IOWA BIRD LIFE—' VI, 1936 
22 
the passenger PIGEON in northeastern 
IOWA 
By ELLISON ORR 
Wankon, Jown 
We sometimes wonder what it was that destroyed 
the great dinosaurs and other hulking saurians of the 
Reptilian Age or how the Mammoth and Mastodon ot 
the Pleistocene came to be exterminated. We shall 
never know certainly the specific cause, yet speaking 
generally, the answer is easy. Anything that changes 
materially the environment of any living species, urn 
less the species has great adaptability, will work its 
destruction. Notwithstanding the fact that the buffalo 
furnished the greater part of the food and clothing 
supply of the American Indian of the Great Plains, 
it increased to numbers almost beyond belief. But 
when the white man came with his gun, in a few years it was almost 
exterminated. A change of the conditions under which it flourished 
was the cause. What can we say of the Passenger Pigeon of which 
there now remains not a single living bird? 
In Ectopistes Migratorius the flocking instinct was exceptionally 
strong. Vast flocks, great armies of this bird in numbers beyond com- 
prehension, visited all parts of the continent from the Great Plains to 
the Atlantic and from the Gulf to the Great Lakes and north. Be- 
sides the larger flocks which appeared in various parts of the country 
at intervals, it was present in smaller, scattering flocks over the en- 
tire area. , 
Arkansas was a favorite wintering place of the Passenger Pigeon be- 
cause of the abundant supply of “mast” which its forests afforded. 
In summer the immense horde of birds went wherever there was a 
plentiful supply of this mast, which consisted principally of acorns, 
and in the valley of the Ohio River of beechnuts, If they did not 
flnd it at one place, or if they had eaten the supply, they went else- 
where. To a bird that could fly 100 miles in an hour, distance meant 
nothing. 
In early summer, where the great flocks found conditions right, they 
nested— often in Kentucky, Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin or 
Indiana, and once at least on the Yellow River in Iowa. 
This Iowa nesting area was twenty miles long and two miles wide 
and reached from Moneek in Winneshiek County, through Allamakee 
County to the Mississippi River. In this area nearly every tree in 
which a place for a nest could be found was used. The larger trees 
would contain a dozen nests, and some of them two dozen or more. 
I was very young the year the Passenger Pigeons nested on Yellow 
River in Allamakee County, and I remember only one incident in con- 
nection with that nesting. We had a timber lot in the “woods,” a 
part of the nesting area, and at some time that summer my father 
went there for a load of wood. When he came back he brought with 
him a half dozen fully grown young birds that he had killed with a 
stick, so plentiful were they and so easy of approach. 
It was the habit of the male bird to incubate while the female was 
away feeding. After returning she sat on the egg while he took his 
turn at foraging for a meal. Each went out to feed at certain delinite 
times during the day. My father told me that when a flock left the 
"roost,” as the settlers called it. going out to feed, it was like distant 
thunder. Our home was over two miles from the nearest nests. It 
was generally believed by father and his neighbors that a large part 
of the pigeons’ food was gleaned from the recently sown wheat fields 
of Iowa and Illinois, the birds not only picking up all the uncovered 
