514 
FOREST AND STREAM 
April 19, 1913 
THE PASSENGER PIGEON. 
Continued from page 512. 
usual haunts on account of the encroachments 
of civilization, and now make their home in some 
far South American forest. The world is too 
small to hide them if the wild pigeon exists in 
anything like its former numbers. 
The theory of destruction by being blown 
out to sea when in migration and thus de¬ 
stroyed meets with no credence on my behalf. 
Those who knew the habits and range of this 
bird, and were familiar with its powess of flight, 
will scarcely coincide in this belief. A fatal epi¬ 
demic has been suggested as the cause which 
removed the pigeons from the earth, but no man 
can remember seeing dead pigeons, which died 
from disease, in such numbers as to warrant this 
presumption. The wild pigeon of the United 
States did not disappear in the strict sense of 
the word; its fate was that of the American 
bison—extermination at the hands of man. From 
the landing of the first white man in America 
we have lived in an age of destruction. Forests 
so old that the trees were giants when Csesar 
led his.legions into Gaul vanished before the 
axe and flame of the settler, and with these have 
gone many of the beasts and birds which once 
inhabited the land. The wild pigeon was fixed 
in its ways. The voice of spring was the call 
to the breeding ground, and no small woodland 
with cleared fields on its boundaries sufficed this 
blue meteor of the air as a place in which to 
mate and rear its young. The deep woods with 
their towering pines, the lofty hemlocks with 
their hanging branches which forked into a thou¬ 
sand partings, in each of which a pigeon’s nest, 
frail though it was, might ride safely in the 
spring winds and cradle each its squab, the hills 
clothed with graceful beeches in whose boughs 
thousands of pigeons might nest, and under 
whose canopied shade myriads fed upon the 
fallen mast—these were the places toward which 
the passenger pigeon turned its flight at nest¬ 
ing time, as the salmon turns his nose ever to¬ 
ward fresh water when the instinct of his kind 
tells him it is time to spawn. 
Then came the netter with meshes ever 
spread beside the feeding ground and the drink¬ 
ing place of the birds. He tempted them with 
scattered grain, and with seasoned salt bed; 
lured them with his flyers and decoyed them with 
his stool pigeon, and when the fatal moment 
came, flung the smothering folds of his net over 
the packed hundreds, and none escaped. 
It has been said that no salmon lives to 
tell the story of its trip into fresh water at 
spawning time, and that all perish on the jour¬ 
ney. The salmon leaves behind millions upon 
millions of eggs to hatch and replace the parent 
fish. How about the pigeons netted at their 
nesting places? The mother bird engulfed in 
the snare returned no more to the frail nest 
with its one egg or solitary squab; the egg 
chilled, does not hatch. The young bird with 
no warm breast to hover and protect it from 
the cold and no parent to pour the predigested 
food or “pigeon’s milk’’ into the ever hungry 
maw, sickened and died, and no young grew up 
in the place of the parent birds destroyed. 
The lumberman felled the pines and floated 
the logs to the ever devouring mills. The hem¬ 
locks were cut down by sections, denuded of 
their bark and went the way of all trees. The 
settler followed with axe, fire and plow, and 
the nesting places of the passenger pigeon van¬ 
ished as the rifle smoke blows away on the wind. 
There could be but one ending of the pas¬ 
senger pigeon under these conditions. Harried 
by the shooters’ lead when passing the settle¬ 
ments ; engulfed by countless thousands in the 
netters’ snare; driven from nesting grounds by 
the ever-increasing persecution of man; its 
breeding places laid waste; its food supply 
diminished, denied a truce of the warfare against 
it even when the young were in the nests, the 
birds knew not which way to turn for safety, 
ceased to breed for want of undisturbed nest¬ 
ing places, and the end of the survivors was 
swift and sure. 
The letter, which follows, from one of the 
pigeon netters, will show the extent of the in¬ 
roads made in the pigeons’ ranks in one locality, 
and in connection therewith I may say that the 
year in which the writer of the letter referred 
to tells of the operations of the pigeon netters 
in Michigan (1877) was the last year in which 
the passenger pigeon visited that State in any 
numbers. 
The writer of this article has no word of 
criticism to offer on the way in which the pas¬ 
senger pigeon was exterminated. We lived ac¬ 
cording to our light. The times were those of 
destruction and waste. There would always be, 
we thought, enough timber, more than enough; 
JUDGE. 
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ATU)f*Al . 
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(C) JUDGE 
First National Bank 
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