Wait, they’re mad you DO follow people? I’ve gotten yelled at because I DON’T follow everyone back.
Man, there is just no winning.
(Any wild survivors who outlived Martha would have probably been doomed by the chestnut blight.) But their massive flocks may have been an unnatural phenomenon caused by, well, smallpox.
Suddenly passenger pigeons have a massive food source, no human competition, and were able to outcompete everything. When forests got cleared again en masse, their numbers plummeted. (Obviously overhunting was a thing too, but habitat loss probably took them out.)
Passenger pigeon flock sizes were, frankly, weird. Also they fed on mast—nuts, etc. So there’s a theory I quite like that when the East Coast went from fire-controlled savanna under the indigenous people to massive dense forests practically overnight, with the dominant species the chestnut, WHAM!
Yeah. It’s a big frustrating feeling. I picked at it in my brain for days trying to think of how it could have been managed, and I just got nuthin’. We’d pretty much have had to invent vaccines before clipper ships.
Huh. I’d assume someone was a carrier and the colony was all people who had had it, but I’m sure the epidemiologists thought of that already.
“Clearly this fine soil is a result of natural processes!”
Even the Black Death only cracked about 50% overall. The kind of devastation smallpox wrought was literally unprecedented in human history.
Oh, certainly colonialism made it infinitely worse! But there’s just no way to bounce back from an 80-90% mortality event. You lose so much cultural knowledge at that point that what comes after is a very different world.
Depending on your location, assassin bug is also possible!
(Although I will say, in the interests of fairness, that one crawled over my hand repeatedly in bed and I kept absently shaking it off because I thought it was just an itch, and it never laid a mandible on me.)
I respect that this is your field and you love them, but I had a bigass Florida Blue chomp me for the crime of putting a hand in his flowerpot.
I’ve read about that! And how they were working uphill trying to convince people of it!
The most amateur-friendly one I know is “1491” by Charles Mann.
Absolutely, but that was still at best like 200 years later.
I don’t know that one! The Mound-Builders are the ones I knew about.
Even then, somebody would have broken it, and all it took was thirty seconds of contact. Trying to keep strict quarantine for, what, 450 years until they found cures?
When there were enough people left alive to bury the dead. The only thing that even comes close are the writings from the Black Death.
Right?! The descriptions of the landscape of the East Coast are shocking. “This is like open parkland!” 50 years later, “This is a dense horrorshow that must be tamed!”
The most conservative estimates are in the millions. But the weirdly tragic thing is that there was truly no way to prevent it. Nobody had germ theory, and there was simply no way to maintain biosecurity on the kind of scale required. It was horrible but also horribly inevitable.
It’s comparable if you lived in the Americas just after 1492.
No, no, those are house centipedes! Those are fine! You love those! They eat roaches!
THAT IS NORMAL AND HEALTHY BECAUSE SPIDERS JUST WANT TO RUN AWAY AND CENTIPEDES ARE ASSHOLES
(This is my hill. There are many like it, but this one is mine.)
This is your ten-millionth reminder that if you didn’t see the spider, it’s probably not a spider bite. Doctors say that because they aren’t entomologists. BUT CONSIDER THE CENTIPEDE WHICH HATES YOU JUST SO MUCH YES YOU SPECIFICALLY and leaves little puncture wounds that hurt like blazes.