loo The Passenger Pigeon 



This may be set down as accurate or nearly so, and 

 1,500,000 will cover the total destruction of birds by 

 net, gun and Indians. The total number of nesting 

 squabs taken by the Indians would not reach 100,000 

 and not over fifty barrels of these ever reached a market, 

 the Indians smoking the remainder for winter use. No 

 one knows how many birds 1,500,000 are until they 

 see them, and handle a few. As an illustration : To buy 

 and sell 125,000 birds in four months, it took myself, 

 two men and a boy all our time, working from daylight 

 until after dark every day. 



I doubt if there were a billion birds in all the 

 Crooked and Maple nestings. I am certain that there 

 were not at any one time. I am also certain that more 

 than double as many young birds left those nestings 

 than all the birds caught, killed or destroyed. The 

 morning that the Crooked nesting broke, I was out at 

 daylight, and at the net to see and help one of my men 

 make a strike; for an hour and a half a continuous 

 body of birds half a mile wide and very thick was 

 going out; our strike was twenty-nine dozen, twenty- 

 five dozen young and four dozen old, about the same 

 proportion as the other catchers. This showed that of 

 the immense body over five-sixths were young birds, 

 barely old enough ones remaining to guide the body of 

 young, and this was out of the nesting from which the 

 bulk of the birds had been caught, where the destruction 

 had been the greatest. When it is considered that the 



