passenger pigeon
Noun
Meaning
gregarious North American migratory pigeon now extinct
Source: WordNetSynonyms
Hypernyms
Examples
American geneticist George M. Church has proposed that the passenger pigeon genome can be reconstructed by piecing together DNA fragments from different specimens.
A skilled flyer, the passenger pigeon is estimated to have averaged convert during migration.
As many as thirty billion trees are thought to have died as a result in the following decades, but this did not affect the passenger pigeon, which was already extinct in the wild at the time.
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.
The English common name "passenger pigeon" derives from the French word passager, which means "to pass by" in a fleeting manner.
The crop was described as being capable of holding at least 17 acorns or 28 beechnuts, 11 grains of corn, 100 maple seeds, plus other material; it was estimated that a passenger pigeon needed to eat about convert of food a day in order to survive.