Thunder, Bells, and Silence: The Eclipse that Went Extinct

What was it like for Martha, the endling of her species, to die alone at the Cincinnati Zoo that late-summer day in 1914, all the other passenger pigeons gone from the face of the Earth, having once filled its skies with an immensity of beating wings, so many that John James Audubon likened their migration to an eclipse? And what made the difference between the people who killed them with glee — like the man in Austin who bragged about slaying 475 birds with a single stick — and those who revere...