Nov. 2, 1912 
FOREST AND STREAM 
559 
and harass a sparrow-hawk. Kropotkine relates 
how the aquatic birds, crowding on the shores 
of seas and lakes, frequently combine to drive 
off intruding birds of prey. 
Brehm calls attention to the fact that many 
monkeys act in complete concert in their 
plundering expeditions, sending out scouts, 
posting sentinels, and even forming a long chain 
for the transport of the spoils. When a 
Brazilian kite has captured a prey too large for 
it to carry, it summons its friends to its aid. 
Pelicans fish together in large companies, 
forming an extended semi-circle, facing the 
shore, and catching the fish thus inclosed. 
But, perhaps, of all cases of combined 
action for a common end. the migration of 
birds of passage is at once the most familiar 
and the most interesting—the mustering of the 
birds, the excitement leading up to the de¬ 
parture, the trail flights, the confidence placed 
in the guides and chosen leaders of the move¬ 
ment. Migration is usually social, and is sus¬ 
tained by tradition. 
The social habits of the beavers are well 
known. The Indians have invested this rodent 
with immortality. Certain it is they show more 
sagacity than can be explained by heredity 
habit, for they frequently adapt their actions 
to new conditions with an aptitude, and in a 
manner that must be regarded as nothing short 
of intelligent, especially when we bear in mind 
that the beaver belongs to a rather stupid race 
of rodents. Perhaps being more socialized than 
others of its kind may account for its cleverness. 
Many birds, such as rooks, starlings and 
swallows build their nests together, and their 
sociality is frequently advantageous to them. 
Kropotkine, quoting from Dr. Cones, refers 
to some cliff swallows which built their nests 
in a colony quite near the home of a prairie- 
falcon. “The little peaceful birds had no fear 
of their rapacious neighbor; they did not even 
let it approach to their colony. They immedi¬ 
ately surrounded it and chased it, so that it 
had to make off at once.” 
In regard to cranes, the same authority 
notes that they are very “sociable, and live in 
friendly relations, not only with their con¬ 
geners, but also with most aquatic birds.” 
They post sentries, send out scouts, have num¬ 
erous friends and few foes; and are very in¬ 
telligent. Parrots are faithful associates; and 
the members of each band stick closely to 
each other through good or ill luck. They 
feed together, and fly together, and find en¬ 
joyment. as well as protection in combination, 
and, with the exception of man, they appear to 
have few enemies. 
The social habits of ants and bees, and 
their wonderful skill and power of organization 
in everything connected with the well-being of 
their communities, are well known to all who 
are familiar with country life; and writers like 
Sir John Lubbock (now Lord Avebury) and 
others have greatly added to our store of 
knowledge on this highly interesting subject. 
The foregoing natural features of animal 
life would seem to warrant the conclusion that, 
whatever may be the varying degrees of in¬ 
telligence observed in the lower animals re¬ 
garding general subjects, there can be no doubt, 
in all things appertaining to their own safety 
and welfare, they show, on the whole, remarkable 
sagacity and rare wisdom in many instances. 
Again the Wild Pigeon. 
New York City, Oct. 15. —Editor Forest and 
Stream: I read with a great deal of interest 
the contribution of Ernest L. Ewbank. whom I 
know personally to be an excellent observer and 
a “king” fisherman, on the subject of the wild 
pigeon in Western North Carolina in your issue 
of Sept. 28, and particularly that part of it which 
stated that all the great flocks that he saw were 
traveling south. 
Some thirty odd years ago, during my early 
boyhood, I was always allowed to spend the 
period from about the 10th of May to the 20th 
of November of each year with my grandfather 
at his summer residence at Flat Rock, Hender¬ 
son county, North Carolina, in the heart of what 
was then a really wild mountain country, and 
every fall I looked forward to the coming of 
the wild pigeons. I became very familiar with 
them, for from the time of their arrival until 
we began our return journey to the low country 
of South Carolina there was generally a string 
of them hanging in the pantry, and I never tired 
of admiring their iridescent neck plumage and 
the fiery orange eye of the male in its red set¬ 
ting, and incidentally of eating them. I don’t re¬ 
member many very large flocks, but I do remem¬ 
ber distinctly the passage of one that must have 
contained many millions and strangely enough, 
to judge from Mr. Ewbank’s experience, it was 
flying nearly due west. I know this because the 
window from which I saw it faces north, and a 
projection of the house cut off my view of the 
east, the direction from which the flock was 
coming and the south, so that I could not get 
a view of the breadth of the whole flock at any 
time. The darkening of the rising sun and the 
beating of their wings made me rush to the 
window and get my head out long before our 
old nurse came running in to tell me to “Git 
right up and look at de pigeons cornin’,” and as 
far as I could see to the west and north the 
great flock extended, a sight that I will never 
forget. Looking back over the years it seems 
to me that it was a long time in passing, but 
probably it did not take many minutes. At any 
rate, I never saw its like again. 
I suppose the direction of this flight was de¬ 
termined by the search for food, and it seems 
to me that its presence in large quantities or 
absence, in a given region, must often have had 
much to do with the travels of a bird whose 
migrations, as I recollect them, were irregular 
as compared with the periodic migrations of 
birds flying to other continents, and whose num¬ 
bers were almost incredible. 
Smaller flocks were fairly frequent, as I 
recollect it, during the late seventies and early 
eighties, and occasionally my grandfather, who 
was a splendid wing shot, would shoot a few 
stragglers during some afternoon flight from the 
terraces with his little muzzleloading Joe Manton, 
afterward my most cherished possession, and 
which disappeared mysteriously while I was in 
the North at school. Still, it is “better to have 
loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” 
I killed my first bird with it, but as one of the 
members of the family, owing possibly to certain 
Civil War experiences, was, as one of the ser¬ 
vants put it, “Berry timerish ’bout gun,” it was 
some time before I was allowed to use it alone, 
and during those dismal years I was forced to 
indulge my sporting proclivities at second hand 
by trailing after such of my more fortunate com¬ 
panions as were allowed to carry guns, and I 
hoped might be unselfish enough not to want to 
do all the shooting. On two of these occasions 
I remember coming across wild pigeons. The 
first was one cold ashen-red afternoon in early 
November, when I sat as ordered with another 
small boy on the bank of a pond, while the 
proud possessor of a single-barreled muzzleloader 
successfully sneaked up on a small flock and 
raked a dead limb covered with pigeons and ac¬ 
tually got enough to divide—not equally—but 
still to divide, and the second was a year or two 
later, much earlier in the fall, when after stay¬ 
ing as long as I dared with a companion at a 
pond, waiting for ducks that never came, I saw 
on my way home a single pigeon and ran back 
nearly a mile to tell him about it. Post haste 
we hurried to the spot and again the pigeon, the 
last I ever saw in the woods, flew up and he 
shot it. I remember just how it looked when 
we picked it up, and that we could find neither 
ruffled feather nor trace of a wound, and I 
never pass the spot without thinking of it. 
Shortly afterward my regular school days 
began and by Oct. 1 I had to be in Charleston, 
so I never knew of my own knowledge whether 
the pigeons ceased to come to the North Carolina 
Mountains gradually or all at once. Two years 
ago I asked one of the mountaineers who used 
to supply us with pigeons and game about it, 
and he said that the didn’t remember, but now 
Mr. Ewbank has settled the point for me by say¬ 
ing in effect that this year they were and the 
next they were not. In those days there were 
no railroads in that part of Western North 
Carolina, and the Charleston gentlemen who 
owned places there were obliged to send their 
traveling carriages to Greenville on the upper 
edge of South Carolina, and then drive up forty 
miles or more over the mountains. It was a 
very sparsely settled region, and the people who 
lived there used the rifle and not the shotgun. 
Birds of all kinds were practically undisturbed 
by the natives, except the wild turkey, and with 
its millions of uninhabited, inaccessible acres, 
teeming with food, this “land of the sky,” it 
seems to me would have been looked upon by 
the wild pigeons as a natural place of refuge, 
to which they would have continually returned 
had any of them survived the slaughter at their 
last great nesting ground. Apparently none of 
them did, but at any rate it is now “all up" with 
Columba migratoria. Drayton F. Hastie. 
Michigan Bird Life. 
It was in 1893 that Prof. A. J. Cook pub¬ 
lished, as a Bulletin of the Michigan Agriculture 
Experiment Station, a list of the “Birds of Michi¬ 
gan.” This paper was a list, and little more than 
that, though it gave some facts as to distribu¬ 
tion. The notes on the habits of the different 
species were brief. It contained 149 pages. 
Prof. Barrows’ handsome volume, which has 
just come from the press at Lansing, Mich., has 
822 pages, with seventy plates, besides many 
figures in the text. It deals with 326 species. It 
is a special bulletin of the Department of Zo¬ 
ology and Physiology of the Michigan Agricul¬ 
tural College. 
Prof. Barrows has cut out from Mr. Cook’s 
list about thirty species, and has introduced 
