GREAT AMERICAN PIGEON-ROOSTS. 389 



tales of the vast flights of pigeons that used to be seen 

 in North America a generation or two ago, seem 

 now-a-days almost to pass the bounds of credibility were 

 it not that they are recounted by such undoubted 

 authority. 



This pigeon (Columba Migratorid), *'the passenger 

 pigeon " of American ornithologists, unfortunately was 

 an instance of the wilderness tribe which shuns the 

 society of man, so that now-a-days it is comparatively 

 scarce and rare. It was one of the most beautiful of 

 all the pigeon tribe ; all the colours of the rainbow 

 being exhibited in the highest perfection on its glossy 

 plumage. These were principally shades of grey, 

 bronze-green, purple-green, and colours like that of 

 the opal. Great accounts of the wonderful American 

 pigeon-roosts of former days are to be found in Wilson's 

 American Ornithology, * and other works. We must 

 however confine ourselves to a few short specimens of 

 such cases, extracted from recent books; but we may 

 mention that we have ourselves seen enormous assemblages 

 of these birds; consisting of flights which, without 

 exaggeration, may be said to have literally darkened 

 the sky during their passage ; and where some of these 

 flights alighted upon a farmer's field, as the settlers 

 expressed it, as they rose again it looked as if the 

 field itself was taking flight, f One of the accounts 



* See American Ornithology, by Alexr. Wilson and Prince Charles 

 Lucien Buonaparte, Edited by Sir Wm. Jardine, 1876. Vol. ii, pp. 195 

 to 209 ("The Passenger Pigeon.") 



| A couple of centuries ago they swarmed in such vast numbers and 

 committed such ravages upon the French settlers' crops, near Montreal, 

 in Canada, that it appears the Roman Catholic bishop of that place 

 went out to exorcise them, with Holy Water, as evil spirits: this is 

 gravely related in an ancient book of French travels ( Voyages du Baron 

 De La Hontan dans L'Amerique Septentrionale, Vol. i, pp. 93 and 95. 

 Amsterdam 1705). 



