76 
RAPIDITY OF FLIGHT. 
Ireland, in 1842, where a bird of this species belonging to 
Thomas Bernard, Esq., was let go in the town at eleven 
o’clock in the forenoon, with a note appended to it, directing 
dinner to he ready at his residence at Castle Bernard at a 
given time, as he purposed being home that day, which 
message reached the appointed destination in eleven minutes, 
having travelled 23 miles Irish in that wonderfully short 
space of time, or, in other words, at the rate of 125 \ miles an 
hour. These pigeons, of which Mr. Bernard had a large 
flock, were so domesticated, that he could handle them as he 
pleased, and so very tractable were they, that whenever he 
called, they attended promptly. 
A curious way of guessing at the speed of a Pigeon’s 
flight has been noticed in America. Birds have been shot, 
which, on opening them, were found to have fed on coffee- 
berries, so fresh, that they could not have been in the 
stomach above four or five hours ; but, as the nearest part 
of the country known to produce coffee was some hundreds 
of miles distant, it was calculated that they must have flown 
at the rate of sixty or seventy miles per hour. 
But besides this great speed, many, even of those ap- 
parently least calculated for continued flight, can remain on 
the wing for a much longer time than we are apt to imagine, 
from seeing them slowly and heavily waddling, as in the 
case of farm-yard Ducks and Geese, or of a Sparrow, hopping 
leisurely from bough to bough, or flitting from thence to the 
house-top. Thus the tame domestic Geese, belonging to 
several Cossack villages, near the river Don, in Russia, leave 
their homes in March or April, as soon as the ice breaks up, 
and take flight in a body to the more northerly lakes, the 
nearest of which must be five or six huhdred miles off, where 
they breed and constantly reside during the summer ; but in 
the beginning of winter, the parent bird returns with their 
young ones, each alighting with its brood at the door to 
which it belongs. That flights of this sort are not confined 
to Russia, we may learn from the following instance, cor- 
roborating the fact just mentioned. A gentleman walking 
near Aberdeen, in Scotland, one morning, during a heavy 
