48 THE PASSENGER PIGEON IN PENNSYLVANIA 



Their migrations usually required about two weeks for 

 getting started upon the next nesting enterprise. When 

 the young birds left their nests they were extremely 

 fat, and their flesh delicious, only, as every one ate 

 pigeons all day, and every day, they palled upon the 

 taste, and campers soon began to look upon squabs as 

 rather coarse and common fare. However, everybody 

 was ready to eat squabs again when the birds returned. 



The controversies over the questions in regard to 

 whether a single egg, or two eggs, constituted the pro- 

 duction for each nest and each incubation were a great 

 surprise to most men of experience in the nesting col- 

 onies of passenger pigeons. It was the common know- 

 ledge, among both white and red men, that the hen 

 bird should lay two eggs for a setting; but very often 

 she delayed, too long, the work of building a nest, and 

 an egg would be dropped while she wove the materials 

 that her mate brought together. In case of such ac- 

 cident one egg only would remain for that nest, and 

 the others that had lost an egg in such manner. Often 

 nests were precipitated to the ground by the wind, and 

 another hastily built upon each location, where one egg 

 would be laid and incubated alone. Under the trees, 

 during the first days after nest building started, there 

 were thousands of eggs testifying plainly to these cas- 

 ualities. 



William Hazen, a Civil War veteran, who resides 

 at Roulette, Potter .county, Pennsylvania, remembers 

 going to the nesting colony, in 1860, upon Parker Run, 

 Liberty township, McKean county, to cut down the 



