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THE LOST DOVE 



07ie Thousand Dollars {$1000) Reward 



That is the prize that has been offered for a nesting 

 pair of Passenger Pigeons. No one has claimed the 

 money yet, and it would be a great adventure, don't 

 you think, to seek that nest? If you find it, you must 

 not disturb it, you know, or take the eggs or the young, 

 or frighten the father- or mother-bird; for the people 

 who offered all that money did not want dead birds to 

 stuff for a museum, but hoped that someone might tell 

 them where there were live wild ones nesting. 



You see the news had got about that the dove that is 

 called Passenger Pigeon was lost. No one could believe 

 this at first, because there had been so very many — 

 more than a thousand, more than a million, more than 

 a billion. How could more than a billion doves be lost? 



They were such big birds, too — a foot and a half 

 long from tip of beak to tip of tail, and sometimes even 

 longer. Why, that is longer than the tame pigeons that 

 walk about our city streets. How could doves as large 

 as that be lost, so that no one could find a pair, not even 

 for one thousand dollars to pay him for the time it took 

 to hunt? 



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