The Native Americans ate the Passenger Pigeon.

The passenger pigeon was an important source of food for the people of North America.

Archaeological evidence supports the idea that Native Americans ate the pigeons frequently prior to colonization.

They were not killed by deforestation, the European colonists killed them all.

What may be the earliest account of Europeans hunting passenger pigeons dates to January 1565, when the French explorer René Laudonnière wrote of killing close to 10,000 of them around Fort Caroline in a matter of weeks.

After European colonization, the passenger pigeon was hunted with more intensive methods than the more sustainable methods practiced by the natives.

Once pigeon meat became popular, commercial hunting started on a prodigious scale.

By the 1870s, the decrease in birds was noticeable, especially after the last large-scale nestings and subsequent slaughters of millions of birds in 1874 and 1878.