PASSENGER PIGEON 385 



and extended northeast past Crooked Lake for twenty-eight miles, averaging 

 three or four miles wide. Nestings usually start in deciduous woods, but during 

 their progress the pigeons do not skip any kind of trees they encounter. The 

 Petosky nesting extended eight miles through hard-wood timber, then crossed a 

 river bottom wooded with arbor-vitae, and thence stretched through pine 

 woods about twenty miles. For the entire distance of twenty-eight miles every 

 tree of any size had more or less nests, and many trees were filled with them 

 None were lower than fifteen feet above the ground. 



Mr. Stevens also stated that " so rapidly did the colony extend its 

 boundaries that it soon passed literally over and around the place 

 where he was netting, although when he began, this point was several 

 miles from the nearest nest." 



The nests were simple frail structures, composed of sticks and 

 twigs crossing one another and supported by forks of the branches 

 at a height of 10 to 50 feet or more. The nest was often so loosely 

 made that the egg or squab could be seen through it from below. 



Ruthven Deane (1896) observed the habits of captive birds 

 belonging to David Whittaker, of Milwaukee. These birds had 

 increased from two pairs procured in 1888 to six males and nine 

 females in 1896. 



When the pigeons show signs of nesting, small twigs are thrown on the 

 bottom of the enclosure, and on the day of our visit, I was so fortunate as to 

 watch the operations of nest building. There were three pairs actively engaged. 

 The females remained on the shelf, and at a given signal which they only uttered 

 for this purpose, the males would select a twig or straw, and in one instance 

 a feather and fly up to the nest, drop it and return to the ground, while the 

 females placed the building material in position and then called for more. In 

 all of Mr. Whittaker's experience with this flock he has never known of more 

 than one egg being deposited. * * * The eggs are usually laid from the 

 middle of February to the middle of September, some females laying as many as 

 seven or eight during the season, though three or four is the average. 



This fact of one egg to the clutch is also confirmed by Prof. C. O. 

 Whitman. "Wilson (1832) also confirms this, " a circumstance," he 

 adds, " in the history of the bird not generally known to naturalists." 

 Audubon and many who have followed and copied him state, how- 

 ever, that two eggs form the clutch, as is the case with the domestic 

 and other pigeons. There are, however, a sufficient number of inde- 

 pendent observations that show that two eggs are often, or, according 

 to others, rarely found. It is possible, in the crowded nesting places, 

 that two females may have laid in the same nest. Brewster (1889) 

 questioned Stevens closely on the number of eggs in the nest. " He 

 assured me that he had frequently found two eggs or two young in 

 the same nest, but that fully half the nests which he had examined 

 contained only one." Mr. Brewster adds : " Mr. Stevens is satisfied 

 that pigeons continue laying and hatching during the entire summer. 

 They do not, however, use the same nesting place a second time in 

 one season, the entire colony always moving from twenty to one 



