Mark Avery on the lessons we need to learn from the loss of the passenger pigeon – billions once flew across the US

On 1 September 1914 a pigeon died in Cincinnati zoo, around lunchtime, and with her died her species. The pigeon's name was Martha and her species was the passenger pigeon. Only 50 years before, passenger pigeons flew in flocks of millions across the forests of the eastern US and Canada.

They ate acorns, beechnuts and chestnuts, and scoured the forests of America, from Ontario to Florida, and from Texas to Wisconsin, in search of places where the trees produced most seed. Passenger pigeons nested in colonies of tens of millions, and in winter their roosts were so packed that the weight of birds broke the limbs off mature trees.

Flocks would pass overhead for hours at a time, darkening the sky. The French-American artist, John James Audubon, described a flock in Kentucky in the early 1800s, which he estimated at more than a billion birds. Similar descriptions from other, apparently reliable, sources describe flocks that could have numbered millions of birds in one locality. Yet, around 1900, the species was extinct in the wild. After that a few captive birds remained until Martha (named after the wife of George Washington) died in the cage that still stands in Cincinnati zoo.

The passenger pigeon was the commonest bird the world has ever seen. How did it disappear in a matter of decades? First, it was a forest bird, and the European colonists, as they spread west, cut down the forests for timber and firewood, and in order to cultivate the land. The low point in forest cover was reached in 1872 when more than half of the original virgin forest in America had been felled. Deforestation, selective felling of mature trees within remaining forests and the replacement of old trees (which produce most seeds) with young trees reduced food supplies and nesting areas for the pigeons. And forests were filled with free-range pigs, which also fed on the same nuts as the pigeons. Hog-farmers moaned that when passenger pigeons arrived in their woods, the pigs starved to death.

The most dramatic impact humans had on passenger pigeons, though perhaps not the most important (deforestation was more so) was eating them. Pigeon pie was a favoured dish in the US at that time, and any farmer with a gun would shoot a few pigeons if a flock flew over within range. But the advent of the telegraph (in the early 1830s), the spread of the railroad and the development of better firearms meant that groups of hundreds of pigeon shooters (and trappers) could hear about the location of an enormous colony, travel there easily and kill millions of birds quickly. The railroads transported trainloads of plucked and salted pigeons to New York and Philadelphia from Michigan and Wisconsin to be served in restaurants within a few days of their deaths.

The birds were also used as live targets in shooting contests. Pigeons were sent in their tens of thousands to be released, one at a time, in shooting competitions back east. That's why we call targets clay pigeons rather than clay pheasants, and it's why they are traditionally blue to resemble the "blue meteor", as the fast-flying passenger pigeon was also known.

The birds had always been eaten by squirrels, hawks, bears etc, but their huge abundance made negligible the impact of local predators. What did losses of tens of thousands of birds and their eggs matter if the colony were tens of millions of pairs? But when the pigeon population fell, such predation mattered.

In the era after the civil war, the US population soared (1860: 34 million; 1900: 73 million). Fortunes were made by the likes of Rockefeller, Mellon and Carnegie, living standards rose and, in 1890, the US Bureau of Census announced that there was no longer a frontier – the US, its laws and its dominion stretched "from sea to shining sea". People wanted land, wood and pigeon pies, and they took them all.

The history books rarely mention the loss of the passenger pigeon in these years – a casualty of "progress". The species wasn't alone – the bison almost preceded it to extinction, falling from 30 million beasts to fewer than 1,000 in the same decades. The forests were felled and the prairies were fenced and ploughed. This brought on an unprecedented wave of extinctions or near misses; the Carolina parakeet and the Rocky Mountain locust were driven to extinction and the Pronghorn antelope, the bison, black-footed ferret, Eskimo curlew, ivory-billed woodpecker, heath hen and others were brought to the brink. When the west was "won" the "wild" was most certainly lost.

Does it matter? Now, a century later, should we mourn Martha's death and that of billions of her kind? I think so. Not because we would be economically better off if we had pigeons and a lot more bison, but because the world would have retained more of its natural beauty. If America had lost such species, would it still have put a man on the moon? Economically and socially we would not be worse off – ecologically we would be better off.

We lost the passenger pigeon and much of the rest of North America's wildlife through ignorance, but we can't use that excuse today and we still plunder the world's natural beauty. Now we can see, clearly, what we are doing.

• A Message from Martha by Mark Avery is published by Bloomsbury.