Was Theodore Roosevelt the Last to See Wild Passenger Pigeons

The State Legislature of Ohio declared in 1857, "The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, ... no ordinary destruction can lessen them from the myriads that are yearly produced." The last individual of this species, once the world's most abundant bird, died in that same state. A female named Martha, the last of a line started with four pairs captured near Petosky, Michigan, in 1878 (Pers. Comm. E.J. Maruska, 1976), died at age 29 in the Cincinnati zoo on September 1, 1914. The mounted skin is now in the U.S. National Museum. But of far more interest is what happened to the species in Nature.