MISCELLANEOUS BIRDS. 235 



teen inches. The Passenger Pigeon is eminently a gregarious and 

 migratory species, known particularly for its great swiftness of 

 flight, and the immense size of the companies found feeding 

 together. Their favorite food seems to be beech mast, acorns and 

 other soft shelled nuts, and where these are plenty, the pigeons 

 congregate at early morning and feed during the day, retiring to 

 the pine woods to pass the night. Their roosts when discovered 

 are resorted to at night by men and boys, armed with guns and 

 clubs, and the birds who sit packed tightly together are slaughtered 

 in countless numbers, till all the hunters loaded down with their 

 grain bags full of the birds, cease their murderous onslaughts from 

 sheer fatigue. 



Until disturbed the birds return nightly to the same roost as 

 long as the mast in the neighborhood is plenty. Suddenly they 

 all disappear, and are seen no more until the following fall. The 

 wild cherries are, while they last, eagerly sought by the pigeons, 

 and large bags are made by sitting beneath these trees and shoot- 

 ing at the incoming flocks. 



At this season of the year the Alleghany Mountains are literally 

 alive with them, and from morn to eve, nothing in the best local- 

 ities can be heard but the sharp crack of rifles and the heavier 

 sound of shot guns. Every one seems to be impressed with the 

 idea that he must make the finest bag of the season, and conse- 

 quently every one who can procure a gun, no matter of what 

 kind, sallies forth to wage an indiscriminate war upon the 

 poor pigeons that have visited the hills and valleys to feed upon 

 the acorns and wild cherries which are found in the greatest pro- 

 fusion on the top of the Alleghanies in a strip of country called the 

 Glades. These Glades are open spaces devoid of trees in the 

 midst of unbroken forests covered by tall grass and alder bushes ; 

 they extend for perhaps fifty miles on top of the mountains, and 

 are from fifteen to twenty miles in breadth. This section of the 

 countiy seems to be the favorite ground for pigeons in the fall of 

 the year. At early morning to sit in these glades and shoot at the 

 flocks as one by one they arrive from their nesting places affords 

 fine sport, and is altogether the most pleasant way of hunting these 

 birds. 



Thousands are caught alive by means of clap-nets, and they 



