36 THE PASSENGER PIGEON IN PENNSYLVANIA 



several birds. From right to left, :is far as the eye 

 could reach, the breadth of this vast procession reach- 

 ed, seeming everywhere equally crowded. Curious to 

 determine how long this appearance would continue, 

 I sat down, wath my watch in hand at 1 :30 p. m., for 

 more than an hour, but instead of diminution of this 

 prodigious procession, it seemed rather to increase 

 both in numbers and rapidity of flight; anxious to 

 reach Frankfort before night, I rose and went on. 

 About 4 o'clock that afternoon, I crossed the Kentucky 

 river, at the town of Frankfort, at which time the 

 living torrent above my head seemed as numerous and 

 as extensive as ever. The great breadth of front which 

 this mighty multitude preserved would seem to intimate 

 a corresponding breadth of their breeding place, which 

 several gentlemen who had lately passed through part 

 of it, told me was several miles wide, and they esti- 

 mated about forty miles long, in which every tree was 

 absolutely loaded wnth nests of young birds. 



''The nesting was begun abgut April 10th and all 

 the birds left by the end of May. The appearance of 

 large detached bodies of them in the air, and the var- 

 ious evolutions they display, are strikingly picturesque 

 and interesting. In descending the Ohio by myself in 

 February, I often rested on my oars to contemplate 

 their aerial manoeuvres. A column, eight or ten miles 

 in length, would appear from Kentucky, high in the 

 air, steering over to Indiana. The leaders would some- 

 times gradually vary their course, until it formed a 

 large bend of more than a mile in (^i:ameter, those be- 



