The passenger pigeon roost in Homer Township

Perrin's 1881 county history has one of the strangest paragraphs about Medina County you'll ever read. It describes the years, roughly 1830 to 1855, when Homer, Spencer, and Harrisville townships together were an annual spring nesting ground for the North American passenger pigeon.¹

The passenger pigeon was, at that time, likely the most numerous bird species on Earth. Flocks flew in numbers so dense they darkened the sun for hours. In North America the total population is estimated to have peaked in the billions.²

In Perrin's words: “They came in large flocks, in countless numbers, and literally took possession of the woods... before the young pigeons had become full-fledged, they would tumble out of their nests, and, for a short time, the ground would be literally strewn with them.”³

Market hunters from the East set up headquarters at nearby Lodi and shipped the birds by the thousand to Cleveland and beyond. The neighboring Liverpool Township section of Perrin's account notes the same: “Thousands of dozens were taken and shipped to Cleveland and other cities.”⁴

Within a single generation the passenger pigeon vanished from Medina County. Perrin, writing in 1881, records that by then the birds “abandoned this territory as a nesting-ground.” The last confirmed wild passenger pigeon in North America was shot in 1901 or 1902. The last individual, a captive bird named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914.⁵

Perrin also notes that decades after the nesting ended, when the woods were cleared for farmland, the ground beneath the old roosting sites had accumulated pigeon guano “to the depth of six inches.” That is the only physical trace left in the county today, and it is under the plow.