Once numbering in the billions, this was one of the last of the now extinct Passenger Pigeons… I took this picture at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto:

In 1857, a bill was brought forth to the Ohio State Legislature seeking protection for the Passenger Pigeon. A Select Committee of the Senate filed a report stating, “The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced.”

The diorama above (which is within Philadelphia’s Natural History Museum) is of a woodland filled with Passenger Pigeons and captures a scene that was once common, but is now lost forever.