The naked woods
are suddenly blue as with fluttering ribbons and scarfs, and vocal
as with the voices of children. Their arrival is always unexpected.
We know April will bring the robins and May the bobolinks, but we
do not know that either they or any other month will bring the
passenger pigeon. Sometimes years elapse and scarcely a flock is
seen. Then, of a sudden, some March or April they come pouring over
the horizon from the south or southwest, and for a few days the
land is alive with them.
The whole race seems to be collected in a few vast swarms or
assemblages. Indeed, I have sometimes thought there was only one
such in the United States, and that it moved in squads, and
regiments, and brigades, and divisions, like a giant army. The
scouting and foraging squads are not unusual, and every few years
we see larger bodies of them, but rarely indeed do we witness the
spectacle of the whole vast tribe in motion. Sometimes we hear of
them in Virginia, or Kentucky and Tennessee; then in Ohio or
Pennsylvania; then in New York; then in Canada or Michigan or
Missouri. They are followed from point to point, and from State to
State, by human sharks, who catch and shoot them for market.
A year ago last April, the pigeons flew for two or three days up
and down the Hudson. In long bowing lines, or else in dense masses,
they moved across the sky. It was not the whole army, but I should
think at least one corps of it; I had not seen such a flight of
pigeons since my boyhood.
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