SPECIES EXTINCT OR EXTIRPATED. 445 



succession. The people were all armed, and the banks of the 

 river were crowded with men and boys, incessantly shooting 

 at the Pigeons, which flew lower as they passed the river. 

 For a week or more the people fed on no other flesh than 

 Pigeons. The atmosphere during that time was strongly 

 impregnated with the odor of the birds. Audubon estimated 

 the number of Pigeons passing overhead (in a flock one mile 

 wide) for three hours, travelling at the rate of a mile a minute, 

 allowing two Pigeons to the square yard, as one billion, one 

 hundred and fifteen million, one hundred and thirty-six thou- 

 sand. He estimated, also, that a flock of this size w^ould re- 

 quire eight million, seven hundred and twelve thousand bushels 

 of food a day, and this was only a small part of the three 

 days' flight. 



Great flights of Pigeons ranged from the Alleghenies to 

 the Mississippi and from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico, 

 until after the middle of the nineteenth century. Even two 

 decades later, enormous numbers of Pigeons nested in several 

 States. 



Their winter roosting places almost defy description. 

 Audubon rode through one on the banks of the Green River 

 in Kentucky for more than forty miles, crossing it in different 

 directions, and found its average width to be rather more than 

 three miles. He observed that the ejecta covered the whole 

 extent of the roosting place, like snow; that many trees two 

 feet in diameter were broken off not far from the ground, and 

 that the branches of many of the largest and tallest had given 

 way. ^ 



The birds came in soon after sundown with a noise that 

 sounded " like a gale passing through the rigging of a close- 

 reefed vessel," causing a great current of air as they passed; 

 and here and there, as the flocks alighted, the limbs gave way 

 with a crash, destroying hundreds of the birds beneath. It 

 was a scene of uproar and confusion. No one dared venture 



1 Audubon's statement that trees were broken off by the birds has been questioned, but it is 

 corroborated by others. James Mease (1807) quotes a Rev. Mr. Hall who saw a hickory tree more 

 than a foot in diameter bent over by the birds until its top touched the ground and its roots were 

 started, and he states that brittle trees often were broken of! by them. (Mease, James: A Geological 

 Account of the United States, 1807, pp. 348, 349. Kalra and Luwson also observed this long 

 before the time of Audubon.) 



