Although it is hard to speculate as to how the American public received the news of the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, Martha's fate was certainly used within the growing conservationist discourse. One popular rumor that circulated within the press during 1915 was that Department of Agriculture had offered a $10000 reward for a nest and eggs, which its 15 June newsletter denied.

But the rumor persisted and conservationists would invoke the passenger pigeon as an example for some kind of regulatory system for wild game. Larry St. John, the author of the Chicago Tribune's "Woods and Waters" sporting and nature columns asserted:

No one in those days [the 1860s] believed that the passenger pigeon would ever be decreased, much less exterminated- they had no example like we have. As we will point out in this column from time to time, other birds are going the way of the passenger pigeon- slower, but just as certain. Think it over.

The time has passed when marketing game in this country can be looked upon as a business. The only game that should be sold should be raised by carefully supervised and licensed game farmers. Anything more liberal than this means the end of game in the United States and soon. Game dealers and market hunters have killed their own goose; now let them pay the price.

William Temple Hornaday, one of the early generation of American conservationists, explicitly cited the passenger pigeon’s fate in an appeal to save the Sage Grouse:

The passenger pigeon millions went the same way, by commercial slaughter, so quickly that no one realized what was happening until it was all over! [emphasis original] For ten years, the American people refused to believe that all those millions of birds have gone forever; but now they know that this is true.

Forest and Stream’s 12 September 1914 coverage of Martha’s death concluded that her tale was a cautionary one:

If only the human species could emulate this commercial spirit, act in unison for bird-protection without commercial quibbling, curb its mania for bird adornment, check excessive “sport for sport’s sake,” and annihilate potting for market, some of our threatened birds would reestablish their slender hold and escape their impending extinction. In the early settlements, pigeons, turkeys, parakeets, and Heath hens were plentiful; civilization and culture came; the hills and valleys were deforested, the lowlands were cultivated; in short, the balance of nature was excessively disturbed, yet where we collectively provided these original occupants refuge, or how have we restrained ourselves, to promote their greater increase, when they were most rapidly lessening? The conscience balm has always been “They will be ever common.”

Finally, the Florida Audubon Society reported in its July 1919 Bulletin that the Migratory Bird Treaty was explicitly to prevent the type of activities that caused the demise of the passenger pigeon:

The bunch of “sports” who last February near Tallahassee killed 1399 Mourning doves in one day on a baited field, and quit the murder only when they ran out of shells, have learned that the Federal Government will not permit this species to be wiped out, as the Passenger pigeon was wiped out, to make a vandal’s holiday. The hundred dollars they each paid for the information that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act is a living proposition, always to be reckoned with, was much too little.

As a whole, Martha's tale gave a degree of focus to the problem of extinction caused by human hunting and many conservationist literature used her fate to promote regulations.

Sources

Florida Audubon Society. "Paying for Their Sport." Florida Audubon Bulletin, Vol. 1, No. 11 (July 1919): 2.

Hornaday, William T. Save the Sage Grouse from Extinction; A Demand from Civilization to the Western States. New York: New York Zoological Park, 1916.

John, Larry St., "Woods and Waters: Something to Think About." Chicago Daily Tribune, January 2, 1917: 14.

_. "Woods and Waters: Something to Think About." Chicago Daily Tribune, January 23, 1917: 16.

Wright, Albert Hazen. “Martha the Last Passenger Pigeon Dead: The Passenger Pigeon: Early Historical Records, 1534-1860.” Forest and Stream. Volume LXXXIII, No. 11 (September 12, 1914) :336-338.