Nature Walk at Offield Family Viewlands - The Great Petoskey Passenger Pigeon Nesting of 1878

Join Little Traverse Conservancy Director of Environmental Education Dylan Klinesteker and Inland Seas Education Association Grounds Supervisor Jess Piskor for a guided walk through the Offield Family Viewlands, exploring one of the most astonishing stories in North American natural history, the passenger pigeon. Once numbering in the billions, this bird was so deeply woven into the ecology of our northern Michigan landscape that its presence shaped the very forests we walk through today. On this walk, we’ll explore what made the passenger pigeon so ecologically extraordinary, how its relationship with our beech-maple forests sustained and was sustained by this region for millennia, and how the species’ catastrophic extinction in the early twentieth century sent ripple effects through ecosystems we are still reckoning with today. Come ready to walk, reflect, and look at the canopy above you with new eyes.