502 



NA TUBA L HIS TOB Y. 



The Carolina, or common dove of the United States, is far better known 

 to us, distributed as it is over nearly the whole of the United States. Its 

 home is in the south, but each spring it migrates to the north, and some 

 even pass the winter in New England. The flocks arrive at their summer 

 home about the last of April or the first of May, and remain until October. 

 It is frequently called the mourning-dove from the melancholy character 

 of its cooing notes. 



Even more celebrated is the wild or passenger pigeon, which formerly 

 ranged over our country in vast flocks, but which has now become greatly 



reduced in numbers, 

 although it still 

 abounds in the more 

 newly settled locali- 

 ties. For a picture 

 of this bird as it 

 used to be, we must 

 refer to the older 

 writers on ornithol- 

 ogy, and of these 

 none has given a 

 more graphic account 

 than the father of 

 American bird-lore, 

 Alexander Wilson. They are remarkable for their migratory habits, and 

 their associating together in flocks so large that no man can begin to enu- 

 merate them. Single flocks have been seen which must have contained 

 hundreds of millions ! Speaking of what he had seen in Ohio, Kentucky, 

 and Indiana, "Wilson says : " These fertile and extensive regions abound 

 with the nutritious beech-nut, which constitutes the chief food of the wild 

 pigeon. In seasons when these nuts are abundant, corresponding numbers 

 of wild pigeons may be confidently expected. It sometimes happens that, 

 having consumed the whole product of the beech-trees in an extensive dis- 

 trict, they discover another at a distance of perhaps sixty or eighty miles, 

 to which they regularly repair every morning, and return as regularly in 

 the course of the day, or in the evening, to the general place of rendezvous, 

 or, as it is usually called, the roosting-place. These roost ing-places are 

 always in the woods, and sometimes occupy a large extent of forest. 

 When they have frequented one of these places for some time, the appear- 

 ance it exhibits is surprising. The ground is covered to the depth 

 of several inches with their dung ; all the tender grass and underwood 

 destroyed ; the surface strewed with large limbs of trees broken down 



Fig. 419. — Passenger-pigeon [Ectopistes migrator id). 



