86 
DOMESTIC FOWLS-THE WILD PIGEON. 
Bialowitz, where about a thousand are still preserved, and in 
some great menageries, as for example that at Schonbrunn, 
near Vienna, which, in 1852, had four specimens. The eland, 
which is closely allied to the American wapiti, if not specific¬ 
ally the same animal, is still kept in the royal preserves of 
Prussia, to the number of four or five hundred individuals. 
The chamois is becoming rare, and the ibex or steinbock, once 
common in all the high Alps, is now believed to be confined 
to the Cogne mountains in Piedmont, between the valleys of 
the Dora Baltea and the Oreo. 
Number of Birds in the United States. 
The tame fowls play a much less conspicuous part in rural 
life than the quadrupeds, and in their relations to the economy 
of nature, they are of very much less moment than four-footed 
animals, or than the undomesticated birds. The domestic 
turkey * is probably more numerous in the territory of the 
United States than the wild bird of the same species ever was, 
and the grouse cannot, at the period of their greatest abun¬ 
dance, have counted as many as we now number of the com¬ 
mon hen. The dove, however, must fall greatly short of the 
wild pigeon in multitude, and it is hardly probable that the 
flocks of domestic geese and ducks are as numerous as once 
were those of their wild congeners. The pigeon, indeed, 
seems to have multiplied immensely, for some years after the 
first clearings in the woods, because the settlers warred unspar¬ 
ingly upon the hawk, while the crops of grain and other vege¬ 
table growths increased the supply of food within the reach of 
the young birds, at the age when their power of flight is not 
* The wild turkey takes readily to the water, and is able to cross rivers 
of very considerable width by swimming. By way of giving me an idea of 
the former abundance of this bird, an old and highly respectable gentle¬ 
man who was among the early white settlers of the 'West, told me that he 
once counted, in walking down the northern bank of the Ohio River, within 
a distance of four miles, eighty-four turkeys as they landed singly, or at 
most in pairs, after swimming over from the Kentucky side. 
