The Passenger Pigeon {Ectopistes migratoHus) 



By W. Leon Dawson 



Length: 15 to 17^ inches. 



Range : Eastern North America from Hudson Bay southward, and west to 

 the Great Plains ; rare thence to Nevada and Washington. Now extinct. 



No more marvelous tales have been handed down to us from remote past 

 than those which our own fathers tell, and solemnly asseverate, concerning the 

 former abundance of the Wild Pigeon during its migration and in its breeding 

 haunts. During their passage the sun was darkened and the moon refused to 

 give her light. The beating of their wings was like the voice of thunder, and 

 their steady oncoming like the continuous roar of Niagara. Where they roosted 

 great branches, and even trees two feet in diameter, were broken down beneath 

 their weight, and where they nested a hundred square miles of timber groaned 

 with the weight of their nests or lay buried in ordure. 



At the beginning of the last century the species enjoyed a general distribu- 

 tion throughout the northern portions of the Eastern States, and was to be found 

 scatteringly to the Pacific coast. The birds were, however, rather irregular in 

 their habits, and the center of abundance within historic times was in the North 

 Central States. Although very abundant in Ohio, they are best known from 

 Kentucky, through the accounts of Wilson and Audubon, and in Michigan, 

 where the birds had their last known stronghold, and where the last considerable 

 flight was observed in 1888. In Kentucky they bred and occasionally wintered 

 in such numbers that Wilson once computed a single flight at upwards of two 

 billions. Since the pigeons appeared to the people of the day absolutely count- 

 less their destruction was carried forward by wholesale methods, and upon 

 colossal scale. Men gathered them with nets and knocked them down with poles, 

 or felled trees to secure the fat squabs. At Pentwater, Michigan, people lined 

 the cliffs and beat them down with sticks and whips as they arrived spent with 

 the passage of the lake, and they wielded their weapons until the ground was 

 heaped with countless thousands slain. Powder and shot were deemed inade- 

 quate for the quest, although my grandfather in southern Michigan, in the 

 late forties, once killed 'fifty-nine pigeons with a shotgun at a single discharge. 

 The next day his boys, a lusty brood, and zealous for their father's honor, 

 turned out and scoured the neighborhood until they found one more dead bird, 

 and added it to the collection. 



In order to show a little more clearly the immense destruction of the Pas- 

 senger Pigeon in a single year, and at one roost only, I quote the foflowing 

 extract from an interesting article on the habits, methods of capture, and nesting 

 of the Wild Pigeon, with an account of the Michigan nesting of 1878, by Prof. 

 H. B. Roney in the Chicago Field: 



270 



