204 BIRDS 



Season — Chiefly a transient visitor in the United States of 

 late years. 

 (See plate, page 210.) 



The wild pigeon no longer survives to refute the adage, 

 "In union there is strength." No birds have shown 

 greater gregariousness, the flocks once numbering not 

 hundreds nor thousands but millions of birds; Wilson in 

 1808 mentioning a flock seen by him near Frankfort, Ken- 

 tucky, which he conservatively estimated at more than two 

 bilHon, and Audubon told of flights so dense that they 

 darkened the sky, and streamed across it like mighty 

 rivers. So late as our Centennial year one nesting ground 

 in Michigan extended over an area twenty-eight miles in 

 length by three or four in width. The modern mind, 

 accustomed to deal only with pitiful remnants of feathered 

 races, can scarcelyvgrasp the vast numbers that once made 

 our land the spoi&man's paradise. Union for once has 

 been fatal. Unl;^ted netting, even during the entire 

 nesting season, has resulted in sending more than one million 

 pigeons to market from a single roost in one year, leaving 

 perhaps as man^ more wounded birds and starving, help- 

 less, naked soS^^s behind, until the poultry staUs became 

 so glutted^' wjtii ' pigeons that the low price per barrel 

 scarcely p^d^^r their transportation, and they were fed 

 to the hogs;- This abominable practice of netting pigeons, 

 discontinued only because there are no flocks left to cap- 

 ture, drove the birds either to nest north of the United 

 States, oy, when within its borders, to change their habits 

 and live in couples chiefly. Captain Bendire, than whom 

 no writer ever expressed an opinion out of fuller knowledge, 

 said in 1892: "The extermination of the passenger pigeon 



