398 BULLETIN 16 2, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



a day to the net were a fair average of the numbers caught. He 

 adds : 



Higher figures than these are often reached, as in the case of one trapper 

 who caught and delivered 2,000 dozen pigeons in ten days, being 200 dozen, 

 or about 2,500 birds per day. A double net has been known to catch as high 

 as 1,332 birds at a single throw, while at natural salt licks, their favorite 

 resort, 300 and 400 dozen, or about 5,000 birds have been caught in a single 

 day by one net. 



At this time, 1879, dead birds were sold in Chicago markets for 

 50 to 60 cents a dozen, 35 to 40 cents at the nestings, while live birds 

 brought $1 to $2 a dozen, and Professor Roney estimated that the 

 pigeoner made at these times $10 to $40 a day. As long as money 

 was obtained by the sale of the birds, men were ready to slaughter 

 them. Mershon (1907), in his book on the passenger pigeon, gives 

 a large number of statistics and estimates of the immense slaughter of 

 this bird. 



The last great nesting of this beautiful bird to be desecrated was in 

 1878 at Petoskey, Mich. Here the persecuted birds had gathered in 

 old-time numbers, driven out from roosts and nestings in other places. 

 The nesting was said to have been 28 to 40 miles in length and 3 to 10 

 miles in width. Professor Roney (1879), who visited the nesting at 

 the time of the slaughter, thus describes it : 



Scarcely a tree could be seen but contained from 5 to 50 nests, according to its 

 size and branches. Directed by the noise of chopping and of falling trees, we 

 followed on, and soon came upon the scene of action. Here was a large force 

 of Indians and boys at work, slashing down the timber and seizing the young 

 birds as they fluttered from the nest. As soon as caught, the heads were jerked 

 off from the tender bodies with the hand, and the dead birds tossed into heaps. 

 Others knocked the young fledglings out of the nests with long poles. 



The Indians were paid a cent apiece for the slain. "Within 100 

 rods of the nests, instead of 2 miles away as the law prescribed, netters 

 were hard at work, one taking 984 birds in a single day. He saw 

 men going about close to the nesting, shooting the birds as they 

 roosted in rows on the branches and passed in clouds overhead. 

 Scores of dead pigeons were left on the ground to decay, and the 

 woods were full of wounded ones, while many of the squabs, deprived 

 of their parents, starved to death. It is a terrible picture of cruelty 

 and greed. 



Roney (1879) adds: 



For many weeks the railroad shipments averaged fifty barrels of dead birds 

 per day — thirty to forty dozen old birds and about fifty dozen squabs being 

 packed in a barrel. Allowing 500 birds to a barrel, and averaging the entire 

 shipments for the season at 25 barrels per day, we find the railroad shipments 

 to have been 12,500 dead birds daily, or 1,500,000 for the summer. Of live birds 

 there were shipped 1,116 crates, six dozen per crate, or 80,352 birds. These 

 were railroad shipments only and not including the cargoes by steamer from 



