PASSENGER PIGEON. 255 



a straight line across the country for a great way. Not far from 

 Shelbyville in the state of Kentucky, about five years ago, there was 

 one of these breeding places, which stretched through the woods in 

 nearly a north and south direction, was several miles in breadth, and 

 was said to be upwards of forty miles in extent ! In this tract almost 

 every tree was furnished with nests, wherever the branches could 

 accommodate them. The Pigeons made their first appearance there 

 about the tenth of April, and left it altogether, with their young, before 

 the twenty-fifth of May. 



As soon as the young were fully grown, and before they left the 

 nests, numerous parties of the inhabitants, from all parts of the adjacent 

 country, came with wagons, axes, beds, cooking utensils, many of them 

 accompanied by the greater part of their families, and encamped for 

 several days at this immense nursery. Several of them informed me, 

 that the noise in the woods was so great as to terrify their horses, and 

 that it was difficult for one person to hear another speak without bawl- 

 ing in his ear. The ground was strewed with broken limbs of trees, 

 eggs, and squab Pigeons, which had been precipitated from above, and 

 on which herds of hogs were fattening. Hawks, Buzzards, and Eagles, 

 were sailing about in great numbers, and seizing the squabs from their 

 nests at pleasure ; while from twenty feet upwards to the tops of the 

 trees the view through the woods presented a perpetual tumult of crowd- 

 ing and fluttering multitudes of Pigeons, their wings roaring like 

 thunder ; .mingled with the frequent crash of falling timber ; for now 

 the axe-men were at work cutting down those trees that seemed to be 

 most crowded with nests ; and contrived to fell them in such a manner, 

 that in their descent they might bring down several others ; by which 

 means the falling of one large tree sometimes produced two hundred 

 squabs, little inferior in size to the old ones, and almost one mass of 

 fat. On some single trees upwards of one hundred nests were found, 

 each containing one young only, a circumstance in the history of this 

 bird not generally known to naturalists. It was dangerous to walk 

 under these flying and fluttering millions, from the frequent fall of 

 large branches, broken down by the weight of the multitudes above, 

 and which in their descent often destroyed numbers of the birds them- 

 selves ; while the clothes of those engaged in traversing the Avoods Avere 

 completely covered with the excrements of the Pigeons. 



These circumstances were related to me by many of the most respect- 

 able part of the community in that quarter ; and were confirmed in 

 part by what I myself witnessed. I passed for several miles through 

 this same breeding place, where every tree was spotted with nests, the 

 remains of those above described. In many instances, I counted 

 upwards of ninety nests on a single tree ; but the Pigeons had aban- 

 doned this place for another, sixty or eighty miles oif, towards Green 



