On Sept 1, 1914 — just 5½ months after the Royal Ontario Museum opened to the public for the first time — a bird named Martha passed away at the Cincinnati Zoo.

She took her species with her.

A species that had flown by the billions — in flocks that obliterated the sun along migratory routes in eastern North American for days at a time — was gone with Martha, the last living passenger pigeon on Earth.

“It was very sad,” says ROM ornithology technician Mark Peck, whose museum holds the world’s largest collection of the extinct birds, with some 153 stuffed specimens.

“It happened so fast. In just 60, 70 years, they were all gone.”

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In this centennial year of the ROM’s opening and the passenger pigeon’s demise, the museum is hauling its collection out of storage and putting it on display for the first time in 34 years. More importantly, it may also be playing a significant role in the bird’s resurrection.

Christened “de-extinction,” a scheme has been launched by a U.S. non-profit group known as Revive & Restore to bring the passenger pigeon back to life.

It involves retrieving genetic material from the footpad of a stuffed passenger bird and mingling it with the DNA of a closely related and extant species known as the band-tailed pigeon (Patagioenas fasciata).

The plan works like this, says Ben Novak, the project’s lead researcher. First, scientists will take DNA samples from both bird species and sequence them, creating a genetic map of each. They will then compare the two genetic maps — which like those of chimps and humans will be largely identical — and look for the places where they differ.

It’s these differing segments of DNA that make one bird a passenger pigeon and the other a band-tailed.

The group will then use emerging technology to take the desired segment of the passenger pigeon’s genome and insert it into the appropriate location in the band-tailed’s DNA while cutting out the gene it is replacing.

“The (technology can) cut out the band-tailed pigeon’s version of a gene which would be, say, a purple feather colour gene,” explains Novak, who did two years of postgraduate work at McMaster University in Hamilton. “Then they paste in the passenger pigeon’s version of that gene, which is a blue feather colour gene.”

This process will be repeated until all targeted DNA segments have been switched. It will occur within the band-tailed species’ primordial germ cells, which go on to make sperm and eggs.

These cells will then be injected into band-tailed embryos, creating what are known in genetics as a “chimera” animal: band-tailed pigeons in all appearances, but with a passenger pigeon’s sperm or eggs. When these chimera birds mate, they will produce a passenger pigeon.

Novak says his group hopes to recreate a passenger pigeon by 2022 or 2023.

And the passenger pigeon DNA being used for the project? It was retrieved from one of the ROM’s female birds.

The fate of the passenger pigeon species was an all too familiar one, says Peck. It just occurred on a scale unmatched in human history.

It was a simple case, he says, of overhunting and lost habitat — factors that have led to so many extinctions. “This has happened many times and it is still happening today to species around the world.”

The ROM’s passenger pigeon exhibit, which will open on the anniversary of Martha’s death, will replicate a diorama that was on permanent display at the museum between 1935 and 1980.

It is meant to provide an ecological learning opportunity for ROM visitors when it reopens, Peck says — an entirely fitting purpose, as the bird’s extinction a century ago was a crucial spur to organized conservation movements on this continent.

“This was one of the iconic species to start that kind of thinking and action,” says Peck, who oversees the ROM’s bird collection. “People realized that this is what we’ve done in a relatively short time, and unfortunately it was just a little too late for this species.”

Boasting a pastel panache of rusty reds and greyish blues, the passenger pigeons’ sleek appearance was more like that of a mourning dove than the plump look of rock doves, a.k.a. the familiar “pigeons” that now besmirch modern urban landscapes around the globe.

Native to this continent and travelling between Florida and points as far north as Moosonee on James Bay, they were a ubiquitous presence in the New World landscape.

“Passenger pigeons were probably at one point the most abundant bird ... in North America,” Peck says.

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“And what they were able to do very successfully was roam in huge flocks. People talked about them darkening the skies for three days. It’s hard for us to even imagine something that large today.”

Peck says the birds would nest in colonies packed wing to wing over 20 square kilometres or more.

“It would be wonderful to think of a late March and you’d walk outside and all of a sudden you hear this thundering roar of flying birds,” he says. “I guess in some ways we may never be able to see something like that again.”

The passenger pigeon was a voracious eater, with a slender beak that could open, snake-like, to gobble down acorns and other tree nuts from the deciduous forests that once covered the eastern half of the continent, Peck says.

Unfortunately for the passenger pigeon, they proved to be good eating themselves. And European settlers saw them as a teaming, tasty and seemingly endless source of food.

Nesting together in the hundreds of millions, they were also stupendously easy to catch.

“You’d go in and knock branches with rods or something,” Peck says. “You could smoke them out, you could use nets to trap them, you could use guns. There were a variety of ways to hunt them.”

The young, fat and flightless pigeon “squabs” were especially easy prey, with hunters simply picking them out of trees like apples.

By the mid-19th century, a massive market-hunting operation was in full swing up and down the eastern seaboard.

“These birds were being transported in train loads to the different bigger cities in the northeast,” Peck says.

Aside from hunting, a rapid loss of habitat, as settlers felled the forests for farmland, also played a role in the species’ demise.

And as farms were opened and their natural food sources dwindled, the birds turned to the new crops for sustenance, making them agricultural pests to be further eradicated.

Finally, as populations plummeted, leaving fewer and fewer birds to breed, the pigeons may have also lost the critical mass that allowed them to weather the natural predation they faced, Peck says.

Still, it came as a surprise to most North Americans at the turn of the last century that the birds were actually being obliterated.

“People couldn’t believe that these massive flocks would disappear completely,” Peck says. “They just thought they had moved elsewhere.”

Had some birds survived, he says, they likely could have developed the urban symbiosis their rock pigeon cousins have so thoroughly adapted.

“I think this bird would have loved the idea of backyard feeders and would have done quite well,” he says.

“They just were never given the opportunity.”