# The sky was full of them. Then there was one.

- Series: [Miu Animations](https://miu.fm/miuanimations.md)
- Published: 2026-10-16
- Page: https://miu.fm/miuanimations/the-sky-was-full-of-them-then-there-was-one

## Story

The sky was full of them. Then there was one.

Passenger pigeons once crossed North America in flocks that witnesses said took hours, even days, to pass. In 1813 John James Audubon wrote that the light of noon was obscured as by an eclipse. Hunted for cheap meat and driven from the cut forests, they collapsed within a few decades; the last confirmed wild birds were shot around 1900. By 1910 a single bird was left, a female called Martha, at the Cincinnati Zoo, where her keepers lowered her perch when she could no longer reach it. She died there in 1914, and this short tells it the way Tango (1981) tells a room: one fixed view, every figure its own loop.

What did you see often as a child that you never see now?

Sources: Elizabeth Kolbert's review of Joel Greenberg, A Feathered River Across the Sky, in The New York Review of Books (2014); the Linda Hall Library on Martha; A. W. Schorger, The Passenger Pigeon (1955), and R. W. Shufeldt (1915), as cited by others; John James Audubon, Ornithological Biography (1831); Zbigniew Rybczyński on making Tango, in Cinema and Architecture (BFI, 1997).

Film and music: ours, an homage made independently of the makers of Tango. Sound: recordings on Freesound and BigSoundBank (CC0); there are no recordings of passenger pigeons, so the wings and the coos are other birds. Strings, horn, clarinet and flute: Apple GarageBand. Cello recordings: University of Iowa Electronic Music Studios.

## Watch

- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mNf6PPAI6TU
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dej63V7kh1w/

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