It was a nomadic species, breeding and foraging in vast flocks millions of birds strong. It exploited seasonally available crops of beechmast, acorns and chestnuts; scouting for food sources and infomation sharing was likely to have required flocks of a certain critical size, below which survival would be compromised. Birds nested in April or May in vast colonies typically 16 by 5 km in size.

Ectopistes migratorius was found in forest in eastern and central Canada and the USA, occasionally wandering south to Mexico and Cuba. Over the 19^th century, the species crashed from being one of the most abundant birds in the world to extinction (Schorger 1955). The last wild bird was shot in 1900, and surveys in 1910-1911 failed to record any (Blockstein and Tordoff 1985). The last captive bird died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo (Wilcove 1989).