The Passenger Pigeon: Early Historical Records, 



1534-1860 



By ALBERT HAZEN WRIGHT 



A LMOST the only sources of ornithological knowledge of the earlier times 

 /\ in North America are historical annals, quaint narratives of explora- 

 tion, and travelers' sketches. Our predecessors had intense interest in 

 birds, now rare, near-extinct, or extinct. The flocking of the Passenger Pigeon, 

 or other habits equally peculiar, were in such bold relief, and so patent, as 

 to attract the attention of any layman, whatever his mission. Only a small 

 part of this mass of information from the contemporaries of the Pigeon can 

 be presented, and this resume can consider but a few topics, which are largely 

 clothed in the language of early observers. 



Migration. — The prodigious flights of these "millions of millions of birds" 

 have exhausted the numerical superlatives of the English tongue. "They 

 darkened the sky like locusts;" "the hemisphere was never entirely free of 

 them;" "all the pigeons of the world apparently passed in review;" "their 

 incredible multitudes were like thunder-clouds in heaven;" and countless other 

 figures, mixed and pure, have entered the history of their migrations. In the 

 early days, the writers apologized for such marvelous stories. John Clayton, 

 the early Virginian botanist (1688), remarked, "I am not fond of such Stories, 

 and had suppressed the relating of it, but that I have heard the same from 

 very many . . . the Relators being very sober Persons." Bernaby, in 1759, 

 felt that he must intrench himself, and asserted that "The accounts given of 

 their numbers are almost incredible; yet they are so well attested, and oppor- 

 tunities of proving the truth of them so frequent, as not to admit of their 

 being called in question." One of the Jesuit Fathers (1656) considered this 

 migration one of the three remarkable facts of the natural history of America. 

 LaHontan, in 1687, wrote, "that the Bishop had been forced to excommuni- 

 cate 'em oftner than once, . . ." The early colonists of New England 

 and Maryland often thought of them as ominous presages of approaching 

 disasters, like Indian massacres, crop failures, etc. It was an old observation 

 in America, whether true or not, that Pigeons were quite numerous in the 

 springs of sickly years. Several authors claimed that the Pigeons came north 

 in the spring by a route different from that of their return in the fall. "Wild 

 pigeons, in their passage northward, begin to appear in New England, end 

 of February and beginning of March, but not in large numbers, because they 

 travel more inland for the benefit of last autumn berries of several sorts in 

 the wilderness; they return in their passage southward, in larger quantities, 

 end of August ; . . . they at that season keep toward the plantations for the 

 benefit of their harvest" (Douglass, 1755). 



Two descriptions of their flights from eyewitnesses will suffice: "A gentle- 

 man of the town of Niagara assured me (Weld, 1795) that once, as he was 



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