If the reader is interested in numbers, he will appreciate the
statement written about 1808 by Wilson, who estimated that a flock
of Wild Pigeons observed by him near Frankfort, Kentucky, contained
at least 2,230,272,000 individuals. If he is also interested in the aspect
presented by these birds in flight, cloud-like in form and apparently
boundless in extent, he will read the full and graphic descriptions
given by Audubon. In 1863, when the writer was a boy, he remembers
seeing the birds brought to town in barrels and sold at a price which
did not justify transportation to market. What appeared to be a cloud,
dark and lowering, was not infrequently seen approaching, soon to shut
out the light of the sun, until the birds which composed it, on the way
to or from their feeding or roosting places, had passed on. Now hear
what Major Bendire, as late as 1892, says: "It looks now as if their
total extermination might be accomplished within the present century.
The only thing which retards their complete extinction is that it no
longer pays to net these birds, they being too scarce for this now, at
least in the more settled portions of the country, and also, perhaps,
that from constant and unremitting persecution on their breeding
grounds, they have changed their habits somewhat, the majority no longer
breeding in colonies, but scattering over the country and breeding in
isolated pairs."
The natural home of the Wild Pigeon is within the wooded lands, and
they are seldom met with upon the broad prairies. Audubon observed
that it was almost entirely influenced in its migrations by the abundance
of its food, that temperature had little to do with it, as they not
infrequently moved northward in large columns as early as the 7th of
March, with a temperature twenty degrees below the freezing point.
"The Wild Pigeons are capable of propelling themselves in long continued
flights and are known to move with an almost incredible rapidity,
passing over a great extent of country in a very short time." Pigeons
have been captured in the state of New York with their crops still
filled with the undigested grains of rice that must have been taken in
the distant fields of Georgia or South Carolina, apparently proving that
they must have passed over the intervening space within a very few
hours. Audubon estimated the rapidity of their flight as at least a mile
a minute.
The Wild Pigeon is remarkable for its ease and grace, whether on the
ground or the limbs of trees. Though living, moving, and feeding
together in large companies, they mate in pairs. Several broods are
reared in a season, nesting beginning very early in the spring. The
nests are placed on trees, being a slight platform structure of twigs,
without any material for lining whatever. Two white eggs are laid.
Mr. Goss says (1891) that the Passenger Pigeon is still to be found in
numbers within the Indian Territory and portions of the southern states,
and in Kansas a few breed occasionally in the Neosho Valley.