Yours very truly,
C. H. Ames.
Memorandum prepared by Mr. Robert Ridgway, Curator of the Division of Birds, U. S. National Museum, to accompany letter to Mr. W. B. Mershon, Saginaw, Mich.
If Mr. Mershon will communicate on the subject of Passenger Pigeons with Mr. William Brewster, [E] 145 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Mass., he may get some data which will (or ought to) dismiss from consideration the idea that the passenger pigeon could have been exterminated in the manner suggested by Mr. Ames. During a visit to northern Michigan, Mr. Brewster talked with a great many pigeon netters. I have forgotten the figures, and may be very inexact in my recollection of them, but my recollection is that at one "roost" there were one hundred netters who averaged one thousand (it may have been ten thousand) pigeons per day. When it is considered that this was the rate of destruction at one locality in one State only, that the same was going on in other States, and that tens of thousands were being killed by hunters and others, and this year after year, I cannot see anything surprising in the eventual extermination of the species, no matter how numerously represented originally.
[E] See Chapter VII, "Netting the Pigeon" by Wm. Brewster.
Nothing in the history of the Passenger Pigeon is more certainly known than the fact that its range to the southward did not extend beyond the United States. There is a single Cuban record, but the occurrence was purely accidental. The migrations of the Passenger Pigeon were wholly different in their character from those of true emigrants, that is to say, they were influenced or controlled purely by the matter of food supply, as in the case of the robin and some other birds, and the flights were as often from west to east and vice versa as from south to north or north to south; in short, the flocks moved about in various directions in their search for food or nesting places. For myself, I do not believe in the story of drowning in the Gulf of Mexico for two reasons. In the first place the birds are extremely unlikely to have been there, a hurricane from the northward being absolutely necessary to explain their presence in that quarter, and, in the second place, no such explanation is needed in view of what is known to be the facts concerning their wholesale destruction by human agency alone.
The range of the Passenger Pigeon was limited to the mixed hardwood forest region of the eastern United States and Canada, and any that occurred beyond were stragglers, pure and simple. Consequently it was not found, except as stragglers, in the long-leaf pine belt of the Gulf Coast, but only on the uplands from northern or middle Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, northward.