The Extinctions
Passenger Pigeons: Stewards of the Hardwood Forests
https://www.theextinctions.com/articles-1/passenger-pigeons-stewards-of-the-hardwood-forests
Passsenger Pigeons would probably be the most useful deextinction as they could be a major low cost food source. In fact when they existed in swarms, indentured servants sometimes had contract saying they could only be fed PP a certain number of days a week. Unfortunately breeding the swarm size that would allow mating behavior would not be easy.
Regarding Covid and Spanish Flu, God help us if Spanish Flu gets loose. It killed 50 million people in 2 years. I think Covid has only killed about 6 million, and that is with a world population multi billions of people more these days. Of course we have more experience with flu vaccine, so might get one more quickly, but distribution would be much harder as the SF spread really fast, I could imaging as many as 200 million dead in a year or two. Meanwhile if they don’t get on top of Monkey Pox with serious contact tracing, that could also become endemic, and it should not as it spreads less easily.
Wonderful article. Long read, but worth it! Thank you :)