the eastern elk, a now extinct subspecies of North American elk. At one time, elk were the most widely distributed hoofed mammal in North America, ranging right here in New York and all the way to Maine. When the European settlers showed up, the elk foraged where they always had which was, unfortunately, right near the new settlements, especially in winter. Like the passenger pigeons, they were an easy target. And, like the passenger pigeon, the settlers didn’t just take what they needed. The elk were great creatures, larger than our whitetail deer, and the bulls had massive, spreading antlers. The elk were killed for fun, and for their antlers. And brutely, sometimes, with axes and corn cutting knives.
The last few eastern elk in New York were killed in Saranac in 1826. The subspecies is believed to be extinct. It happened so fast that we aren’t even sure of the extent of their original range. Most evidence is fossilized bones and written accounts.
Now back to the wolves. Grey wolves, also called timber wolves around here, have been all but gone from New York since the 1890s. The same unregulated hunting and habitat destruction by settlers that was responsible for the loss of the passenger pigeon and eastern elk eliminated the grey wolves, too. The early settlers and then the ranchers didn’t want them around their livestock and there was a demand for warm wolf fur. The government even sponsored wolf extermination efforts. And they came close to eliminating the wolves. While they are considered endangered and not extinct in New York, they are considered completely eradicated.
But the wolves aren’t totally gone. In fact, DNA testing on some supposed coyotes shot within the last decade has shown they were, in fact, wolves, probably coming down from Canada seeking new territory. Unfortunately, they don’t stand too much of a chance of reestablishing themselves here. The same dislike for wolves displayed by the settlers is still prevalent today. That is one relationship that needs repairing.