Page:The Passenger Pigeon - Mershon.djvu/84

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CHAPTER VI

The Passenger Pigeon

From "Life Histories of North American Birds,"[1]by Charles Bendire


GEOGRAPHICAL Range: Deciduous forest regions of eastern North America; west, casually, to Washington and Nevada; Cuba.

The breeding range of the Passenger Pigeon to-day is to be looked for principally in the thinly settled and wooded region along our northern border, from northern Maine westward to northern Minnesota; in the Dakotas, as well as in similar localities in the eastern and middle portions of the Dominion of Canada, and north at least to Hudson's Bay. Isolated and scattering pairs probably still breed in the New England States, northern New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and a few other localities further south, but the enormous breeding colonies, or pigeon roosts, as they were formerly called, frequently covering the forest for miles, and so often mentioned by natural-

  1. The first volume of Captain Bendire's monumental work was published in 1892, by which time the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon was foretold as a matter of a few more years. His contribution to the subject therefore deals with a much later period in the history of the bird and links the studies of Wilson and Audubon with the present day.