Introduction 



geration in the records of such earlier observers as 

 Alexander Wilson, the ornithologist, who said that 

 these birds associated in such prodigious numbers as 

 almost to surpass belief, and that their numbers had no 

 parallel among any other feathered tribes on the face 

 of the earth; or that one of their "roosts" would kill 

 the trees over thousands of acres as completely as if 

 the whole forest had been girdled with an ax. 



Audubon estimated that an average flock of these 

 pigeons contained a billion and a quarter of birds, which 

 •consumed more than eight and a half million bushels of 

 mast in a day's feeding. They were slain by millions 

 during the middle of the last century, and from one 

 region in Michigan in one year three million Passenger 

 Pigeons were killed for market, while in that roost alone 

 as many more perished because of the barbarous 

 methods of hunting them. They supplied a means of 

 living for thousands of hunters, who devastated their 

 flocks with nets and guns, and even with fire. Yet so 

 vast were their numbers that after thirty years of 

 observation Audubon was able to say that "even in the 

 face of such dreadful havoc nothing but the diminu- 

 tion of our forests can accomplish their decrease." 



Many theories have been advanced to account for the 

 disappearance of the wild pigeons, among them that 

 their migration may have been overwhelmed by some 

 cyclonic disturbance of the atmosphere which destroyed 

 their myriads at one blow. The big "nesting" of 1878 



