Books: History's Pigeon

THE SILENT SKY by Allan W. Eckert. 243 pages. Little, Brown. $4.95.

One March morning in 1900, a small boy crouched along the bank of Ohio's Scioto River, sighted down the barrel of his BB gun, and sent a pellet smashing into the brain of a big red-breasted, blue-backed bird. It was the last wild passenger pigeon ever to be sighted. In this indignant, touching book, Allan W. Eckert, author of The Great Auk, details the wanton greed that extinguished this remarkable species and imagines a biography for the last wild survivor that died that...

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