416 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 



betake themselves farther south, where the ground is bare all winter. 

 Not one of them remains in Canada throughout the winter; but they 

 generally spend this season in the vast forests of the Illinois, who 

 live at about the same latitude as Pennsylvania and Virginia. They 

 do not willingly migrate toward the seaboard, where the country 

 has been extensively cultivated by the English, and the forests are 

 much cut down; partly because they can not there secure a sufficient 

 food supply, and partly to avoid running the risk of getting killed 

 by the number of people and gunners in that section. They prefer 

 the vast and dense forests in the interior of the country, where there 

 are no human habitations for many miles around. But should it 

 happen during a certain year that there is a failure of the crop of 

 acorns or other food suitable for them, or an unusually severe winter 

 with great snowfall sets in, which to some extent covers the ground, 

 then they are forced to leave their usual winter quarters and seek 

 their way to the English settlements down the seaboard. It is on 

 these occasions that they swarm into Pennsylvania in such enor- 

 mous numbers; but as soon as the weather changes a little and be- 

 comes milder, they again retire farther inland. Here they remain 

 until the last snow disappears in the spring. 



As the snow gradually melts away in the spring the pigeons migrate 

 farther and farther north and when northern Canada is free from 

 snow, which generally occurs toward the end of April or the beginning 

 of May, the pigeons arrive in their old haunts and commence their 

 mating, nesting, hatching of eggs, and the rearing of their young, etc. 



The French in Canada, who annually catch a number of young 

 pigeons alive which they thereafter rear at their homes, have taken 

 much pains to tame these birds, although with but little success. 

 It is very easy, when they are kept in suitable quarters, to make them 

 so tame as to feed from one's hands, in the manner of any other 

 domesticated pigeon; but as soon as they are let out into the open 

 hardly a few days pass before they fly away to the woods, nevermore 

 to return. It was, however, emphatically asserted that some had 

 succeeded in taming them to the same extent as the domesticated 

 pigeons. 



As they fly in great flocks and keep close together, whether on 

 the wing, on the ground, or in the trees, so poor a marksman as to 

 fail to make a hit is difficult to find. Several persons told me that 

 a man who lived at Schenectady, between Albany and Col. John- 

 son's farm, had killed 150 of these birds with two discharges of bird- 

 shot, and in Canada there are said to have been several cases where 

 130 had been killed in a single shot. 



Their flesh is a delight to the epicure, and especially is the meat 

 of the young pigeons scarcely second in delicacy to that of any other 

 bird. 



