December 30, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



959 



The family home in western-central Dubuque 

 County stood just west of the woodland belt 

 extending to the Mississippi, and some four 

 miles east of the woodland belt skirting the 

 Maquoqueta; the two wooded areas converg- 

 ing somewhat northward, so that the vernal 

 flights may have been somewhat concentrated. 

 The pigeons appeared regularly every spring 

 (in the sixties and early seventifes) about the 

 time of wheat sowing; most farmers aiming 

 to postpone the sowing until after the pigeon 

 migration. Ordinarily the flights extended 

 over two or three days or even more, though 

 the chief movement usually occurred during 

 a single day. The flocks commonly appeared 

 over the southern horizon as dark, moving 

 bands, one after another at intervals of a few 

 minutes, quickly resolving themselves into 

 myriads of birds flying northward at a height 

 of a hundred or a hundi-ed and fifty feet, at 

 the rate of, say, sixty miles an hour; an aver- 

 age flock was, say, a hundred yards in width 

 from front to rear and half that height, fre- 

 quently extending eastward over the wood- 

 lands and westward far as the eye could reach, 

 nearly or quite to the Maquoqueta groves 

 four miles away; the closeness of the flight 

 being such that a flock obscured or even con- 

 cealed the sun during its passage and cast a 

 definite shadow which might be seen to move 

 over the ground like that of a cloud — such 

 that the random discharge of a shotgun or 

 even a rifle upward usually brought down a 

 number of birds. When fired into the sound 

 of the myriad wings changed from a sort of 

 shrill roar into thunderous tumult, both 

 sounds being distinctive and easily remem- 

 bered. The flocks were always irregular in 

 width and height, occasionally thinning out 

 or even separating into a phalanx of fairly 

 distinct flocks maintaining about the same 

 height and rate of movement in the same 

 latitudinal line; but the large flocks were al- 

 ways the more extended at right angles to the 

 line of flight, though those of only a few 

 thousand birds preceding or following the 

 main flights were longer front to rear, some- 

 times tailing out in irregular lines of strag- 



glers evidently unable to keep up with those 

 of greater strength. The large flocks seldom 

 alighted; and though the main flights com- 

 monly occurred between midforenoon and 

 midafternoon, they sometimes continued into 

 the night, when the passage was marked by 

 the rustling, whistling roar of wings audible 

 for some minutes before and after the actual 

 passage of each flock. The smaller flocks 

 frequently settled either to rest for a time or 

 to feed in the woodlands; they first alighted 

 on trees, often in such numbers that the 

 branches were bent and frequently broken by 

 their weight, and generally after resting a 

 fraction of a minute flew down individually 

 to the ground in search of acorns and other 

 mast. When startled, they arose from trees 

 and ground with a roar of wings audible for 

 miles, while if not frightened by hunters or 

 otherwise they arose more gradually and in 

 the course of a quarter or half an hour were 

 gone. Over the prairie between the wood- 

 lands the flocks were never seen to alight save 

 now and then on a wheat field; even here all 

 were never on the ground at once, but the 

 flight, as it were, rolled over the field, the 

 birds in the lead alighting to scratch out and 

 pick up the newly-sown wheat, and then arise 

 as the body of the flock passed over them to 

 again fly to the front and repeat the process, 

 so that each was a part of the time in the air 

 and a part on the ground — and the entire 

 field was robbed of its seed within a few 

 minutes. Chiefly because of their avidity for 

 wheat, partly because of their injury to trees 

 by breaking branches, the pigeons were 

 deemed a pest; yet no local defense was em- 

 ployed save that of energetic shooting into 

 the flocks, killing a few hundreds annually 

 which were used for food, and frightening 

 the rest. There were no pigeon roosts or 

 rookeries anywhere in the countryside, though 

 on two or three occasions the early flights 

 encountered storms and harbored for a few 

 days at a time in the woodlands, where in at 

 least one case many died. Such are merely 

 the commonplace facts of the vernal migra- 

 tions of the passenger pigeon in a representa- 

 tive locality — facts such as those observed 



