CHAPTER VII. 

 PIGEONS. 



WOOD PIGEONS, AND THE CASE AGAINST THEM. 



IT must sometimes have occurred to any thoughtful person 

 to wonder what heights the discontent of the British farmer 

 would reach, were his mild northern plagues changed for 

 some of those which scourge his fellow- subjects and kinsmen 

 elsewhere ! 



He strains at a gnat in, let us say, the shape of a turnip- 

 fly, while his brown-skinned brothers are swallowing that 

 camel the locust ; he grumbles profusely if an " emmet " or 

 two gets into the dairy milk-pans, yet were he translated into 

 a Hindoo grazier, dairy and cattle-sheds I had almost added 

 crockery itself would crumble to dust before white ants ; 

 and what are cattle flies to tarantulas, scorpions, leeches, or 

 mosquitos ? Even pheasants swarming out to his barley 

 fields are better than a score of wild pigs in a corn-croft; 

 and, lastly, though our comparisons are not exhausted, 

 what loss has he to complain of due to the amiable cushat 

 compared to the havoc the passenger pigeon commits in 

 America ? 



There he might be visited day after day by a solid column 

 of birds " a mile broad, by two hundred and fifty miles long," 

 as Wilson cheerfully expresses it ; he might own their breeding- 

 grounds, a wooded range of mountains where every spruce 

 bent under the weight of nests, where the ground was white 

 as though covered with snow for miles with the pigeons' 



