HDi m: 
1894.] Prairie Chicken and Wild Pigeon. 935 
has resounded back and forth among the hills which have 
not known the old familiar sound for many a year before. 
Adolphe B. Covert, the veteran ornithologist and taxider- 
mist of Washtenaw County, tells me that a small band of 
prairie chickens has continued to live in a tract of marsh 
land some distance from Ann Arbor, notwithstanding Dr. 
Steere's notes to the contrary. Thus it is very probable that 
our immigrants, unless they switched off from some western 
contigent of Coxey’s Army, came from some such isolated 
locality where yet a few pairs nest, rather than in a long flight 
from the southwest as many would believe. 
On June 13, 1894, late in the afternoon, as I was returning 
from an interesting day among the late-nesting water birds, a 
fine male wild pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, was startled from 
a plowed field, lately sown to buckwheat, and rose in full view 
not more than thirty feet away, affording identification of 
which I am positive. He flew a few rods and dropped grace- 
fully into the dense foliage of a maple tree by the roadside. 
Then as I approached, wondering at the presence of the beau- 
tiful bird, now so rare, whose garnished plumage turned the 
rays of the sun into a thousand bright reflections, and ina 
land over which, in numbers eclipsing all other species, his 
ancestry once fairly swarmed, he again took wing and with a 
rapid, measured tread of his pointed pinions disappeared in 
an instant over the wooded hills beyond. But the old-time 
flights of pigeons are forever of the past. It had been nine 
years since the last few were seen here, and we had begun to 
think it very probable that they would never again be noted. 
On June 16, a pair were seen in the same field and on June 
18 three were noted by my brother, two of which he was very 
certain were young of the year. Perhaps a pair of “$2.00 
eggs” were hatched in this very locality. 
Of the disappearance of the wild pigeon in Southern Michi- 
gan, we have the following notes: “ Extinct at Ann Arbor in 
1875,” Dr. J. B. Steere. “ Extinct in Monroe County in 1885,” 
Jerome Trombley. “Last seen at Morrice, Mich., in 1881," 
Dr: W. C. Brownell. 
