MIGRATORY PIGEON. 
295 
from considerable distances, visit them in the night, 
with guns, clubs, long poles, pots of sulphur, and various 
other engines of destruction. In a few hours, they fill 
many sacks, and load their horses with them. By the 
Indians, a pigeon roost, or breeding place, is considered 
an important source of national profit and dependance 
for that season ; and all their active ingenuity is 
exercised on the occasion. The breeding place differs 
from the former in its greater extent. In the western 
countries above mentioned, these are generally in beech 
woods, and often extend, in nearly 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 direc- 
tion ; 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 10th of April, and 
left it altogether, with their young, before the 25th 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 bawling in his ear. The ground was strewed 
with broken limbs of trees, eggs, and young 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 num- 
bers, 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 presented a perpetual 
tumult of crowding and fluttering multitudes of pigeons, 
