182 THE PASSENGER PIGEON IN PENNSYLVANIA 



v/ho have never seen them that they were here — and, 

 as the old men say, "they darkened the sun". One 

 dark afternoon when the writer was travehng home- 

 ward on "501," an old man with keen eyes, an 

 eagle's nose and a long white beard, got into the train 

 at Liverpool, Dauphin County, the thought arose, 

 "He has seen the pigeons fly." How he wished that 

 he might become acquainted with such a man, for he 

 had lived in the golden age of Pennsylvania, to para- 

 phrase the Ancient Bard who "sang of wolves, and 

 roes, and elks", in days of flat topped bronze barked 

 original white pines, of panthers, of wolves, of wild 

 pigeons — yes, zvild pigeons, whose flights literally 

 darkened the sun. Oh God eternal, to have lived in 

 such days, before man conquered nature in "Penn's 

 Woods" and turned it from a Sylvan Paradise to a 

 smoky, manufacturing Commonwealth. Today, on the 

 horizon, the smoke of her factories and mills literally 

 darkens the sun. Will the pigeon cloud ever return, 

 that purple mass, flying low in precise battalions, 

 headed for death and destruction? And to look at 

 those calm old men, eagle visaged and bearded, and to 

 think what they have seen, of the obstacles that they 

 have been through, is but to feel that one is, in the 

 words of William Morris, "An idle singer of an empty 

 day." 



Despite the prodigality of their nesting opera- 

 tions, there is as far as known, not a single Passenger 

 Pigeon's nest in any collection today. Dr. B. H. War- 

 ren, the brilliant author of "Birds of Pennsvlvania". 



