342 WILD PIGEONS AND DOVES 



The nets made to capture wild pigeons were often 

 as large as eighteen by forty feet ; they were placed on 

 baited ground and sprung by means of spring-poles. 

 As many as sixty dozen were taken often at a single 

 throw of the net. Those taken in the morning and at 

 evening, says Lieutenant Simpson, were males, and all 

 taken near midday were females. The reason was found 

 when it was observed that the male and female divided 

 the labor of incubation. Meantime the bombardment 

 of guns and weapons, and missiles of all sorts, includ- 

 ing sticks and stones, went on, and it is no wonder the 

 race was destroyed. 



Wild pigeons fly with . a speed almost incredible. 

 Birds killed in the State of New York were found to 

 contain the undigested grains of rice that must have 

 been taken in the distant fields of Georgia and South 

 Carolina, proving that they passed the intervening 

 space in a very few hours. A single pigeon, at full 

 speed, passing a blind, was a more difficult mark than 

 a wild duck. As in duck-shooting, a number were 

 often killed from a flock with the use of both barrels. 



I shot pigeons for several years every autumn, or 

 late in the summer, in Northern Ohio. I had one ex- 

 cellent stand in a large clearing overgrown with the 

 Canada thistle and full of pokeberry bushes, upon 

 which the pigeons were feeding. It was a picturesque 

 place, shut in on all sides by forests which had never 

 felt the axe. The thistles grew everywhere among the 

 wild grasses and poke-bushes, and their red plumes, 

 with the white daisies and the yellow mustard, sug- 

 gested at a short distance a vast garden of flowers. 

 Throughout the clearing, at intervals, stood the tall, 



