“…humans’ desire to mimic came to a head in the small west Georgia town of Cochran in 1986. Two ornithologists, James Tarry and the appropriately named Joshua Bird, explored the county for a species that hadn’t been seen in almost eighty years.
One of the last unofficially reported sightings of the Passenger Pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, occurred in Cochran in 1923, although the bird was thought to be extinct more than two decades earlier. Still, local legend had it that the bird could be heard in the modern day, and Tarry and Bird set about finding it.
What they found over three months of research was no evidence that the bird had existed in the region for more than a century. At the time of the last rumored sighting in 1923 however, a Bleckley County newspaper had put out a suggestion to the townsfolk to help preserve the bird by answering its call whenever it was heard.
The idea was that if the few remaining pigeons felt there was a population nearby, they might stay during their migration and be more likely to find and mate with others of their kind, also attracted by the calls.
After talking to the Cochran community through that mid-1980s summer, all that Tarry and Bird found was a community of people who, upon hearing a sound that reminded them of what they believed to be a passenger pigeon, would answer it back with the same rising five-note staccato rhythm.
Their answering of the non-existent passenger pigeon had become such a habit among locals that many didn’t appear to notice their own whistle as they responded, and as their neighbors responded in kind.
Unfortunately the only reliable evidence indicates the last passenger pigeon had already died in Cincinnatti by 1914. The last published evidence of the animal after that date included a tape recording made in 1960, which contained a few repeats of those rising five notes that sound uncannily like the first five notes of “My only Sunshine…” “
– Anneke Brouwer in “Primate Culture from a psychological perspective.”
