Page:The Passenger Pigeon - Mershon.djvu/183

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152
The Passenger Pigeon

Upon inquiry here among old residents, I am told that there was quite a large roost on a beech ridge about forty miles west of here, which would be at a point north of the present station of Eckerman. I have been unable to learn just when this roosting place was discontinued, but as near as I can make out from comparing statements and records, it must have been in '78, '79, or '80.

I have heard of a large roosting place in northern Wisconsin which was used as late as 1874 by vast numbers of birds. It was located to the south and a little west of Lac Vieux Desert. At the head of the Pike River in Wisconsin, a point probably sixty-five miles south of here, and west into that State, the pigeons were seen in large numbers until 1872. As I understand it, in the early days they were very likely to frequent the same section year after year when not too much disturbed.

Mr. Newell A. Eddy of Bay City, Mich., under date of Aug. 7, 1905, wrote me as follows:

I find that I have but few notes regarding this species. On Sept. 13, 1880, I took a single bird near the city of Bangor, Maine. The sex was not determined. This was an unusual capture for the place and the time. A few years previous to that time, on a canoeing trip to the headwaters of the Penobscot River, I fell in with a small flock of a dozen or more in an old