One of the arguments that keeps coming up in the ongoing debate about spring hunting is that there are millions of turtle doves, the population is enormous, so what's the fuss all about? Yes, the estimated European population is relatively large in numerical terms, but that is hardly the point at issue.
It is not the population size now that we have to be looking at, but the population size then, and the extent by which that population has shrunk. However large the estimated turtle dove population is, the salient fact is that everybody - environmentalists, scientists and hunters alike - agree on one thing: that it has shrunk significantly and is shrinking still.
The fascinating thing about this debate is that it is clear many people think and talk as though turtle doves and wild birds in general are made in some kind of factory. It is the unconscious mindset of those raised in an urban environment completely detached from nature, where the supply of commodities is directly related to demand.
Running out of turtle doves? We'll ring our men in China and rush through an emergency order.
It doesn't help that none of this is really taught in school in any meaningful way. The result is a tragic situation in which the No campaign for the upcoming referendum has to start literally by explaining to people why birds should not be shot in spring - because that is when they reproduce, and every bird, females especially, taken out of the equation at the end of a gun means an exponential decrease down the generations in the population of that species, just as leaving it alive leads to an exponential increase.
When I was a child, I devoured books about animals and science. So I have known about the passenger pigeon ever since I was in primary school, though it's certainly no thanks to the school itself. I also knew enough not to discuss it with my classmates, because children then were not what they are now, and girls especially so. But now I have grown up (and how) I find that the situation is not much changed.
Any mention of the passenger pigeon, even in a conversation about hunting and threatened bird species, still draws blank stares unless the people I am talking to have a professional or related interest in the subject, and by that I don't mean hunters because, oddly, they are among those least likely to know. That is the extent of what the No campaign is up against.
The passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) was, in the 19th century, the most common bird in North America and possibly the world, excluding sparrows. Contemporary descriptions of migrating passenger pigeons are of the sky turning black as vast flocks of them passed by like clouds with a sound like thunder.
"While I gazed in wonder and astonishment, I beheld moving toward me in an unbroken front millions of (passenger) pigeons, the first I had seen that season," wrote a Potawatomi tribal leader called Simon Pokagon of one day in May, 1850. Before he saw the birds he heard the noise: "it was as if an army of horses laden with sleigh bells was advancing through the deep forests towards me. As I listened more intently, I concluded that instead of the tramping of horses it was distant thunder, and yet the morning was clear, calm and beautiful."
Others described at the time how these vast clouds of migrating passenger pigeons sometimes took hours to pass by, darkening the sky and making all conversation impossible because of the sound of their beating wings.
Within four decades, these wild flocks of hundreds of millions, some of them billions, of passenger pigeons had shrunk to flocks of a pathetic few hundred and then a few dozen. Sixty-four years after Simon Pokagon was struck by that wondrous sight and sound of millions of passenger pigeons migrating together, the last passenger pigeon - called Martha - died in captivity at the zoo in Cincinnati. She was 29 and had never laid a fertile egg.
What happened? Simple: there were so many millions, perhaps billions, of passenger pigeons that people in North America shot at them for sport, picking them out of the sky and treating them like vermin. There were so many, they thought, that there would never be an end to them. Some actually wanted an end to them, it has to be said, in that era when conservation was unheard of and passenger pigeons were pests.
But the general thinking was that no amount of shooting could threaten their numbers because there were just so many of them. But then they were gone. The decrease year on year was exponential until the only surviving passenger pigeon was Martha in the Cincinnati Zoo.
Last year was the centenary of Martha's death, and scientists and environmentalists in North America started off Project Passenger Pigeon to address questions about our role in the extinction of species, even as we think that such extinction couldn't be possible, because there are millions of some particular bird or animal.
Right now, people are arguing that the turtle dove couldn't possibly be rendered extinct because there are millions of them in Europe and so those who say they are threatened are lying and making a fuss about nothing.
But that's exactly what people said about the passenger pigeon in the 19th century, except that there wasn't the level of environmental and conservation awareness that there is now. People were ignorant. We have had certain advantages since then and have no such excuse.