“Here ends Audubon’s story. What do you think of it, my friends?”
“I think,” Jules replied, “that those flocks of pigeons darkening the sky and taking several days to pass over are the most astonishing thing I have ever heard of about birds.”
“And I,” said Emile, “am still thinking of that shower of dung that falls from the sky, as thick as flakes of snow in winter, when the pigeons are flying over. Everywhere they fly the ground is whitened with this singular shower.”
“And those trees breaking under the pigeons’ weight,” Louis exclaimed; “those three hundred pigs let loose to surfeit on what the hunters have left—all that would seem incredible to me if Uncle Paul had not assured us it was so.”
“It’s a great pity,” sighed Emile, “that we have no such flocks of pigeons here. If they are knocked [[157]]down with nothing but a pole, as we knock down apples and nuts, I would undertake to bag a fine lot myself.”
“Would you also,” his uncle asked him, “undertake to find food for the pigeons, when for a single day’s supply for one of their flocks it takes from eight to nine million bushels of seeds? You see well enough that such multitudes would be calamitous: the entire harvest of a province would scarcely be enough to fill the crops of these ravenous birds. Such flocks require vast tracts of woodland not exploited by man, such as America had sixty years ago, in Audubon’s time. But to-day, in that country, as civilization extends its boundaries the primeval forests disappear and give place to cultivated fields. Food becoming scarce, pigeons also become scarce; and it is doubtful whether one could ever again witness such prodigious scenes as formerly.” [[158]]
[1] Audubon’s narrative (“Ornithological Biography,” vol. I, pp. 319–324) is here reproduced with greater accuracy than the French writer chose to observe. The omissions indicated occur in the French, but are not there indicated.—Translator. [↑]