THE PASSENGER PIGEON IN PENNSYLVANIA 177 



the afternoons in the seventies, in company with 

 W. W. Atterbury, now Brigadier General and head 

 of the American Military Railways in France, he used 

 to go up on Wopsononock, the high mountain north 

 of Altoona, to watch the wild pigeons coming 

 back to their roosts. ''They made a louder noise than 

 the heaviest freight train", he avers, and from that we 

 can imagine the immensity of their numbers. William 

 Collins, a veteran Pennsylvania Railroad employee at 

 Altoona, has related in a bulletin issued by the rail- 

 road, that on a certain occasion in the '70's, the wild 

 pigeons were so numerous in the country between 

 Kane and Sargeant, Pa., that they broke down the rail- 

 road telegraph line for a distance of eleven poles by 

 lighting up and flying against the wires. The birds 

 kept the line out of commission for several days. Daniel 

 Ott, the old Snyder County pioneer, who died in 1916, 

 aged 96 years, tells of netting and killing 1.300 wild 

 pigeons in a single day. Ke killed them by crushing 

 their skulls with his thumbs ; he killed so many that 

 bis fingers became so sore he had to desist, then he 

 crushed the skulls with his teeth until his teeth 

 became loose. Women came up from neighboring 

 cabins to beg a few birds to fertilize their sweet-pea 

 beds, claiming that the male birds, with their ruby 

 breasts gave a deeper color to the ''posies". Here is 

 a case which seems to mean "out of death comes life; 

 out of decay comes beauty". James A\ Bennett, lead- 

 ing builder, of Williamsport, in his youth was a 

 famous pigeon trapper. As the birds became scarce 



