PASSENGER PIGEON 395 



Field marks. — The passenger pigeon may easily be confused with 

 the mourning dove. It is considerably larger, the adult male being 

 nearly half as long again, but in the female and young, with their 

 shorter tails, the difference is not so great. As already remarked, 

 and as all ornithologists know, difference in size alone without direct 

 comparison is of little value as a field mark. The best observer, 

 depending on this alone, may easily be mistaken. The passenger 

 pigeon lacks the spot on the neck that is present in adult mourning 

 doves, but is absent in juveniles. The adult male passenger pigeon 

 has a much redder breast than the mourning dove. The iris of the 

 adult male passenger pigeon is scarlet, that of the female orange, 

 while the iris of a juvenile bird taken by me on September 4, 1877, is 

 described in my notes as " hazel and gray outside." The iris of the 

 mourning dove on the other hand is dark brown. A capital mark 

 of the adult male passenger pigeon is its blue rump. To some extent 

 in the female and especially in the young, however, this is obscured 

 by a brown or olivaceous hue, and is more like the rump of the 

 mourning dove. Unlike the mourning dove, the passenger pigeon 

 does not make a twittering sound with its wings when it rises in 

 flight. 



It is hardly necessary to consider the band-tailed pigeon, which 

 more nearly resembles the domestic pigeon. Its tail is short and 

 square. Flocks of this bird in the West have, however, sometimes 

 been mistaken for the passenger pigeon. 



Enemies. — Before the arrival of Europeans in this country preda- 

 tory animals and birds found in the passenger pigeon a large and 

 easily accessible store of food, and with these the Indian joined in 

 the feast. Yet, judged from the enormous numbers of pigeons ob- 

 served by the white pioneers, the drain on the pigeons must have been 

 insignificant. The white man from the first began destroying the 

 pigeons excessively, and later, with the development of the railroads 

 and the telegraph and with increasing demands of the markets, the 

 destruction advanced by leaps and bounds. The pigeon had become 

 a commercial asset of great value. The Indians, before they were 

 contaminated by the whites killed no more than they could use them- 

 selves, cooking and eating them, or drying the flesh and trying out 

 the fat of a moderate number for future use. 



The following from Kalm (1911) is an interesting reflection on 

 the difference of treatment of the pigeons by the Indians and so-called 

 civilized white man: 



While these birds are hatching their young, or while the latter are not yet 

 able to fly, the savages or Indians in North America are in the habit of never 

 shooting or killing them, nor of allowing others to do so, pretending that it 

 would be a great pity on their young, which would in that case have to starve 

 to death. Some of the Frenchmen told me that they had set out with the inten- 



