"We may read indignantly of the Great Auk and 

 the Passenger Pigeon and say complacently that 

 such a thing could not happen nowadays, but only 

 by the narrowest margin is the Trumpeter Swan of 

 North America, the largest of all waterfowl, still in- 

 cluded in the avifauna of the world." Peter Scott, 

 Wild Chorus 



19 

 Broken Traditions 



The Passenger Pigeon is gone beyond recall. 

 Oaks live whose branches held their nests ; much of the pigeon environment 

 is still here on earth; but the last pigeon is long since dead. 



The Canada Goose is a living part of our native fauna, a passage mi- 

 grant with numbers strong enough to give the modern hunter a share in 

 the annual harvest. On part of its range, however, it is as dead as the Pas- 

 senger Pigeon. Many regions of the United States and Canada once knew 

 the clarion call of the goose on its breeding territory. It bred in Illinois, 

 Indiana, and Iowa (Cooke, 1906). In Minnesota, Roberts (1932) tells us 

 that it was "formerly a common summer resident, nesting throughout the 

 State." Manitoba old-timers, such as Stuart Criddle, of Treesbank, remem- 

 ber nesting geese where there are none today. Cooke, writing in 1906, said 

 that "a hundred years ago the species bred commonly in all the northern 

 third of the Mississippi Valley and not uncommonly to the latitude of St. 

 Louis." McClanahan ( 1940) shows that its breeding range reached to north- 

 western Mississippi. Now this region is barren of its original stock; the 

 native geese of the Mississippi Valley and their breeding traditions have 

 vanished with the Passenger Pigeon. 



Despite drainage, places still remain in the Middle West where geese 

 might nest, marshes as fine for reproduction as are to be found in the 

 north country. It must hold that the Canada Goose has left the Mississippi 

 Valley as a breeder not simply because all its nesting habitat is gone, nor 

 because of the encroachments of civilization, but because all geese with 



243 



