The Passenger Pigeon 



I remember calling my mother to a window early one 

 morning and shouting: "See there! a flock of pigeons! 

 Ah, ha ! April fool!" This time I did not deceive her 

 with the threadbare trick. The joke was "on me" for 

 once. There was a flight of pigeons that morning, the 

 first one of the season, and behind the foremost flock 

 another and another came streaming. Away from the 

 east side of the river at the north of the town, from near 

 Crow Island, they swept like a cloud. Crossing the 

 river to the west they reached the woods near Jerome's 

 mill and skirted the clearings or passed in waves over 

 the tree tops, back of John Winter's farm, and then 

 wheeled to the south. Out of the tongue of woodland, 

 just back of the Hermansau Church, they poured, thence 

 over the fields, too high to be shot, and then away to the 

 evergreens and stately pines of Pine Hill; on, on, on 

 across the Tittabawassee, to some feeding ground we 

 knew not how far away. 



Now that the pigeons had come they would "fly" 

 every morning. This we knew from years of observa- 

 tion in the great migration belt of Michigan. They 

 would fly lower to-morrow morning, and in a day or two 

 more sweep low enough for the sixteen-gauge and the 

 number eight shot to reach them. Sometimes, even now, 

 forty years after the last of the great passenger pigeon 

 flights, I fall to day-dreaming and seem to hear myself 

 saying in the eager, piping tones of those golden boy- 

 hood days: 



