Photographing ‘Prairie Pigeons” 
louder grow the voices, and presently the 
undulating line appears and leisurely yet 
steadily sweeps by, whither bound who 
can tell. Often have | wished I could fol- 
low and learn their secret. But wherever 
I might drive | would see their lines still on 
the move. Where there is a marshy lake 
they may often be seen, at times in large 
numbers hovering over the rushes or 
grass, throwing up their wings to settle 
down, presently to come fluttering up 
again, parties frequently leaving to strag- 
gle over the prairie, and others arriving, 
probably passing to and from their dis- 
tant breeding-ground. 
Of these unique birds but very little has 
been known until within recent years, and 
most of the works on ornithology have 
almost no information to offer. They are 
now known to winter in the southern 
states, mostly west of the Mississippi River. 
In April, or as soon as the ice breaks up in 
the lakes, they appear in the Dakotas and 
surrounding regions, extending their mi- 
gration, as a species, to the arctic regions. 
It was formerly supposed that they were 
altogether boreal, but less than thirty 
years ago they were discovered breeding 
in Manitoba, and more recently were found 
to do so in Minnesota and North Dakota. 
Each spring, in May, all the rosy gulls of 
a wide region somehow agree to resort to 
a particular one of various marshy lakes 
for the purpose of rearing their young. 
Just how they decide the important ques- 
tion is not for us humans to know. At 
any rate, what they do select is a great 
area of grass, reeds, or rushes growing out 
of the water, and there, out of the abun- 
dance of dry stems, each pair builds a 
partly floating nest, side by side with 
others, thousands upon thousands of them. 
These great “‘cities” of the prairie pigeon 
present one of the most dramatic, spectac- 
ular sights in the bird-life of this conti- 
nent, comparable in a way to the former 
breeding “‘roosts”’ of the real wild pigeon, 
and are well worth great effort on the part 
of any lover of wild life to see, offering 
particular sport to the hunter with the 
camera, as the game is both beautiful and 
readily approachable. 
It is no easy matter to locate a colony, 
as the birds select a wild region and are 
liable to change their location from year 
to year, so that to ascertain from settlers 
87 
where they have resorted before does not 
assure finding them the next season. The 
distances over the prairie are so vast that 
one may easily miss the colony. This was 
my experience in North Dakota, where | 
drove and tramped during several seasons 
over hundreds of miles of territory before 
I found the desired bird-city, and more 
latterly, in another part of the “great 
plains,” it proved no easy task to hunt the 
prairie pigeon with the camera to a suc- 
cessful issue. 
This was out on the broken, rolling 
prairie country of western Saskatchewan 
where there are many lakes and where the 
rosy gull is nearly everywhere a common 
bird. Most of the lakes which we first 
visited were more or less alkaline, and had 
no grass or reeds favorable to the desired 
pigeon roost. Plenty of birds were flying 
about everywhere, but no one knew where 
they made their headquarters. Now and 
then we investigated a lake of the right 
sort, but the birds had not seen fit to locate 
there. 
The ninth of June began as one of the 
many cold, lowering days of the wet season 
of 1905 on those bleak, wind-swept plains, 
when we started off on another cold drive 
in search of the elusive colony. The sky 
was dark with heavy masses of cumuli, 
and had a sinister, fallish aspect. The 
trail led for five miles over the irregular 
prairie and then up a billowy ridge. Out 
beyond us, almost as far as the eye could 
reach, extended a perfectly flat plain which 
in ages past had evidently been the bed of 
a very large lake. All that was left of it 
lay well out in the middle of the plain, a 
lake over a mile long, rather narrow, and in 
two arms, surrounded by a vast area of 
reeds. In the foreground a big bunch of 
cattle were feeding. As we drove nearer 
I noticed a few rosy gulls flying toward 
the lake, or hovering over the reeds. This 
showed that success was possible, though 
by no means assured, for again and again 
had similar good signs proved disappoint- 
ing. 
We were now within less than half a mile 
and the nearer we came the more birds 
were in evidence. Stopping the horse | 
got out my powerful stereo-binoculars, and 
took a good look. There was no longer 
room for doubt. By watching any one 
spot for a moment I could see gulls in 
