The Last Passenger Pigeon 103 



all the most effective engines of slaughter known. Many times the birds were 

 so persecuted that they finally left their young to the mercies of the pigeon- 

 ers, and even when they remained most of the young were killed and sent 

 to the market and the adults were decimated. The average life of a Pigeon in 

 nature is possibly not over five years. The destruction of most of the young 

 birds for a series of years would bring about such a diminution of the species 

 as occurred soon after 1878. One egg was the complement for each nest. 

 Before the country was settled, while the birds were unmolested except by 

 Indians and other natural enemies, they bred in large colonies. This, in itself, 

 was a means of protection, and they probably doubled their numbers every 

 year by changing their nesting places two or three times yearly, and rear- 

 ing two or three young birds to each pair. Later, when all the resources of 

 civilized man were brought to bear against them, their very gregariousness, 

 which formerly protected them, now insured their destruction; and when 

 at last they were driven to the far North to breed, and scattered far and wide, 

 the death rate rapidly outran the birth rate. Wherever they settled to roost 

 or to nest, winter or summer, spring or fall, they were followed and destroyed 

 until, unable to raise young, they scattered over the country pursued every- 

 where, forming targets for millions of shot-guns, with no hope of safety save 

 in the vast northern wilderness, where the rigors of nature forbade them to 

 procreate. Thus they gradually succumbed to the inevitable and passed into 

 the unknown. Were it possible to obtain an accurate record of the receipts of 

 Pigeon shipments in the markets of the larger cities only from 1870 to 1895, 

 the enormous numbers sold and the gradual decrease in the sales would ex- 

 hibit, in the most graphic and convincing manner possible, the chief cause of 

 the passing of the Passenger Pigeon. 



Whils we have been wondering why the Pigeons disappeared, the markets 

 have been reaching out for something to take their place, and we have wit- 

 nessed also the rapid disappearance of the Eskimo Curlew, the Upland Plover, 

 the Buff-breasted Sandpiper, and the Golden Plover, from the same cause. 

 Shall we awake in time to save any of these birds, or the many others that 

 are still menanced with extinction by this great market demand? No hope 

 can be held out for the future of these birds until our markets are closed to 

 the sale of native wild game. 



