Recollections of the Passenger Pigeon 



By Mr. John Burroughs 



HE last great flight of the Passenger Pigeons up the Hudson River 

 valley was in April, 1875, when they flew all day. There was 

 hardly an hour during the day when one on looking up could 

 not see a great cloud of these birds going north. In my boyhood 

 days, nearly every time we had a flight of Passenger Pigeons they nested in 

 the Neversink Valley of the Catskill Mountains. They did not come every 

 year, but would usually come every beechnut year, as they fed largely upon 

 beechnuts. They used to nest in the valley of the Neversink about thirty- 

 five miles from the Hudson River. They nested in trees for miles in extent, 

 and everybody that had a gun would go in there and shoot the breeding birds. 

 I was never there myself, but I have talked with others who have been 

 there and they said there would be a perfect fusilade, reminding one of a 

 field of battle. The female would sit until noon and then the male would 

 come and relieve her and the hunters would get a chance to shoot both male 

 and female; but the birds used to go right on taking care of their young as 

 if nobody was there, but hundreds and thousands of nests were broken up 

 and destroyed. This went on for a great many years and during that time 

 the birds used to spread all over the country for food, ranging for twenty 

 miles or more. There was such a number of them that they had to go a 

 great distance at times to find a sufficient food supply, and they frequently 

 came through Roxbury, Delaware County, where I lived. 



From 1844 to i860 I used to see them come at certain times in the 

 spring and fall in vast numbers, but always in greater numbers in the spring 

 than in the fall. In the fall they would come in small flocks to the buck- 

 wheat fields and hover around the beech woods where we used to hunt 

 for them, but the great flights always took place in the spring when 

 millions of them could be seen. I have seen the sky literally covered with 

 Pigeons. You could not look up at any time without seeing a gre_at mass 

 of them sweeping across the sky. They would stop and feed in the beech 

 woods wherever the snow was off, and the hunters used to net them. After 

 baiting them and getting them to coming to a certain spot they would set 

 their nets and would build bough-houses where they could hide, with a rope 

 running from the net to the hiding-place, and they used to catch thousands 

 in this way; yes, I suppose tens of thousands. I have heard it said that they 

 would sometimes get their nets over so many Pigeons that the birds would 



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