Flights of locusts are often seen passing through the air, like vast
clouds, obscuring the sky. The passenger-pigeon of America appears in
almost equal numbers. The accounts of their vast nights would be
incredible, were they not thoroughly well authenticated.
They are beautiful birds; the males being about sixteen inches in
length, the females slightly smaller, and usually of less attractive
plumage. The head, part of the neck, and chin of the male bird, are of
a slaty-blue colour; the lower portions being also of a slate colour,
banded with gold, green, and purplish-crimson, changing as the bird
moves here and there. Reddish-hazel feathers cover the throat and
breast, while the upper tail-coverts and back are of a dark slaty-blue.
Their other feathers are black, edged with white; and the lower part of
the breast and abdomen are purplish-red and white. The beak is black,
and the eyes of a fiery orange hue, with a naked space round them of
purplish-red.
Its chief food is the beech-mast; but it also lives on acorns, and grain
of all sorts--especially rice. It is calculated that each bird eats
half a pint of food in the day; and when we recollect their numbers, we
may conceive what an immense amount must be consumed.
The female hatches only one bird at a time, in a nest slightly made of a
few twigs, loosely woven into a sort of platform. Upwards of one
hundred nests have been found in one tree, with a single egg in each of
them; but there are probably two or three broods in the season. In a
short time the young become very plump, and so fat, that they are
occasionally melted down for the sake of their fat alone. They choose
particular places for roosting--generally amid a grove of the oldest and
largest trees in the neighbourhood.
Wilson, Audubon, and other naturalists, give us vivid descriptions of
the enormous flights of these birds. Let us watch with Audubon in the
neighbourhood of one of their curious roosting-places. We now catch
sight of a flight of the birds moving with great steadiness and
rapidity, at a height out of gunshot, in several strata deep, and close
together. From right to left, far as the eye can reach, the breadth of
this vast procession extends, teeming everywhere, equally crowded. An
hour passes, and they rather increase in numbers and rapidity of flight.
The leaders of this vast body sometimes vary their course, now forming
a large band of more than a mile in diameter; those behind tracing the
exact route of their predecessors. Now they once more change their
direction--the column becoming an immense front, sweeping the heavens in
one vast and infinitely extended line. Suddenly a hawk makes a sweep on
a particular part of the column, when almost as quick as lightning that
part shoots downwards out of the common track; but soon again rising,
advances at the same rate as before.
We will now hurry on towards their breeding place, a forest on the banks
of the Green River in Kentucky, fully forty miles in length, and more
than three in width. In the neighbourhood are assembled a large number
of persons, with horses, waggons, guns, and ammunition; and a farmer has
brought three hundred hogs to be fattened on the refuse pigeons. As the
vast flight arrives at the spot, thousands are knocked down by men with
long poles. Some place pots of sulphur under the trees; others are
provided with torches of pine-knots; and the rest have guns. The birds
continue to pour in. The fires are lighted; and a magnificent, as well
as almost terrifying, sight presents itself. The pigeons arrive by
thousands, alighting everywhere, one above another, till solid masses,
as large as hogsheads, are formed on the branches all around. Here and
there the perches give way with a crash, and falling to the ground,
destroy hundreds of the birds beneath, forcing down the dense groups
with which every stick is loaded. The pigeons continue coming, and it
is past midnight before there is any sign of a decrease in their
numbers. The ground in all directions is strewed with branches broken
by the weight of the birds which have pitched on them. By sunrise, the
enormous multitude have taken their departure, while wolves, foxes, and
other animals who had assembled to feast on the bodies of the slain, are
seen sneaking off.
Audubon describes the flight of one of these almost solid masses of
birds pursued by a hawk; now darting compactly in undulating and angular
lines, now descending close to the earth, and with inconceivable
velocity mounting perpendicularly, so as to resemble a vast column, and
then wheeling and twisting within their continued lines, resembling the
coils of a gigantic serpent. Their assemblages greatly surpass in
numbers those of the pinnated grouse already described.