The Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback began in 2012 with a central paradigm: de-extinction needed a model candidate. The goal of de-extinction for us, quite literally is revive and restore, and so the pilot project needed to be one that would have a chance of successfully returning the species to the wild.
We hypothesized the Passenger Pigeon could be a model de-extinction project. The Passenger Pigeon is certainly an iconic candidate. Conservation has often rallied behind iconic birds to galvanize environmental revolutions. The conservation movement itself formed in response to the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon. When the last birds were shot in the wild, mere decades after their population numbered in the billions, their absence from the skies demonstrated that even the most abundant of natural resources could be exhausted by unchecked human consumption, beginning a new age of conservation regulation and game management
