FIELD AND STUDY 



them, and vocal with their soft, childlike calls; or 

 all day the sky would be streaked with the long 

 lines or dense masses of the moving armies. The last 

 great flight of them that I ever beheld was on the 

 10th of April, 1875, when, for the greater part of the 

 day, one could not at any moment look skyward 

 above the Hudson River Valley without seeing 

 several flocks, great and small, of the migrating 

 birds. But that spectacle was never repeated as it 

 had been for generations before. The pigeons never 

 came back. Death and destruction, in the shape of 

 the greed and cupidity of man, were on their trail. 

 The hosts were pursued from State to State by pro- 

 fessional pot-hunters and netters, and the numbers 

 so reduced, and their flocking instinct so disorgan- 

 ized, that their vast migrating bands disappeared, 

 and they were seen only in loosely scattered and 

 diminishing flocks in different parts of the West 

 during the remainder of the century. A friend of 

 mine shot a few in Indiana in the early eighties, and 

 scattered bands of them have occasionally been re- 

 ported, here and there, up to within a few years. The 

 last time that my eyes beheld a passenger pigeon 

 was in the fall of 1876 when I was out for grouse. 

 I saw a solitary cock sitting in a tree. I killed it, 

 little dreaming that, so far as I was concerned, I was 

 killing the last pigeon. 



What man now in his old age who witnessed in 

 youth that spring or fall festival and migration of 



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