Volo | General Notes. S7 
Destruction of Passenger Pigeons in Arkansas.— My friend, Mr. 
C. A. Willett of Hammond, La., sends me an interesting account of the 
destruction of Passenger Pigeons by a forest fire. Some years ago he 
was accustomed to board with Mr. and Mrs. Robert Booth of Garner, 
Arkansas. Mr. Booth was a great hunter and knew the country well. 
“Many a time,” writes Mr. Willett, “‘ he told me of the Wild Pigeons and 
how they filled the woods and he always insisted very positively that they 
all burned up. Mr. Booth died a few years ago but Mrs. Booth is still 
living. His story was as follows: 
“Near Hickory Plains, Arkansas, some eight miles east of Beebe, White 
County, Ark., there was in the early days, a large pigeon roost. The 
timber, where the roost was, was all broken down from the weight of the 
birds that used it; the ground covered with litter, limbs, dry grass, dead 
trees, brush, ete. You can imagine what a hot fire such a place must have 
made. The weight of the birds was such that large trees had the branches 
stripped off them, and only the trunk was left standing, others were all 
split to pieces. All the big timber in this roost had been broken down. 
When hunters wanted pigeons in that section, they were in the habit of 
going to the roost at night and with guns, clubs, and poles, knocked down 
all they wanted. 
“On this fatal night a party of hunters accidentally set fire to the woods, 
burning out the roost with all the pigeons. There was so much litter upon 
the ground that the fire burned an entire week. Pigeons would begin to 
come to the roost along about two o’clock in the afternoon, and keep it up 
until dark. They poured into that fire by the hundreds, keeping it up all 
week while that roost was burning. The ground was alive with naked 
pigeons that had the feathers singed off them, but which eventually died 
and ever since that fire there have been no more wild pigeons in Arkansas, 
so Mr. Booth positively insisted, and he was a hunter who was in the woods 
all the time, and when he was eighty years old, still had perfect eyesight 
and could read a paper without glasses. 
“Now, I asked Mrs. Booth the last time I saw her, when this fire oc- 
curred. She said that they moved onto their farm in 1877, and as it now 
seems to her, they must have lived on it, before the roost burned, some- 
thing like a year or two. This, as she figured it, would put the fire 
around the year 1879, but she is not positive as to this date. 
“T think these facts should be investigated —the time this roost burned, 
for burn it did, the extent of the roost, and the date of the fire, all of which 
can no doubt be ascertained pretty accurately if some of the old settlers 
are still alive and no doubt some are.” 
This account seems worthy of publication and investigation by those 
who are in a position to secure more details of the catastrophe-— Pau. 
Bartscu, U.S. National Museum, Washington, D.C. 
American Goshawks in Kansas.— Eastern Kansas is being honored 
this fall by a visit from a flight of these beautiful hawks. The only other 
