184 The Passenger Pigeon 



who heard Mr. Cooper's statement, said he saw a large 

 flock last fall about a buckwheat field, in the same town. 

 This man was reported to me as perfectly reliable, and 

 he gave me that impression. 



At Port Ewen, I met a Hudson River shad fisher- 

 man, Mr. Van Vliet, who said he had seen early one 

 morning in April or May, two years ago, a flock of wild 

 pigeons over the Hudson. He estimated the flock as 

 containing seventy or eighty birds. Mr. Van Vliet is 

 a man nearly seventy years old, and one cannot look 

 into his face and have him speak and doubt for a mo- 

 ment the truth of what he is saying. When I asked 

 him if he knew the wild pigeon, he smiled good- 

 humoredly and said he knew them as well as he knew 

 anything; he had lived in the time of pigeons, and had 

 killed hundreds of them. 



Another man, one of the leading grocerymen of Port 

 Ewen, said he had seen a very large flock of pigeons 

 between 4 and 5 o'clock on May 15 last, flying over 

 as he was on his way to open his store. His hired man, 

 who was with him, also saw them. Mr. Van Leuven 

 had also seen pigeons in his youth and described to me 

 accurately their manner of flight and the form of the 

 flock against the sky. A neighbor of his told me he 

 had seen a flock of fifteen or twenty pigeons on a foggy 

 morning only a few days before. The rush of their 

 wings overhead first attracted his attention to them. 

 But he had never seen wild pigeons, and might have 



