Bio Trip to Downtown

Yesterday was our biology trip to U of T and to the ROM.  It wasn't easy getting to school by 8:00 AM, but at least most of us were able to get some more sleep on the bus.  The lectures that were presented were very interesting to hear, and motivated some of us in one way or another into choosing what we want to go into or do with our lives.  But I felt that the auditorium wasn't placed in the best location, because we were able to hear the subway pass by below us.  After the lecture we were let to roam downtown to find lunch and then head back to the ROM by 1, which meant that we had more than an hour to find food, and when I say food I meant McDonald's.
I've been to the ROM so many times as a kid, but I never really had a person take us around the ROM, it was mostly a "go as you please" type of thing where we basically just walked around the ROM aimlessly, although there was this one time I went to the ROM with my Latin class and was able to touch some of the artifacts and had a mini lesson from a teacher that worked there.
The lady that was giving us our lesson was really nice, and she knew everything there was to know about the animals in the display.  She seems like a person who was really passionate about her work, and looked like she really enjoyed doing what she did.  She gave us a variety of lessons; she gave us a lesson about the mistletoe bird, and how the seed of the mistletoe causes the bird to poop 25 minutes after eating it and causes their poop to be stuck on their tails causing the bird to rub it against a tree, the flower that looked like a pokemon which creates a stench that smells like rotting meat and is the colour of dead meat that will attract bugs like flies, the story about lemmings and how their population is inconsistent and that one year there can be a huge population of them and then the next they would be on the brink of extinction, and a story about the corals and how they are so sensitive to change that the plant species that live on them will leave and cause the coral to be "bleached".

Since we only need to write about one story that she had told us I will be talking about the story about the passenger pigeons.

Passenger pigeons were pigeons that enjoyed staying in big flocks, and when I say big I mean real big, as in they have the ability to cover the sun and rain bird poop, making it seem like the world's ending I guess.  One of the reasons that they fly in such big numbers is because it is safe to be in great numbers since they don't have any protective mechanisms that will help them since they're just pigeons.

Since Passenger birds was abundant back then, having a population of over 3.5 billion, humans decided to kill them for food, since I guess they thought pigeon meat taste good, and also to make sure they don't eat all their crops, although according to our teacher the pigeon's poop will become very beneficial for next year's crop.  You can shoot up at the sky with a gun and you are 100% guaranteed to be able to get at least one pigeon.  Another method that the humans did was pluck out the eyes of a passenger pigeon and then tie it on a tree to make to fly in distress.  Many birds that see this will want to fly towards the poor bird and try to save it since they are social birds, but end up being clubbed to death.  There was a record that over 4000 pigeons were killed a day for a few months which ended up killing a lot of the population.  Since these pigeons are social birds they start to die off when their population starts decreasing.  Because of the decrease of population, the birds did not breed often, resulting in another factor that had caused their population to decrease even more.  The last passenger pigeon was a female at the Cincinnati Zoo (1914).  It really saddens me that humans are the cause of the extinction of animals.  Without this tour, I wouldn't have learned about passenger pigeons.