58 THE ARCHITECTURE OP BIRDS. 



greater part of their families, and encamped for sev- 

 eral days at this immense nursery. Several of them 

 informed me that the noise in the woods was so 

 great as to terrify their horses, and that, in speaking, 

 it was difficult for one person to make another hear 

 without bawling in his ear. The ground was strewed 

 with broken limbs of trees, eggs, and young pigeons, 

 which had been precipitated from above, and on 

 which herds of hogs were fattening. Hawks, buz- 

 zards, and eagles were sailing about in great num- 

 bers, and seizing the young from their nest at pleas- 

 ure ; while, from twenty feet upward to the tops 

 of the trees, the view through the woods presented 

 -a perpetual tumult of crowding and fluttering multi- 

 tudes of pigeons, their wings roaring like thunder, 

 mingled with the frequent crash of falling timber ; 

 for now the axemen were at work cutting down 

 those trees that seemed to be most crowded with 

 nests, and contrived to fell them in such a manner 

 that in their descent they might bring down several 

 others ; by which means the falling of one large 

 tree sometimes produced two hundred young, little 

 inferior in size to the old ones, and almost one mass 

 of fat. On some single tree upward of one hundred 

 nests were found, each containing a single young 

 one only, a circumstance in the history of this bird 

 not generally known to naturalists. It was danger- 

 ous to walk under these flying and fluttering mil- 

 lions, from the frequent fall of large branches, broken 

 down by the weight of the multitudes above, and 

 which, in their descent, often destroyed numbers of 

 the birds themselves. 



" These circumstances were related to me by 

 many of the most respectable part of the community 

 in that quarter ; and were confirmed in part by what 

 I myself witnessed. I passed for several miles 

 through this same breeding-place, where every tree 

 was spotted with nests, the remains of those above 

 described. In many instances I counted upward of 



