A BIRD MEDEEY 77 



most cases, Nature has given the song and the plu- 

 mage to the other sex, and all the embellishing and 

 acting is done by the male bird. 



I am always at home when I see the passenger 

 pigeon. Few spectacles please me more than to see 

 clouds of these birds sweeping across the sky, and 

 few sounds are more agreeable to my ear than their 

 lively piping and calling in the spring woods. They 

 come in such multitudes, they people the whole air; 

 they cover townships, and make the solitary places 

 gay as with a festival. The naked woods are sud- 

 denly blue as with fluttering ribbons and scarfs, and 

 vocal as with the voices of children. Their arrival 

 is always unexpected. We know April will bring 

 the robins and May the bobolinks, but we do not 

 know that either they or any other month will 

 bring the passenger pigeon. Sometimes years elapse 

 and scarcely a flock is seen. Then, of a sudden, 

 some March or April they come pouring over the 

 horizon from the south or southwest, and for a few 

 days the land is alive with them. 



The whole race seems to be collected in a few 

 vast swarms or assemblages. Indeed, I have some- 

 times thought there was only one such in the United 

 States, and that it moved in squads, and regiments, 

 and brigades, and divisions, like a giant army. The 

 scouting and foraging squads are not unusual, and 

 every few years we see larger bodies of them, but 

 rarely indeed do we witness the spectacle of the 

 whole vast tribe in motion. Sometimes we hear of 

 them in Virginia, or Kentucky and Tennessee; then 



