8 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Jan. 4, 1913 
Canada, but later they became more concen¬ 
trated—probably the beginning of the end. 
When they first came in the spring they es¬ 
tablished a roost, but the nesting place was 
never where the roost was. They moved a 
day or two before the nesting began—in a mass. 
Mr. Mercereau speaks of being at Lansing, 
Mich., at the time of such a movement—when 
the sky was obscured for half an hour by the 
solid mass of the flight. 
They wintered in Tennessee, Kentucky and 
Georgia, and probably in other of the Southern 
States. Their nesting places were from one to 
ten miles square. The eggs were supported by 
a scant platform of sticks, and only one in a 
nest. He says he never found a nest with two 
eggs, but has heard of them as occurring very 
rarely. There were sometimes a hundred nests 
in a tree. 
On one occasion only—in Allegheny coun¬ 
ty, Pennsylvania, in the 60’s—he gathered 
squabs for the New York market. The birds 
were nesting in the mountains, a hard day’s 
journey with a horse. They carried ice, and on 
the way up caught a fine lot of brook trout 
with a string and a bent pin. The birds were 
nesting on about 1,000 acres, largely in wild 
cherry trees. The method of gathering the 
squabs was to chop down the trees. There 
was a tribe of Indians there gathering the 
squabs and smoking and drying them. They 
had an enormous quantity. Brook trout and 
squab sounds well for a wilderness lunch. He 
objected to gathering the squabs, on the ground 
that it was too destructive. 
When asked what became of the squabs 
when the old birds were trapped, he said the 
squabs were fed by other birds and they did 
not suffer. During the nesting, he said, the 
males left to feed at sunrise, returning from 
nine to eleven o’clock, when tlie females went, 
and birds were returning far into the night. 
They caught nothing but males until about 
10 A. M., then nothing but females. The largest 
haul he remembers was about 100 dozen. 
Sometimes when the net was sprung and they 
were holding it down, the pigeons would still 
pour down on the outside of the net. 
He trapped here five years before follow¬ 
ing the birds, and then for twenty-two con¬ 
secutive springs in New York, Pennsylvania, 
Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Min¬ 
nesota, Missouri, Indian Territory and Ar¬ 
kansas. While trapping in Indian Territory 
they were loo miles from a railroad. The birds 
were all shipped alive, hauled 100 miles by 
horses and then to New York, and there was 
comparatively little loss. They were fed soaked 
corn. 
In the neighborhood of a nesting place 
there was a constant roaring sound continuing 
far into the ni.ght, so that a half mile away it 
was difficult to sleep. In the fall they were 
very destructive to newly planted wheat—the 
flock would roll over and over, looking like a 
large cylinder, leaving scarcely a grain. 
They nested sometimes in Virginia, and 
there they caught young birds in April. At 
one time in Pennsylvania he trapped when 
there was three feet of snow on the ground. 
Many birds froze on the nests. They fed in 
the low valleys. He said they w’ere very fond 
of salt, and his best trapping was done on old 
deer licks. Beech nuts and acorns were their 
natural food, and when feeding in the woods 
they would roar in a vast moving cylinder. His 
last trapping was done in Arkansas, and his 
theory is that they went to South America; 
if so, they have hidden themselves well. 
Trapping was expensive and not particu¬ 
larly lucrative, but one can easily understand 
it was a “calling” in the intimate and literal 
sense. When the spring came and one first 
heard the sibilant murmur of the rushing 
wings, one knew it was the imperative voice 
of the gods calling to the vast valleys and the 
purple hills—it was invitation and command. 
The writer can recall the thrill that came with 
the first flock in March, and the legions that fol¬ 
lowed. Alas! the vast cohorts clad in purple and 
gold are “one with Nineveh and Tyre,” and the 
giant diapason of the millions of glittering wings 
is silent forever. 
Blue Ridge Mountain Rifle Shooting 
W HEN the corn is gathered and the women 
and children begin to pull galax with 
which to draw on the country stores for 
“rations” and other family necessities, the 
mountain rifleman gets out his old hog rifle, 
or deer rifle, and begins to practice for the 
matches that are about to begin. These con¬ 
tests form one of the chief sporting events of 
By FRANK W. BICKNELL 
the year, and perhaps the only real contests of 
skill among the mountaineers. With all their 
fondness for hunting, the average mountaineer 
is not a crack shot these days, probably be¬ 
cause he gets so little practice. It is only very 
recently that he has had a gun that could be 
relied upon beyond a very short range, and 
even now he hunts bear with hounds and small 
single barrel shotguns. The hounds are ex¬ 
pected to hold the bear till the hunters can 
catch up and dispatch the pestered animal with 
their guns. The woods are usually thick, the 
hills and hollows many and the bear cannot be 
seen at a distance. 
The old-fashioned rifle match is an in¬ 
heritance from the “good old days” when there 
were deer to be hunted in these mountains, and 
good shooting was required to get them. Then 
there were no stock laws to restrain the liberty 
of the new settlers to fatten their hogs and 
cattle in the great unclaimed forests. No one 
pretended to feed his hogs, he just turned 
them out on the mountain and they got fat on 
the nuts, roots and numerous rich fodder plants 
that were to be found at all seasons of the year. 
Usually the little pigs were caught and in some 
rude way marked to show ownership, though 
really that didn’t matter much. When a man 
wanted a hog to kill, he went out into the 
woods, tried to find his own, and if he couldn’t, 
just took any he could find, and with his trusty 
rifle laid him low. The animals were perfectly 
wild, and it was very seldom that anyone ever 
attempted to catch one that was full grown, and 
as for an old boar, he was something to be 
avoided by the boldest native, particularly if 
the man was accompanied by a dog. The wild 
hogs were the natural enemies of dogs and the 
dogs were thoroughly afraid of the hogs; and if 
attacked, would run to their masters for pro¬ 
tection, when the enraged razorback was quite 
as willing to tear up the man as the dog. 
ON THE CREST OF THE GREAT CONTINENTAI, DIVIDE. 
