52 From Magazines, &c. [isfXiy 



to which the Pigeons were attracted by imitation of their call 

 or by the voices of captive mates serving as decoys. By 1870 

 the netters had much increased in numbers. The register book 

 of Pigeoners in Wisconsin lists some five hundred names of 

 persons engaged in this unholy trafitic at about this time. The 

 business of locating, killing, and marketing the birds was now 

 thoroughly systematized, and assumed ominous proportions. 

 Invading the winter home of the flocks, which so far had escaped 

 their marauding expeditions, the Pigeoners raided through the 

 cold seasons. Tracking the birds to the breeding range, they con- 

 tinued their nefarious operations in the great nestings, sparing 

 neither the brooding mates nor their young. The unfortunately 

 merely reminiscent accounts of some of the active participants 

 in the forays of those days were brought together by Mershon in 

 his valuable book on the Passenger Pigeon. . . . The netters 

 describe the remunerative business they followed, and frequently 

 give estimates of the seasonal yield. Averaging these fairly 

 reliable data, we find that the catch for the decade 1866-1876 

 amounted to more than 10,000,000 Pigeons per year. This number 

 represents shipments only. The birds used in the camps, those 

 taken by farmers and Indians, and the vast numbers killed 

 accidentally in the overcrowded rookeries, probably exceeded 

 2,000,000 more. Excepting a negligible quantity of squabs, these 

 12,000,000 were brooding birds, and their death involved that 

 of the nestlings. This annual and terrific loss suffered by the race, 

 made irreparable by the break in the sequence of generations due 

 to the fiendish destruction of the young, swiftly led to the in- 

 evitable end. . . . 



" A small number of birds outlived the dissolution of the last 

 flocks. Dispersed in couples, in bands of five or more, or as 

 solitary individuals, these were sighted at rare intervals throughout 

 the former breeding range during the nineties. A dozen or so 

 bred near the head-waters of the Au Sable River in 1896. It is 

 the last known nesting. With the beginning of the new century 

 trustworthy records cease, and there is but little doubt that its 

 first years witnessed the passing away of the hapless descendants 

 of a favoured race." 



Albert Hazen Wright contributes to Bird-Lore some historical 

 records of the Passenger Pigeon, indicating the almost incredible 

 size of the flocks in the days when the birds were but little 

 persecuted. The early colonists of America speak of the Pigeons 

 on migration as having darkened the sky like locusts ; there were 

 "millions and millions of birds." In the Pigeon-roosts the sight 

 was wonderful. The boughs of the trees were often broken down 

 by the weight of the nests built upon them. Two hundred birds 

 were taken from a single tree. E. H. Forbush writes of the last 

 Passenger Pigeon — a female. Stories, the author states, have 

 been pubhshed to the effect that the Pigeons migrated to South 

 America or Austraha. The absurdity of the assertion as regards 

 Australia, at least, is sufticiently apparent. The story of the 



