ORDER XI. PIGEONS AND DOVES. 
COLUMB:. 
Family 1. PIGEONS and DOVES. CoLumspip. 13 species, 3 
subspecies. 
Pigeons are distributed throughout the greater part of the globe, but 
their center of abundance appears to be in the Malay Archipelago, 
where about one hundred and twenty of the some three hundred 
known species are found. One hundred or more species have been 
described from the New World but only twelve of these inhabit North 
America. 
The various races of domestic Pigeons, ‘Pouters,’ ‘Fantails,’ etc. are 
descendants of the Rock Dove of Europe, modified in form and habit 
through the selection by the breeder or ‘fancier.’ 
Pigeons build a flimsy, platform nest of twigs and lay two white 
eggs. Both sexes incubate, one relieving the other at certain hours 
each day. The young are born naked and are fed by regurgitation, 
on ‘Pigeons’ milk,’ the parent thrusting its bill into the mouth of its 
young and discharging therein food which has been softened in its own 
crop. 
Some species of Pigeons nest in isolated pairs, others in large colo- 
nies, but it is the habit of many species to gather in large flocks after 
the nesting season. 
The Wild or Passenger Pigeon, once so abundant in this county, was 
found in flocks throughout the year. Alexander Wilson, the ‘father of 
American Ornithology’ writing about 1808, estimated that a flock of 
Wild Pigeons seen by him near Frankfort, Kentucky, contained at 
least 2,230,272,000 individuals. Audubon writes that in 1805 he saw 
schooners at the wharves in New York city loaded in bulk with Wild 
Pigeons caught up the Hudson River, which were sold at one cent each. 
As late as 1876 or 1877 there was a colony of nesting Wild Pigeons 
in Michigan, which was twenty-eight miles long and averaged three or 
four miles in width, and in 1881 the birds were still so abundant in 
parts of the Mississippi Valley that the writer saw thousands of birds, 
trapped in that region, used in a Pigeon match near New York City. 
‘Today, however, as a result of constant persecution, the Wild Pigeon 
is so rare that the observation of a single individual is noteworthy. 
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