Vol. xxxvm 



1920 



Fisher, In Memoriam: Lyman Belding. 35 



Pigeon was very common and its ete-tete-tete, as it rattled down 

 the acorns upon which it was feeding was delicious music to me. 

 I have seen many millions of pigeons in a single day in spring, 

 when, after their usual northern migration, they were driven back 

 by a cold storm. One morning early I was on Ross Hill near 

 Kingston looking for a deer, the tracks of which I had seen in the 

 snow the previous day. Soon after the sun appeared, millions and 

 millions of pigeons flew south over the valley. The flight con- 

 tinued into the afternoon when patches of bare ground began to 

 appear, affording feeding places for the birds. When driven south 

 by cold spring storms the north branch of the Susquehanna River 

 was a favorite route of travel. 



" Before I got a gun I often wandered in the woods, sometimes 

 getting home late in the evening, and on one occasion my parents 

 thinking me lost had looked in an open well and other places for me. 

 When I obtained a gun I was out early and late with it, and ne- 

 glected school, though I worked faithfully on our farm when the 

 crops needed me, except in the autumn when I would occasionally 

 steal away and go to the hills for chestnuts." This love of shooting 

 and of life in the woods and fields endured to the end. 



He went to Stockton in March, 1856, and of game seen here and 

 in other parts of California he says: "Game was abundant, in- 

 cluding elk, antelope, deer, bear, otter, quail, and waterfowl. Elk 

 have disappeared from the interior valleys of the State excepting a 

 drove on the Miller and Lux Ranch of forty thousand acres in the 

 San Joaquin Valley, and these animals are being captured and 

 distributed to various parks. The elk of this State inhabited 

 the tule marshes mainly, though I have seen many elk horns in the 

 Marysville Buttes, probably left there by elk which came from the 

 marshes of Butte Creek, and I have seen hundreds, if not thousands, 

 of elk horns on the border of the tule swamps north of Stockton. 

 Antelope have entirely disappeared from the Sacramento and San 

 Joaquin Valleys. I saw three in the latter valley a few miles west 

 of Princeton in the summer of 1870 and a single one in Lower 

 California about twenty-five miles south of Tia Juana in the spring 

 of 1887. Deer were mostly in the mountains, with a few along 

 the rivers where there were extensive thickets on bottom lands. 

 They will continue to be common with proper protection. Very 



