EE AUDUBON BULCUCE TEEN. mL 
Where lower flights passed close to the hilltops, people were stationed 
with guns, poles, rocks and other weapons to knock down the swarming 
birds. 
At night their roosting places were raided and thousands killed. For 
weeks after the passage of a flock the people in some sections fed on no 
other flesh than pigeons. 
Their winter roosting places almost defy description, says Audubon. 
He rode through one on the banks of Green river in Kentucky for more 
than 40 miles, crossing it in different directions, and found its average 
width to be more than three miles. The ground was white with droppings 
like snow; trees two feet in diameter were broken off. When the birds 
came in at sundown, there was a great uproar and confusion and a crack- 
ling of falling limbs not unlike a storm. 
The nesting places sometimes were equal in size to the roosting places, 
frequently covering 100,000 to 150,000 acres. As many as 50 nests were 
observed in a single tree. The females laid one to two eggs and usually 
raised three broods a season, migrating between each brood. 
The squabs were in greater demand for food than the older birds and 
for this reason raids were made upon their nesting places and the young 
slaughtered by the millions. In some places hogs were fatted upon the 
butchered squabs and older birds left on the ground after a raid. 
The most destructive implement was the net, to which birds were at- 
tracted by bait. Gunners also baited the birds with grain and dozens 
were frequently killed at a single shot. 
In the latter part of the nineteenth century hundreds of men made a 
profession of following the birds wherever they went. They kept up with 
their movements by telegraph and moved to each new location as rapidly 
as possible. It required fifteen tons of ice to pack the squabs killed in the 
last great slaughter recorded in New York state. In the seventies it was 
said that the New York market alone consumed t00 barrels of pigeons a 
day for weeks without a break in price. 
It was this market demand that brought about dhe extinction of the 
passenger pigeon. When they began to become scarce the Indians raised 
objection to the way they were being slaughtered and many tribes did 
everything in their power to prevent their total destruction, even using 
threats, where pleading did not avail. The destruction of a large part of 
the young each year was what hastened the end. Nature cut off the rest 
with old age. 
The last great slaughter was in 1878 at Petoskey, Michigan, when 
more than 1,500,000 birds were killed and shipped to market. Over 
2000 people were at the nesting place, engaged in the business of trap- 
ping, killing and shipping pigeons. One Michigan firm reported the 
shipment of five cars a day to the New York market over a period of 
thirty days. In two years one authority says over twelve billion were 
killed and shipped to market from one town in Michigan while another 
