Memorial Day is a day of remembering and honoring the past. We especially remember those who have died while serving to protect our nation. In such a time we also tend to think of and honor others who may have served in the military but were spared. And it can be a time of memorializing loved ones in general.

This year on Memorial Day, we were blessed with a warm, blue sky day with trees bursting in new green leaves, apple trees draped in white and pink blossoms, and wildflowers of every color on the roadsides and in the woods. After a number of days of rain, there seemed also to be a wave of some of the later spring migrant birds skipping through the neighborhoods and parks where Memorial Day parades and speeches were happening.

We noticed it in our neighborhood.

As the fire trucks passed and the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts marched and waved, we heard a newly arrived great crested flycatcher giving its loud “wheep” call nearby as if cheering on the passers-by. A yellow-bellied sapsucker (a late migrant or a wandering local breeder?) suddenly appeared and started drumming its fast-to-slow “rat-a-tat-tat-tat” on a hollow limb of the oak above the yellow house kitty corner to our street. A magnolia warbler, its bright yellow breast contrasting with the bluish on the head, flittered about in the crabapple tree.  

Being in a memorializing mood, we couldn’t help but remember some of the birds and other creatures we’ve also lost since the founding of the United States. Most of us know about the often shared fact that there are almost three billion fewer birds today (most of them songbirds) than there were in the 1970s.

That’s a massive number of birds to have lost in our lifetimes.

And we should not forget that we had already lost between three and five billion birds at the end of the 1800s. That number was the estimated population size of the now-extinct passenger pigeon. The last one died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1914. Passenger pigeons occurred right here in Maine, with records from at least 60 different locations. While the origins of the names seemed to be lost in history, there are Pigeon Hill Roads in Columbia, Mechanic Falls, and Steuben, a Pigeon Plain Road in China, a Pigeon Brook Road in West Baldwin, a Pigeon Point in Lovell, a Pigeon Island in Deer Isle, and a Pigeon Road in Ellsworth. The last passenger pigeons known in Maine were one shot in Dexter in 1896 and another on Mount Desert Island in 1904.

We wonder if there are any exact known locations where passenger pigeons occurred here in Maine that could be tracked down? Maybe a ceremony remembering the passing of the species at such a spot would be something to consider as we work to prevent the extinction of others?

There are other birds to remember including the extinct Eskimo curlew that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions. Unfortunately, we will never know exactly how many there were. We do know that they were killed by the thousands to sell to markets in big cities. Eskimo curlews nested in the Arctic (there are actually only a couple of locations that were documented by western science before they went extinct). In the fall, they arrived along the Maine coast to stop before heading off across the Atlantic on the long journey to South America. The last Eskimo curlew ever known in Maine was one shot near Schoodic Point in 1929. The last documented occurrence on Earth was one shot on Barbados in 1963.

Beyond birds, there are more wildlife creatures to remember. Woodland caribou lived here in Maine until perhaps as late as 1914. Along with the city of Caribou, there are all sorts of places named “caribou” across the state, many of them, presumably, because they had an earlier connection to where caribou occurred. We’ve heard stories of places in the state where there are still some historical caribou trails visible, though we can’t verify the fact ourselves.

Then there are some of the species that still hang on by a thread. The Atlantic salmon spawned in Maine rivers by the hundreds of thousands. Now the numbers have dwindled to just hundreds. Atlantic cod and northern shrimp are among species whose numbers have declined in the Gulf of Maine so precipitously that there are not enough to harvest anymore. We used to love buying shrimp from the back of one of the many pickup trucks marked with a crude “SHRIMP” sign along the roadside on a frigid February day when they were still abundant. Sometimes species like salmon, cod, and shrimp are described as being functionally extinct here in the Gulf of Maine—deeply disturbing and disheartening.

The interconnections between our human past and present and the ability of the natural world to sustain us make for a lot to remember and consider. How do we keep from repeating the parts of history that we regret? We must find a way.

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Vice President of Boreal Conservation for National Audubon. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists. He is a coauthor of the seminal “Birds of Maine” book and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the popular books, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” (Down East Books) and “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao: A Site and Field Guide,” (Cornell University Press).