Do you know who is Martha?
I am sure you may know a lot of Marthas! But this one was a bird!
The last of its kind!
Just when you think if you have the numbers, you have all the odds in your favor, let this be a wake up call!
Martha was a Passenger pigeon!
Martha, thought to be the last passenger pigeon, died on September 1, 1914, at the Cincinnati Zoo. The eradication of the species is a notable example of anthropogenic extinction. Yeah now you want to know what is that! You must know it since we humans are responsible for this!
The Holocene extinction, also referred to as the Anthropocene extinction or the sixth mass extinction, is an ongoing extinction event caused exclusively by human activities!
There is no discrimination here though! This extinction event spans numerous families of plants and animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates, impacting both terrestrial and marine species!
Widespread degradation of biodiversity hotspots such as coral reefs and rainforests has exacerbated the crisis!
In short; the cause of massive extinction of even a species which were billion in number is only one grave factor; the HUMAN GREED!
The cousins of Martha were also one of the victims; poor passenger pigeons.
The name comes from an earlier sense of passenger as one that passes by, and passenger pigeons certainly did that in almost inconceivably vast numbers. One early observer estimated a passing flock as being a mile wide and 240 miles long. They literally darkened the sky! Even now you may see maybe a couple of odd pigeons here and there! This was a flock of over thousands and more!
Apparently at the time of the Mayflower landing there were perhaps nine billion passenger pigeons in North America, more than twice the number of all the birds found on the continent today!
With such numbers they were absurdly easy to hunt. One account from 1770 reported that a hunter brought down 125 with a single shot from a blunderbuss! Some people ate them, but most were fed to pigs.
Millions more were slaughtered for the sport of it. By 1800 their numbers had been roughly halved and by 1900 they were all but gone. On 1 September 1914 the last one died at Cincinnati Zoo; Poor old Martha..
Hope humans can learn from these as soon as possible before it’s too late…
One way to go is the peaceful and relaxing way of yoga!
A sketch dedication to Tirumalai Krishnamacharya the father of modern postural yoga…
Now do the pose to lie down on the bed and close your eyes for some time!
Also known as Sleep!
Shubh ratri!
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