the owner killed a hundred or more in one morning. The writer, during the past forty years, has studied the birds of the vicinity of New York, and in all that period has seen only one live Wild Pigeon. The writer's father who lived at Tarrytown. N. Y., in his boyhood, has often told of the enormous flocks of Pigeons he saw there, so great that in passing overhead the sun was darkened as by a rain-cloud and the noise of their wings was like thunder.
Today the Wild Pigeon is so rare that the observation of a single individual is considered noteworthy.
The species continued abundant until about 1860, when, as a result of increasing slaughter for food, it began rapidly to diminish in numbers, and no large flock has been recorded since 1888. Frank M. Chapman tells me that as late as July, 1881. he saw Wild Pigeons used in large numbers at a trap-shooting tournament held near New York City. The birds had been netted in the West and were often so helpless from their confinement in foul cages that they were unable to fly. William Brewster writes that in 1876 or 1877 there was a Pigeon-nesting near Petosky, Michigan, which was twenty-eight miles long and averaged four miles in width. The disappearance of so abundant a creature in so comparatively short time is a surprising illustration of man’s power in the animal world, when, for any reason, his forces are directed toward a certain end.
Wild Pigeons lived in flocks at all seasons, nesting, roosting and feeding in enormous bodies. Wilson mentions a nesting colony which was several miles in breadth and upwards of forty miles in extent! The birds chose preferably beech woods. and as many as ninety nests have been counted in a single tree. The flock previously mentioned, estimated to contain over two billion individuals, stretched from horizon to horizon, as far as the eye could reach in every direction, and was four hours in passing a given point. At all seasons, whether migrating. roosting or nesting. Pigeons were subject to attack by man. Their migrations were governed largely by the food supply, acorns and beech-nuts constituting their chief fare, and when they appeared at a certain place their destruction became the object of the day. Many were shot, but by far the larger number were netted with the aid of live decoys. Wilson tells of thirty dozen birds being captured at one spring of the net, Audubon states that he knew a man who, in Pennsylvania, netted 500 dozen Pigeons in one day.
When roosting. Pigeons were attacked by men armed with guns, poles, clubs, and even pots of sulphur, and wagon-loads of birds were killed nightly. Similar methods of destruction were employed when the birds were nesting. At this season the squabs were especially desired, and the trees were shaken or felled to obtain them. When the wants of the hunters had been supplied, droves of hogs were released beneath the nesting trees to feed on the birds remaining. At one of the last large known Pig-
