DoE ALULD UU BO:N (BiU.b L ETI N of 
it carefully. The other marks of the passenger pigeon were all there: the 
reddish breast and bluish back, both much more highly colored than in the 
mourning dove, and the long graduated tail. 
The next day I went to the same place to see whether that unusual 
visitor was still there. It was, only now there were two, male and female. 
The area was a sizable tract of real estate, the Waller addition, which 
had been kept in reserve for many years. There were many large old trees 
in it, also large clumps of big shrubs which had been planted years before. 
We always found numerous nests of mourning doves, blue jays, brown 
thrashers, cardinals, and others there. For many years it had been sur- 
rounded by an eight-foot fence, but it had recently been opened for the 
building of fine homes, of which there were a few in the tract then. The 
two birds were in the top of a large cottonwood, a habit different from that 
of mourning doves. Here they were in a better hght than if they had 
frequented the lower parts of trees, as the mourning dove does. Enchanted, 
I kept my binoculars glued on them. When I got too close they flew away 
with the same characteristic whistling sound produced by the wings of the 
mourning dove, but they seemed to dip their wings lower, then they would 
set their wings like the meadowlark or prairie chicken and glide a distance. 
They were also considerably more wary than their smaller relative. 
On May 11 the pair flew over the campus and lit in a grove of big 
cottonwoods across the street from my house, where several new houses 
were going up. That hustle and bustle below them did not suit them, so 
they flew away in a hurry. May 16 I saw them again in the same cotton- 
woods in Waller’s addition. They repeatedly flew into the grounds of a 
large palatial home which occupied a city block, surrounded by large trees 
and numerous clumps of shrubbery and an eight-foot fence. 
After an absence from home of about three weeks I saw them once 
more on July 18, still in the same cottonwoods. After that they seemed 
to have disappeared; I hoped that they had not been shot. I could have 
secured them, but I did not think of such a thing. I hoped they would nest 
there and perhaps establish a little flock in this favorable locality. But 
that was hoping too much; I saw them no more. There was so much cover 
of trees and shrubs here that some years later, when there were many more 
homes built, a pair of wood thrushes nested nearby in two large, intertwined 
hawthorn trees, so quiet and woodlike was it there. 
Finally, in a number of “American Forests” in March, 1941, there is 
an account of the passenger pigeon having been seen in the wildest part of 
the Georgia Alleghanies. I never heard whether anything came of that. 
It does seem unnatural, if not impossible, that a species occurring in such 
gigantic numbers as the passenger pigeon, the largest recorded for any 
bird or mammal, should vanish so utterly, completely, without leaving behind 
at least some straying remnant of its former abundance. If so, the remnant 
might for years be too small to stage a come-back in any number. 
Windermere, Florida. 
fl ft ft 
THE FLYING muscles of a bird are sometimes half its entire weight. 
