Vox:

Today is the anniversary of noteworthy event. Exactly 100 years ago — on September 1, 1914 — the passenger pigeon was driven to extinction.

You may not have heard of this species. But there were once incomprehensibly huge numbers of these birds. When Europeans first arrived to North America, there were somewhere between three and five billion of them in existence. (In comparison, there are now around 10.8 million common pigeons on the continent today.) At the time, they were probably the most numerous bird species on the planet.

Kind of scary to think that, if we can kill off a population of this size in a short period of time, what other damage can we do to the other species on our planet?