340 WILD PIGEONS AND DOVES 



his attention to the fact that I had made a great error. 

 One of the writers from California spoke of the birds 

 as being a nuisance to the farmers. The editor, like 

 all editors, liking a controversy, published these let- 

 ters and wrote me a fi-iendly note, saying that my arti- 

 cles had been remarkably free from error, but that I 

 seemed to be in for it this time. I insisted, however, 

 that I was right, and the matter was referred to the 

 Governor of California, who referred it to the Acad- 

 emy of Sciences, and at the last the matter went to the 

 Smithsonian Institution, and the editor mailed me a 

 letter from that authority which said there were no 

 records of the passenger-pigeon on the Pacific Coast. 

 To the average person a pigeon is a pigeon, but there 

 are great differences in these birds, both in size, mark- 

 ings, and habits. I have seen the wild passenger- 

 pigeons so numerous for days at a time that they 

 literally reached from the southern horizon to the 

 northern horizon, like clouds in the sky, and cast sim- 

 ilar shadows on the earth. I was reminded of Cooper's 

 line, " You may look an hour before you can find a hole 

 through them." 



I have had some excellent sport with the wild 

 pigeons. The pigeons are extremely fond of beech- 

 nuts, and when feeding in the woods of Ohio the flocks 

 would fly from one woodland to another and I shot 

 them usually from ambush as they passed. 



It was as difficult to estimate the number of the pass- 

 ing birds as it is for an astronomer to count the shoot- 

 ing stars on an August night. Audubon attempted to 

 count the different flocks ^one day, but after counting 

 one hundred and sixty-three flocks in twenty minutes 



