PASSENGER PIGEON. 
255 
a straight line across the country for a great way. Not far from 
Shelbyville in the state of Kentucky, about five years ago, there was 
one of these breeding places, which stretched through the woods in 
nearly a north and south direction, was several miles in breadth, and 
was said to be upwards of forty miles in extent ! In this tract almost 
every tree was furnished with nests, wherever the branches could 
accommodate them. The Pigeons made their first appearance there 
about the tenth of April, and left it altogether, with their young, before 
the twenty-fifth of May. — 
As soon as the young were fully grown, and before they left the 
nests, numerous parties of the inhabitants, from all parts of the adjacent 
country, came with wagons, axes, beds, cooking utensils, many of them 
accompanied by the greater part of their families, and encamped for 
several days at this immense nursery. Several of them informed me, 
that the noise in the woods was so great as to terrify their horses, and 
that it was difficult for one person to hear another speak without bawl- 
ing in his ear. The ground was strewed with broken limbs of trees, 
eggs, and squab Pigeons, which had been precipitated from above, and 
on which herds of hogs were fattening. Hawks, Buzzards, and Eagles, 
were sailing about in great numbers, and seizing the squabs from their 
nests at pleasure ; while from twenty feet upwards to the tops of the 
trees the view through the woods jtresented a perpetual tumult of crowd- 
ins: and fluttering multitudes of Pigeons, their wings roaring like 
thunder ; mingled with the frequent crash of falling timber ; for now 
the axe-men were at work cutting down those trees that seemed to be 
most crowded with nests ; and contrived to fell them in such a manner, 
that in their descent they might bring down several others ; by which 
means the falling of one large tree sometimes produced two hundred 
squabs, little inferior in size to the old ones, and almost one mass of 
fat. On some single trees upwards of one hundred nests were found, 
each containing one young only, a circumstance in the history of this 
bird not generally known to naturalists. It was dangerous to walk 
under these flying and fluttering millions, from the frequent fall of 
large branches, broken down by the weight of the multitudes above, 
and which in their descent often destroyed numbers of the birds them- 
selves ; while the clothes of those engaged in traversing the woods were 
completely covered with the excrements of the Pigeons. 
These circumstances were related to me by many of the most respect- 
able part of the community in that quarter ; and were confirmed in 
part by what I myself witnessed. I passed for several miles through 
this same breeding place, where every tree was spotted with nests, the 
remains of those above described. In many instances, I counted 
upwards of ninety nests on a single tree ; but the Pigeons had aban- 
doned this place for another, sixty or eighty miles off, towards Green 
