The Passenger Pigeon

by Unknown

In 1885 I met with the pigeon on Mackinac Island, and have found a few isolated flocks in the Lower Peninsula since then, generally in the fall, but it is safe to say that the birds will never again appear in one-thousandth part of the number of former years.

The places where the birds are nesting are interesting spots to visit. Both parents incubate and the scene is animated as the birds fly about in all directions. However, as the bulk of the birds must fly to quite a distance from an immense rookery to find food, it necessarily follows that the main flocks arrive and depart evening and morning. Then the crush is often terrific and the air is fairly alive with birds. The rush of their thousands of wings makes a mighty noise like the sound of a stiff breeze through the trees.

Often when the large flocks settle at the roost the birds crowd so closely on the slender limbs that they bend down and sometimes crack, and the sound of the dead branches falling from their weight adds an additional likeness to a storm. Sometimes the returning birds will settle on a limb which holds nests and then many eggs are dashed to the ground, and beneath the trees of a rookery one may always find a lot of smashed eggs.

Later in the season young birds may be seen perched all over the trees or on the ground, while big squabs with pin-feathers on are seen in, or rather on, the frail nests, or lying dead or injured on the ground. The frightful destruction that is sure to accompany the nesting of a rookery of Passenger Pigeons is bound to attract the observer's eye. And we cannot but understand how it is that these unprolific birds with many natural enemies, in addition to that unnatural enemy, man, fail to increase. If the pigeon deposited ten to twenty eggs like the quail the unequal battle of equal survival might be kept up. But even this is to be doubted if the bird continues to nest in colonies.

Many ornithological writers have written that the wild pigeon lays two eggs as a rule, but these men were evidently not accurate observers, and probably took their records at second-hand. There is no doubt that two eggs are quite often found in a nest, and sometimes these eggs are both fresh, or else equally advanced in incubation. But these instances, I think, are evidences alone that two females have deposited in the same nest, a supposition which is not improbable with the gregarious species.

That the wild pigeon may rear two or three young in a season, I do not doubt, and an old trapper and observer has offered this theory to explain the condition where there are found both egg and young in the same nest, or squabs of widely varied ages. He asserts that when an egg is about ready to hatch, a second egg was deposited in the nest, and that the squab assisted in incubating the egg when the old birds were both away for food, and that in time a third and last egg was laid, so that three young were hatched each season, if the birds are unmolested.

This peculiarity may exist with the pigeon, but I can add nothing to further it from my own observations, except to record the finding of an egg in the nest with a half-grown bird—the only instance in my experience. From watching the ways of some captive birds kept as stool-pigeons, I am well satisfied that two young are not rarely hatched at some weeks apart, and they do fairly well in confinement.

The young are fed by a process known as regurgitation, the partially digested contents of the birds' crops being ejected into the mouths of the squabs.

The position of the nest varies greatly. Often the nests are well out on slender branches and in dangerous positions, considering the shiftlessness of the structure. When a rookery is visited, nests may be found in all manner of situation. I have found single nests built on small twigs next the body of an oak tree, and at a height of only ten feet, and again have seen nests forty feet up in thick tamaracks.