Topics: Honors College, College of Sciences and Humanities
November 6, 2014
A new exhibit, “Passenger Pigeons,” opens this month at Minnetrista, featuring the work of Honors College students in a colloquium focused on the 100-year anniversary of the passenger pigeon's extinction.
A new exhibit, “Passenger Pigeons,” opens this month at Minnetrista, featuring the work of Honors College students in a colloquium focused on the 100-year anniversary of the passenger pigeon's extinction.
The Ball State course is being taught by Barb Stedman, director of scholarships and Honors Fellow, and Kamal Islam, professor of biology. Passenger pigeons once numbered in the billions in North America but were wiped out by hunters and trappers in just a few decades. The world's last passenger pigeon died at the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914. The anniversary has been featured in recent issues of the Smithsonian, Audubon, and Sierra magazines, and the documentary “From Billions to None” was released in August.
On Nov. 10, Joel Greenberg, author of “A Feathered River Across the Sky,” the seminal book on the passenger pigeon, will lecture at Minnetrista at 7 p.m. His presentation will focus on how a thriving bird became extinct so quickly and what we can learn from the choices humans make. The event is free, open to the public and in cooperation with the Robert Cooper Audubon Society.
The Minnetrista exhibit runs through March 1. Stedman and Islam hope the research and assets their students have contributed to the Minnetrista exhibit will be featured at passengerpigeon.org.