THE WILD PIGEON. 235 



dozen old birds and about fifty dozen squabs being packed 

 in a barrel. Allowing 500 birds to a barrel, and averag- 

 ing the entire shipments for the season at twenty -five 

 barrels per day, we find the rail shipments to have been 

 12,500 dead birds daily, or 1,500,000 for the summer. Of 

 live birds, there were shipped 1,116 crates, six dozen per 

 crate, or 80,352 birds. These were the rail shipments 

 only, and not including the cargoes by steamers from 

 Petoskey, Cheboygan, Cross Village, and other lake ports, 

 which were as many more. Added to this were the daily 

 express shipments in bags and boxes, the wagon-loads 

 hauled away by the shot-gun brigade, the thousands of 

 dead and wounded ones not secured, and the myriads of 

 squabs dead in the nest by the trapping off of the parent 

 birds soon after hatching (for a young, pigeon will surely 

 die if deprived of its parents during the first week of its 

 life), and we have, at the lowest possible estimate, a grand 

 total of 1,000,000,000 pigeons sacrificed to Mammon dur- 

 ing the nesting of 1878." 



I trust the knowledge obtained by the reader wUl be 

 sufficient recompense to insure me a frank forgiveness 

 for engrafting into this chapter so much of the language 

 and experience of another; but many of our sportsmen, 

 especially the younger members of the fraternity, wonder 

 what has become of the birds that, a decade since, dark- 

 ened the sky with their traveling hordes. The report of 

 Professor Roney tells the tale, for there are not sufficient 

 of any living animals to have taken from them the 

 numbers that were taken from that pigeon-roost, and not 

 speedily become extinct. Every day in the spring-time, 

 the time when we used to see so many pigeons with us, 

 flying so gracefully over the hill-tops, or high in air 

 traveling northward, our thoughts revert to those good 

 old times when they were so plenty with us; and we can 

 not but think tenderly of the dead, for they are dead to 



