188 THE PASSENGER PIGEON IN PENNSYLVANIA 



was to find the nest, telegraph to C. F. Hodge, a 

 naturalist of Clark University, and to await the find- 

 ings of ornithologists whom he would immediately 

 despatch to the scene to investigate the genuineness 

 of the find. The Audubon Societies received on an 

 average 100 false alarms a year, but in not a single 

 case was the nest reported found to be a wild pigeon's. 

 Instead, almost every nest w^as found to be that of 

 an ordinary turtle dove. The wald pigeon resembles 

 the ordinary wild dove but is considerably larger. 



The extinction of the wild pigeon tribe was the 

 more amazing because of the vast extent to which it 

 had flourished in this country prior to 1865. Wild 

 passenger pigeons used to travel over the country by 

 millions. Audubon himself told of their roosting in 

 certain parts of Kentucky in territory covering a 

 space of three to five miles wide and forty miles long, 

 which was almost literally hidden by them. Hundreds 

 of farmers, he tells, used to camp on the outside of 

 the vast roosting pigeon host and shoot them by 

 the thousands from the edge of their resting place. 

 The birds were fed by thousands to the farmers' hogs 

 after each night's killing. 



The slaughter raged for years with nets, traps and 

 guns, and by 1884 there were very few of the wild 

 pigeons seen in the country. Several years ago they 

 had dwindled down to a few specimens left in cap- 

 tivity in ]\lilwaukee and in the Cincinnati Zoo. 

 M.artha's mate died about four years ago, and though 

 a prize of $1,000 w^as offered for anv one who could 



