243 The long flight back 



$60,000, "all made in that business." (H. B. Roney in Chicago 

 Field. 1879.) 



Schorger states that a precipitous decline in numbers took place 

 between 1871 and 1880. Through the 1890s the once great flocks 

 dwindled to nothing, and by 1900 only a few pallid captives sur- 

 vived. There have been many reasons advanced for the rapid de- 

 mise biological "defects/' inbreeding, disease, the cutting of the 

 mast-bearing forests, fires, etc. but the record of their slaughter 

 for the market speaks for itself. Schorger writes (1955): 



Judged from the standpoint of numbers, the pigeon was 

 enormously successful in its way of life. Failure to change its 

 habits cannot be laid to stupidity without assuming that most 

 of the surviving species have a higher order of intelligence. 

 The greater number of the passerines chanced to develop a 

 mode of life that rendered survival fairly simple after the ad- 

 vent of Europeans. Very many of our game birds, shore birds, 

 and waterfowl would today be extinct, or near extinction, were 

 it not for coddling through refuges and protective laws. . . . 

 [And further along:] Every species of animal is doomed to ex- 

 tinction when it fails to produce sufficient young to equal the 

 inherent annual losses. This the pigeon was not permitted to 

 do. [Moritz] Fischer estimated that nearly 12,000,000 brooding 

 pigeons met their death during the decade 1866-1876. This 

 represented a high loss of nestlings. It is certain, assuming the 

 correctness of his figures, that the loss would exceed 6,000,000 

 young. If both parents were taken, the young was doomed to die; 

 and if only one adult of a pair was captured, the lone parent 

 could not keep its young alive during the first few days after 

 hatching. His assumption that the number of squabs taken was 

 negligible missed the most potent cause of extinction. 



This attendant loss of young still in the nests was a major reason 

 for the rapid decline of the egrets in Florida, which was well under- 

 way during the 1880s and 1890s. The adults were shot and stripped 

 of the "scalp" of plumes (the entire skin of the back was ripped 

 off), and the neglected young perished of slow starvation. Since 

 much of the shooting took place at the rookeries themselves, the 



