Editing Passenger pigeon (section)

===Decline and conservation attempts===
[[File:Mershon's The Passenger Pigeon (frontispiece, crop).jpg|thumb|left|upright|Male and female by [[Louis Agassiz Fuertes]], [[book frontispiece|frontispiece]] of [[William Butts Mershon]]'s 1907 ''The Passenger Pigeon'']]

The notion that the species could be driven to [[extinction]] was alien to the early colonists, because the number of birds did not appear to diminish, and also because the concept of extinction was yet to be defined. The bird seems to have been slowly pushed westward after the arrival of Europeans, becoming scarce or absent in the east, though there were still millions of birds in the 1850s. The population must have been decreasing in numbers for many years, though this went unnoticed due to the apparent vast number of birds, which clouded their decline.<ref name="Fuller 2014 50–69"/> In 1856 Bénédict Henry Révoil may have been one of the first writers to voice concern about the fate of the passenger pigeon, after witnessing a hunt in 1847:
{{Blockquote|Everything leads to the belief that the pigeons, which cannot endure isolation and are forced to flee or to change their way of living according to the rate at which North America is populated by the European inflow, will simply end by disappearing from this continent, and, if the world does not end this before a century, I will wager&nbsp;... that the amateur of ornithology will find no more wild pigeons, except those in the Museums of Natural History.<ref name="Fuller 2014 50–69"/>}}

[[File:Alabama bird day book (1915) (14751712302).jpg|thumb|upright|Life drawing by [[Charles R. Knight]], 1903]]
By the 1870s, the decrease in birds was noticeable, especially after the last large-scale nestings and subsequent slaughters of millions of birds in 1874 and 1878. By this time, large nestings only took place in the north, around the Great Lakes. The last large nesting was in [[Petoskey, Michigan]], in 1878 (following one in Pennsylvania a few days earlier), where 50,000 birds were killed each day for nearly five months. The surviving adults attempted a second nesting at new sites, but were killed by professional hunters before they had a chance to raise any young. Scattered nestings were reported into the 1880s, but the birds were now wary, and commonly abandoned their nests if persecuted.<ref name="Extinct Birds"/><ref name=SI/><ref name="Fuller 2014 50–69"/>

By the time of these last nestings, laws had already been enacted to protect the passenger pigeon, but these proved ineffective, as they were unclearly framed and hard to enforce. H.&nbsp;B. Roney, who witnessed the Petoskey slaughter, led campaigns to protect the pigeon, but was met with resistance, and accusations that he was exaggerating the severity of the situation. Few offenders were prosecuted, mainly some poor trappers, but the large enterprises were not affected.<ref name="Fuller 2014 50–69"/> In 1857, a bill was brought forth to the [[Ohio State Legislature]] seeking protection for the passenger pigeon, yet a Select Committee of the Senate filed a report stating that the bird did not need protection, being "wonderfully prolific", and dismissing the suggestion that the species could be destroyed.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Hornaday |first1=W. T. |author-link=William Temple Hornaday |place=New York |publisher=[[Charles Scribner's Sons]] |year=1913 |title=Our Vanishing Wild Life. Its Extermination and Preservation |url=https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13249/13249-h/13249-h.htm |access-date=February 29, 2012}} at [[Project Gutenberg]].</ref> Public protests against trap-shooting erupted in the 1870s, as the birds were badly treated before and after such contests. Conservationists were ineffective in stopping the slaughter. A bill was passed in the Michigan legislature making it illegal to net pigeons within {{convert|3|km|mi|abbr=on}} of a nesting area. In 1897, a bill was introduced in the Michigan legislature asking for a 10-year closed season on passenger pigeons. Similar legal measures were passed and then disregarded in Pennsylvania. The gestures proved futile and, by the mid-1890s, the passenger pigeon had almost completely disappeared, and was probably extinct as a breeding bird in the wild.<ref name="Hume 2015"/><ref name="Ehrlich"/> Small flocks are known to have existed at this point, since large numbers of birds were still being sold at markets. Thereafter, only small groups or individual birds were reported, many of which were shot on sight.<ref name="Fuller 2014 50–69"/>