Birds of a Smoky City 17 



the Lincoln Park statue of the Indian pony and rider, and for 

 three weeks of one spring month a wild wood duck rested on 

 the waters of a pond in the park and showed its brilliant 

 plumage to thousands of visitors. 



It is to Lincoln Park that I owe the first chance since boy- 

 hood of seeing a living passenger pigeon. There are men of 

 middle age to-day who remember when the flocks of wild 

 pigeons darkened the sun, and when every gun in the land 

 brought down its share, and more than its share, of the crea- 

 tures that flew low and blindly to their destruction. There 

 were so many millions of the birds forty years ago that no 

 one dreamed that the day would come within a generation 

 when a single pigeon sitting on a tree in a city park might 

 be thought to be the last of its race. No satisfactory expla- 

 nation has ever been given for the disappearance of the pas- 

 senger pigeon. To-day it is well-nigh as rare as the great 

 auk, and the reported occurrence of one of the birds in any 

 part of the country is a matter of scientific interest. 



The pigeon that I met on that April morning in the year 

 1894, in Lincoln Park, was perched on the limb of a soft 

 maple and was facing the rising sun. It was a male bird in 

 perfect plumage. There were no trees between him and the 

 lake to break the sun's rays from his breast. Every feather 

 shone, and the bird's neck was gem-like in its brilliancy. 

 Tennyson needed no special poetic license to write of the 

 "Burnished dove." I watched the pigeon through a glass 

 for fully ten minutes. A park loiterer approached and said 

 he wished that he had a gun ; that it was the first wild pigeon 

 he had seen in thirty years. That man had no soul above 

 pigeon pie. 



A city park is not the safest resting-place for a creature 



