PASSENGER PIGEON 383 



able number of young. Under such conditions they would naturally become 

 weaker, or at least less resistant, each year, and in the attempt to find nesting 

 places in the far north they may have been overwhelmed by snow and ice during 

 one or two of the unusually severe summers that occurred between 1882 and 

 1S90. 



Dr. Thomas S. Koberts (1919) sums up the whole situation when 

 he says of this bird in Minnesota : 



Formerly an abundant summer resident. Rapidly diminished in numbers 

 between the years 1878 and 1885, finally disappearing entirely between 1890 and 

 1900. It is now extinct everywhere. All other theories to the contrary, the 

 extermination of this bird was the result of ruthless and wholesale destruction 

 by man. 



Courtship. — The early writers describe a courtship very much after 

 the fashion of the domestic pigeon. Thus Audubon (1840) says: 



The male assumes a pompous demeanor, and follows the female, whether on 

 the ground or the branehes, with spread tail and drooping wings, which it rubs 

 against the part over which it is moving. The body is elevated, the throat 

 swells, the eyes sparkle. He continues his notes, and now and then rises on 

 the wing, and flies a few yards to approach the fugitive and timorous female. 

 Like the domestic pigeon and other species, they caress each other by billing, 

 in which action the bill of the one is introduced transversely into that of the 

 other. 



All that Wilson (1832) has to say on the subject is that " they have 

 the same cooing notes common to domestic pigeons, but much less of 

 their gesticulations." 



Wallace Craig (1911a) believes that Audubon's description of 

 the courtship and voice " came largely by reasoning by analogy from 

 the domestic pigeon and from the author's charming but somewhat 

 unscientific imagination," because Craig's careful studies of captive 

 passenger pigeons in the aviary of Prof. C. O. Whitman showed 

 various peculiarities and characteristics, unlike those of the domestic 

 pigeon, characteristics that " all seem connected, directly or indi- 

 rectly, with the extreme gregariousness, the breeding in vast 

 colonies." Thus he found no bowing or strutting or charging as 

 in other species. The male emits a loud hek and chattering notes 

 and waves his wings in a single sweep, or flaps the wings repeatedly, 

 holding tight to the perch the whole body, head, and tail rising and 

 falling with each stroke. 



When close beside the female, the male Ectopistes had a way all his own 

 of sidling up to her on the perch, pressing hard upon her, sometimes putting 

 his neck over her neck, "hugging" her as Professor Whitman expressed it. 

 * * * When the female becomes amorous, instead of edging away from 

 the male when he sidles up to her, she reciprocates in the hugging, pressing 

 upon the male in somewhat the same manner that he presses upon her. * * * 

 The act of billing, which occurs in all pigeons before copulation, is in Ectopistes 

 reduced to a mere form. * * * The bills ate quickly clasped, shaken for 

 a fraction of a second, and as quickly separated ; the performance is precisely 



