the john muir exhibit - writings - the_story_of_my_boyhood_and_youth - chapter 4
The Story of My Boyhood and Youth
by John Muir
Chapter IV
A Paradise of Birds
THE
Wisconsin oak openings were a summer paradise for song birds, and
a fine place to get acquainted with them; for the trees stood wide apart,
allowing one to see the happy home-seekers as they arrived in the spring,
their mating, nest-building, the brooding and feeding of the young, and,
after they were full-fledged and strong, to see all the families of the
neighborhood gathering and getting ready to leave in the fall. Excepting
the geese and ducks and pigeons nearly all our summer birds arrived singly
or in small draggled flocks, but when frost and falling leaves brought
their winter homes to mind they assembled in large flocks on dead or leafless
trees by the side of a meadow or field, perhaps to get acquainted and talk
the thing over. Some species held regular daily meetings for several weeks
before finally setting forth on their long southern journeys. Strange to
say, we never saw them start. Some morning we would find them gone. Doubtless
they migrated in the night time. Comparatively few species remained all
winter, the nuthatch, chickadee, owl, prairie chicken, quail, and a
few stragglers from the main flocks of ducks, jays, hawks, and bluebirds.
Only after the country was settled did either jays or bluebirds winter
with us.
The brave, frost-defying chickadees and nuthatches stayed all the year
wholly independent of farms and man's food and affairs.
With the first hints of spring came the brave little bluebirds, darling
singers as blue as the best sky, and of course we all loved them. Their
rich, crispy warbling is perfectly delightful, soothing and cheering, sweet
and whisperingly low, Nature's fine love touches, every note going straight
home into one's heart. And withal they are hardy and brave, fearless fighters
in defense of home. When we boys approached their knot-hole nests, the
bold little fellows kept scolding and diving at us and tried to strike
us in the face, and oftentimes we were afraid they would prick our eyes.
But the boldness of the little housekeepers only made us love them the
more.
None of the bird people of Wisconsin welcomed us more heartily than
the common robin. Far from showing alarm at the coming of settlers into
their native woods, they reared their young around our gardens as if they
liked us, and how heartily we admired the beauty and fine manners of these
graceful birds and their loud cheery song of Fear not, fear
not, cheer up, cheer up. It was easy to love them for they reminded
us of the robin redbreast of Scotland. Like the bluebirds they dared every
danger in defense of home, and we often wondered that birds so gentle could
be so bold and that sweet-voiced singers could so fiercely fight and scold.
Of all the great singers that sweeten Wisconsin one of the best known
and best loved is the brown thrush or thrasher, strong and able without
being familiar, and easily seen and heard. Rosy purple evenings after thunder-showers
are the favorite song-times, when the winds have died away and the steaming
ground and the leaves and flowers fill the air with fragrance. Then the
male makes haste to the topmost spray of an oak tree and sings loud and
clear with delightful enthusiasm until sundown, mostly I suppose for his
mate sitting on the precious eggs in a brush heap. And how faithful and
watchful and daring he is! Woe to the snake or squirrel that ventured to
go nigh the nest! We often saw him diving on them, pecking them about the
head and driving them away as bravely as the kingbird drives away hawks.
Their rich and varied strains make the air fairly quiver. We boys often
tried to interpret the wild ringing melody and put it into words.
After the arrival of the thrushes came the bobolinks. gushing, gurgling,
inexhaustible fountains of song, pouring forth floods of sweet notes over
the broad Fox River meadows in wonderful variety and volume, crowded and
miffed beyond description, as they hovered on quivering wings above their
hidden nests in the grass. It seemed marvelous to us that birds so moderate
in size could hold so much of this wonderful song stuff. Each one of them
poured forth music enough for a whole flock, singing as if its whole body,
feathers and all, were made up of music, flowing, glowing, bubbling melody
interpenetrated here and there with small scintillating prickles and spicules.
We never became so intimately acquainted with the bobolinks as with the
thrushes, for they lived far out on the broad Fox River meadows, while
the thrushes sang on the tree-tops around every home. The bobolinks were
among the first of our great singers to leave us in the fall, going apparently
direct to the rice-fields of the Southern States, where they grew fat and
were slaughtered in countless numbers for food. sad fate for singers so
purely divine.
One of the gayest of the singers is the redwing blackbird. In the spring,
when his scarlet epaulets shine brightest, and his little modest gray wife
is sitting on the nest, built on rushes in a swamp, he sits
on a near-by oak and devotedly sings almost all day. His rich simple strain
is baumpalee, baumpalee, or bobalee as interpreted by some.
In summer, after nesting cares are over, they assemble in flocks of hundreds
and thousands to feast on Indian corn when it is in the milk. Scattering
over a field, each selects an ear, strips the husk down far enough to lay
bare an inch or two of the end of it, enjoys an exhilarating feast, and
after all are full they rise simultaneously with a quick birr of wings
like an old-fashioned church congregation fluttering to their feet when
the minister after giving out the hymn says, "Let the congregation
arise and sing." Alighting on near-by trees, they sing with a hearty
vengeance, bursting out without any puttering prelude in gloriously glad
concert, hundreds or thousands of exulting voices with sweet gurgling baumpalees
mingled with chippy vibrant and exploding globules of musical notes,
making a most enthusiastic, indescribable joy-song, a combination unlike
anything to be heard elsewhere in the bird kingdom; something like bagpipes,
flutes, violins, pianos, and human-like voices all bursting and bubbling
at once. Then suddenly some one of the joyful congregation shouts Chirr!
Chirr! and all stop as if shot.
The sweet-voiced meadowlark with its placid, simple song
of peery-eery-ódical was another favorite, and we soon learned
to admire the Baltimore oriole and its wonderful hanging nests, and the
scarlet tanager glowing like fire amid the green leaves.
But no singer of them all got farther into our hearts than the little
speckle-breasted song sparrow, one of the first to arrive and begin nest-building
and singing. The richness, sweetness, and pathos of this small darling's
song as he sat on a low bush often brought tears to our eyes.
The little cheery, modest chickadee midget, loved by every innocent
boy and girl, man and woman, and by many not altogether innocent, was one
of the first of the birds to attract our attention, drawing nearer and
nearer to us as the winter advanced, bravely singing his faint silvery,
lisping, tinkling notes ending with a bright dee, dee, dee! however
frosty the weather.
The nuthatches, who also stayed all winter with us,
were favorites with us boys. We loved to watch them as they traced the
bark-furrows of the oaks and hickories head downward, deftly flicking off
loose scales and splinters in search of insects, and braving the coldest
weather as if their little sparks of life were as safely warm in winter
as in summer, unquenchable by the severest frost. With the help of the
chickadees they made a delightful stir in the solemn winter
days, and when we were out chopping we never ceased to wonder how their
slender flaked toes could be kept warm when our own were so painfully frosted
though clad in thick socks and boots. And we wondered and admired the more
when we thought of the little midgets sleeping in knot-holes when the temperature
was far below zero, sometimes thirty-five degrees below, and in the morning,
after a minute breakfast of a few frozen in-sects and hoarfrost crystals,
playing and chatting in cheery tones as if food, weather, and everything
was according to their own warm hearts. Our Yankee told us that the name
of this darling was Devil-downhead.
Their big neighbors the owls also made good winter music, singing out
loud in wild, gallant strains bespeaking brave comfort, let the frost bite
as it might. The solemn hooting of the species with the widest throat seemed
to us the very wildest of all the winter sounds.
Prairie chickens crane strolling in family flocks about the shanty, picking
seeds and grasshoppers like domestic fowls, and they became still more
abundant as wheat-and-corn-fields were multiplied, but also wilder, of
course, when every shotgun in the country was aimed at them. The booming
of the males during the
mating-season was one of the loudest and strangest of the early spring
sounds being easily heard on calm mornings at a distance of a half or three
fourths of a mile. As soon as the snow was off the ground, they assembled
in flocks of a dozen or two on an open spot, usually on the side of a ploughed
field, ruffled up their feathers, inflated the curious colored sacks on
the sides of their necks, and strutted about with queer gestures something
like turkey gobblers, uttering strange loud, rounded, drumming calls,--boom!
boom! boom! interrupted by choking sounds. My brother Daniel caught
one while she was sitting on her nest in our corn-field. The young are
just like domestic chicks, run with the mother as soon as hatched, and
stay with her until autumn, feeding on the ground, never taking wing unless
disturbed. In winter, when full-grown, they assemble in large flocks, fly
about sundown to selected roosting-places on tall trees, and to feeding-places
in the morning,--unhusked corn-fields, if any are to be found in the neighborhood,
or thickets of dwarf birch and willows, the buds of which furnish a considerable
part of their food when snow covers the ground.
The wild rice-marshes along the Fox River and around Pucaway Lake were
the summer homes of millions of ducks, and in the Indian summer,
when the rice was ripe, they grew very fat. The magnificent mallards in
particular afforded our Yankee neighbors royal feasts almost without price,
for often as many as a half-dozen were killed at a shot, but we seldom
were allowed a single hour for hunting and so got very few. The autumn
duck season was a glad time for the Indians also, for they feasted and
grew fat not only on the ducks but on the wild rice, large quantities of
which they gathered as they glided through the midst of the generous crop
in canoes, bending down handfuls over the sides, and beating out the grain
with small paddles.
The warmth of the deep spring fountains of the creek in our meadow kept
it open all the year, and a few pairs of wood ducks, the most beautiful,
we thought, of all the ducks, wintered in it. I well remember the first
specimen I ever saw. Father shot it in the creek during a snowstorm, brought
it into the house, and called us around him, saying: "Come, bairns,
and admire the work of God displayed in this bonnie bird. Naebody but God
could paint feathers like these. Juist look at the colors, hoo they shine,
and hoo fine they overlap and blend thegether like the colors o' the rainbow."
And we all agreed that never, never before had we seen so awfu' bonnie
a bird. A pair nested every year in the hollow top of an oak
stump about fifteen feet high that stood on the side of the meadow, and
we used to wonder how they got the fluffy young ones down from the nest
and across the meadow to the lake when they were only helpless, featherless
midgets; whether the mother carried them to the water on her back or in
her mouth. I never saw the thing done or found anybody who had until this
summer, when Mr. Holabird, a keen observer, told me that he once saw the
mother carry them from the nest tree in her mouth, quickly coming and going
to a near-by stream, and in a few minutes get them all together and proudly
sail away.
Sometimes a flock of swans were seen passing over at a great height
on their long journeys, and we admired their clear bugle notes, but they
seldom visited any of the lakes in our neighborhood, so seldom that when
they did it was talked of for years. One was shot by a blacksmith on a
millpond with a long-range Sharp's rifle, and many of the neighbors went
far to see it.
The common gray goose, Canada honker, flying in regular harrow-shaped
flocks, was one of the wildest and wariest of all the large birds that
enlivened the spring and autumn. They seldom ventured to alight in our
small lake, fearing, I suppose, that hunters might be concealed
in the rushes; but on account of their fondness for the young leaves of
winter wheat when they were a few inches high, they often alighted on our
fields when passing on their way south, and occasionally even in our corn-fields
when a snowstorm was blowing and they were hungry and wing-weary, with
nearly an inch of snow on their backs. In such times of distress we used
to pity them, even while trying to get a shot at them. They were exceedingly
cautious and circumspect; usually flew several times round the adjacent
thickets and fences to make sure that no enemy was near before settling
down, and one always stood on guard, relieved from time to time, while
the flock was feeding. Therefore there was no chance to creep up on them
unobserved; you had to be well hidden before the flock arrived. It was
the ambition of boys to be able to shoot these wary birds. I never got
but two, both of them at one so-called lucky shot. When I ran to pick them
up, one of them flew away, but as the poor fellow was sorely wounded he
did n't fly far. When I caught him after a short chase, he uttered a piercing
cry of terror and despair, which the leader of the flock heard at a distance
of about a hundred rods. They had flown off in frightened disorder, of
course, but had got into the regular harrow-shape order when
the leader heard the cry, and I shall never forget how bravely he left
his place at the head of the flock and hurried back screaming and struck
at me in trying to save his companion. I dodged down and held my hands
over my head, and thus escaped a blow of his elbows. Fortunately I had
left my gun at the fence, and the life of this noble bird was spared after
he had risked it in trying to save his wounded friend or neighbor or family
relation. For so shy a bird boldly to attack a hunter showed wonderful
sympathy and courage. This is one of my strangest hunting experiences.
Never before had I regarded wild geese as dangerous, or capable of such
noble self-sacrificing devotion.
The loud clear call of the handsome bob-whites was one of the pleasantest
and most characteristic of our spring sounds, and we soon learned to imitate
it so well that a bold cock often accepted our challenge and came flying
to fight. The young run as soon as they are hatched and follow their parents
until spring, roosting on the ground in a close bunch, heads out ready
to scatter and fly. These fine birds were seldom seen when we first arrived
in the wilderness, but when wheat-fields supplied abundance of food they
multiplied very fast, although oftentimes sore pressed during
hard winters when the snow reached a depth of two or three feet, covering
their food, while the mercury fell to twenty or thirty degrees below zero.
Occasionally, although shy on account of being persistently hunted, under
pressure of extreme hunger in the very coldest weather when the snow was
deepest they ventured into barnyards and even approached the doorsteps
of houses, searching for any sort of scraps and crumbs, as if piteously
begging for food. One of our neighbors saw a flock come creeping up through
the snow, unable to fly, hardly able to walk, and while approaching the
door several of them actually fell down and died; showing that birds, usually
so vigorous and apparently independent of fortune, suffer and lose their
lives in extreme weather like the rest of us, frozen to death like settlers
caught in blizzards. None of our neighbors perished in storms, though many
had feet, ears, and fingers frost-nipped or solidly frozen.
As soon as the lake ice melted, we heard the lonely cry of the loon,
one of the wildest and most striking of all the wilderness sounds, a strange,
sad, mournful, unearthly cry, half laughing, half wailing. Nevertheless
the great northern diver, as our species is called, is a brave, hardy,
beautiful bird, able to fly under water about as well as above it, and to
spear and capture the swiftest fishes for fod. Those
that haunted our lake were so wary none was shot for years,
though every boy hunter in the neighborhood was ambitious to get one to
prove his skill. On one of our bitter cold New Year holidays I was surprised
to see a loon in the small open part of the lake at the mouth of the inlet
that was kept from freezing by the warm spring water. I knew that it could
not fly out of so small a place, for these heavy birds have to beat the
water for half a mile or so before they can get fairly on the wing. Their
narrow, finlike wings are very small as compared with the weight of the
body and are evidently made for flying through water as well as through
the air, and it is by means of their swift flight through the water and
the swiftness of the blow they strike with their long, spear-like bills
that they are able to capture the fishes on which they feed. I ran down
the meadow with the gun, got into my boat, and pursued that poor winter-bound
straggler. Of course he dived again and again, but had to come up to breathe,
and I at length got a quick shot at his head and slightly wounded or stunned
him, caught him, and ran proudly back to the house with my prize. I carried
him in my arms; he didn't struggle to get away or offer to strike me, and
when I put him on the floor in front of the kitchen stove, he
just rested quietly on his belly as noiseless and motionless as if he were
a stuffed specimen on a shelf, held his neck erect, gave no sign of suffering
from any wound, and though he was motionless, his small black eyes seemed
to be ever keenly watchful. His formidable bill, very sharp, three or three
and a half inches long, and shaped like a pickaxe, was held perfectly level.
But the wonder was that he did not struggle or make the slightest movement.
We had a tortoise-shell cat, an old Tom of great experience, who was so
fond of lying under the stove in frosty weather that it was difficult even
to poke him out with a broom; but when he saw and smelled that strange
big fishy, black and white, speckledy bird, the like of which he
had never before seen, he rushed wildly to the farther corner of the kitchen,
looked back cautiously and suspiciously, and began to make a careful study
of the handsome but dangerous looking stranger. Becoming more and more
curious and interested, he at length advanced a step or two for a nearer
new and nearer smell; and as the wonderful bird kept absolutely motionless,
he was encouraged to venture gradually nearer and nearer until with perhaps
five or six feet of its breast. Then the wary loon, not liking
Tom's looks in so near a view, which perhaps recalled to his mind the
plundering minks and muskrats he had to fight when they approached his
nest, prepared to defend himself by slowly, almost imperceptibly drawing
back his long pickaxe bill, and without the slightest fuss or stir held
it level and ready just over his tail. With that dangerous bill drawn so
far back out of the way, Tom's confidence in the stranger's peaceful intentions
seemed almost complete, and, thus encouraged, he at last ventured forward
with wondering, questioning eyes and quivering nostrils until he was only
eighteen or twenty inches from the loon's smooth white breast. When the
beautiful bird, apparently as peaceful and inoffensive as a flower, saw
that his hairy yellow enemy had arrived at the right distance, the loon,
who evidently was a fine judge of the reach of his spear, shot it forward
quick as a lightning-flash, in marvelous contrast to the wonderful slowness
of the preparatory poising, backward motion. The aim was true to a hairbreadth.
Tom was struck right in the centre of his forehead, between the eyes. I
thought his skull was cracked. Perhaps it was. The sudden astonishment
of that outraged cat, the virtuous indignation and wrath, terror, and pain,
are far beyond description. His eyes and screams and desperate retreat
told all that. When the blow was received, he made a noise that I never
heard a cat make before or since; an awfully deep, condensed,
screechy, explosive Wuck! as he bounced straight up in the air like
a bucking bronco; and when he alighted after his spring, he rushed madly
across the room and made frantic efforts to climb up the hard-finished
plaster wall. Not satisfied to get the width of the kitchen away from his
mysterious enemy, for the first time that cold winter he tried to get out
of the house, anyhow, anywhere out of that loon-infested room. When he
finally ventured to look back and saw that the barbarous bird was still
there, tranquil and motionless in front of the stove, he regained command
of some of his shattered senses and carefully commenced to examine his
wound. Backed against the wall in the farthest corner, and keeping his
eye on the outrageous bird, he tenderly touched and washed the sore spot,
wetting his paw with his tongue, pausing now and then as his courage increased
to glare and stare and growl at his enemy with looks and tones wonderfully
human, as if saying: "You confounded fishy, unfair rascal! What did
you do that for? What had I done to you? Faithless, legless, long-nosed
wretch!" Intense experiences like the above bring out the humanity
that is in all animals. One touch of nature, even a cat-and-loon touch,
makes all the world kin.
It was a great memorable day when the first flock of passenger pigeons
came to our farm, calling to mind the story we had read about them when
we were at school in Scotland. Of all God's feathered people that sailed
the Wisconsin sky, no other bird seemed to us so wonderful. The beautiful
wanderers flew like the winds in flocks of millions from climate to climate
in accord with the weather, finding their food--acorns, beechnuts, pine-nuts,
cranberries, strawberries, huckleberries, juniper berries, hackberries,
buckwheat, rice, wheat, oats, corn--in fields and forests thousands of
miles apart. I have seen flocks streaming south in the fall so large that
they were flowing over from horizon to horizon in an almost continuous
stream all day long, at the rate of forty or fifty miles an hour, like
a mighty river in the sky, widening, contracting, descending like falls
and cataracts, and rising suddenly here and there in huge ragged masses
like high-plashing spray. How wonderful the distances they flew in a day--in
a year--in a lifetime! They arrived in Wisconsin in the spring just after
the sun had cleared away the snow, and alighted in the woods to feed on
the fallen acorns that they had missed the previous autumn. A comparatively
small flock swept thousands of acres perfectly clean of acorns in a few
minutes, by moving straight ahead with a broad front. All got
their share, for the rear constantly became the van by flying over the
flock and alighting in front, the entire flock constantly changing from
rear to front, revolving something like a wheel with a low buzzing wing
roar that could be heard a long way off. In summer they feasted on wheat
and oats and were easily approached as they rested on the trees along the
sides of the field after a good full meal, displaying beautiful iridescent
colors as they moved their necks backward and forward when we went very
near them. Every shotgun was aimed at them and everybody feasted on pigeon
pies, and not a few of the settlers feasted also on the beauty of the wonderful
birds. The breast of the male is a fine rosy red, the lower part of the
neck behind and along the sides changing from the red of the breast to
gold, emerald green and rich crimson. The general color of the upper parts
is grayish blue, the under parts white. The extreme length of the bird
is about seventeen inches; the finely modeled slender tail about eight
inches, and extent of wings twentyfour inches. The females are scarcely
less beautiful. "Oh, what bonnie, bonnie birds!" we exclaimed
over the first that fell into our hands. "Oh, what colors!
Look at their breasts, bonnie as roses, and at their necks aglow
wi' every color juist like the wonderfu' wood ducks. Oh, the bonnie, bonnie
creatures, they beat a'! Where did they a' come fra, and where are they
a' gan? It's awfu' like a sin to kill them!" To this some smug, practical
old sinner would remark: "Aye, it's a peety, as ye say, to kill the
bonnie things, but they were made to be killed, and sent for us to eat
as the quails were sent to God's chosen people, the Israelites, when they
were starving in the desert ayont the Red Sea. And I must confess that
meat was never put up in neater, handsomer-painted packages."
In the New England and Canada woods beechnuts were their best and most
abundant food, farther north, cranberries and huckleberries. After everything
was cleaned up in the north and winter was coming on, they went south for
rice, corn, acorns, haws, wild grapes, crab-apples, sparkle-berries, etc.
They seemed to require more than half of the continent for feeding-grounds,
moving from one table to another, field to field, forest to forest, finding
something ripe and wholesome all the year round. In going south in the
fine Indian-summer weather they flew high and followed one another, though
the head of the flock might be hundreds of miles in advance. But against
head winds they took advantage of the inequalities of the ground,
flying comparatively low. All followed the leader's ups and downs over
hill and dale though far out of sight, never hesitating at any turn of
the way, vertical or horizontal that the leaders had taken, though the
largest flocks stretched across several States, and belts of different
kinds of weather.
There were no roosting- or breeding-places near our farm,
and I never saw any of them until long after the great flocks were exterminated.
I therefore quote, from Audubon's and Pokagon's vivid descriptions.
"Toward evening," Audubon says, "they depart for the
roosting-place, which may be hundreds of miles distant. One on the banks
of Green River, Kentucky, was over three miles wide and forty long."
"My first view of it," says the great naturalist, "was
about a fortnight after it had been chosen by the birds, and I arrived
there nearly two hours before sunset. Few pigeons were then to be seen,
but a great many persons with horses and wagons and armed with guns, long
poles, sulphur pots, pine pitch torches, etc.,
had already established encampments
on the borders. Two farmers had driven upwards of three hundred hogs a
distance of more than a hundred miles to be fattened on slaughtered pigeons.
Here and there the people employed in plucking and salting what
had already been secured were sitting in the midst of piles of birds. Dung
several inches thick covered the ground. Many trees two feet in diameter
were broken off at no great distance from the ground, and the branches
of many of the tallest and largest had given way, as if the forest had
been swept by a tornado.
"Not a pigeon had arrived at sundown. Suddenly a general cry arose--'
Here they come!' The noise they made, though still distant, reminded me
of a hard gale at sea passing through the rigging of a close-reefed ship.
Thousands were soon knocked down by the pole-men. The birds continued to
pour in. The fires were lighted and a magnificent as well as terrifying
sight presented itself. The pigeons pouring in alighted everywhere, one
above another, until solid masses were formed on the branches all around.
Here and there the perches gave way with a crash, and falling destroyed
hundreds beneath, forcing down the dense groups with which every stick
was loaded; a scene of uproar and conflict. I found it useless to speak
or even to shout to those persons nearest me. Even the reports of the guns
were seldom heard, and I was made aware of the firing only by seeing the
shooters reloading. None dared venture within the line of devastation.
The hogs had been penned up in due time, the picking up of the
dead and wounded being left for the next morning's employment. The pigeons
were constantly coming in and it was after midnight before I perceived
a decrease in the number of those that arrived. The uproar continued all
night, and, anxious to know how far the sound reached I sent off a man
who, returning two hours after, informed me that he had heard it distinctly
three miles distant.
"Toward daylight the noise in some measure subsided; long before
objects were distinguishable the pigeons began to move off in a direction
quite different from that in which they had arrived the evening before,
and at sunrise all that were able to fly had disappeared. The howling of
the wolves now reached our ears, and the foxes, lynxes, cougars, bears,
coons, opossums, and polecats were seen sneaking off, while eagles and
hawks of different species, accompanied by a crowd of vultures, came to
supplant them and enjoy a share of the spoil.
"Then the authors of
all this devastation began their entry amongst the dead, the dying and
mangled. The pigeons were picked up and piled in heaps until each had as
many as they could possibly dispose of, when the hogs were let loose to
feed on the remainder.
"The breeding-places are selected with reference to
abundance of food, and countless myriads resort to them. At this period
the note of the pigeon is coo coo coo, like that of the domestic
species but much shorter. They caress by billing, and during incubation
the male supplies the female with food. As the young grow, the tyrant of
creation appears to disturb the peaceful scene, armed with axes to chop
down the squab-laden trees, and the abomination of desolation and destruction
produced far surpasses even that of the roosting places."
Pokagon, an educated Indian writer, says: "I saw one nesting-place
in Wisconsin one hundred miles long and from three to ten miles wide. Every
tree, some of them quite low and scrubby, had from one to fifty nests on
each. Some of the nests overflow from the oaks to the hemlock and pine
woods. When the pigeon hunters attack the breeding-places they sometimes
cut the timber from thousands of acres. Millions are caught in nets with
salt or grain for bait, and schooners, sometimes loaded down with the birds,
are taken to New York, where they are sold for a cent apiece."
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