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26¢ By ALAN R. CAPON ‘ So abundant were the assenger pigeons at one time in Prince Edward County an in many other parts of Ontario in the middle 1800's. that boys could stand on house tops and knock birds down with sticks as'they flew over. . The wild pigeons were a source of food for the early settlers and they were slaughtered in immense numbers. and in 1914 - when the last passenger pigeon toppled from its perch in a l United States zoo, the bird became extinct. I The passenger Kigeon visited Canada in the early spring i months and In ugust in immense flocks. and Samuel ‘ Strickland wrote in his book “Twenty-seven years in Canada West': (1853) the following: "...in some parts of the province, early in S .ring and directly after wheat harvest} their numbers are incre ible. Some days they commence flying as soon as it is light in the morning, and continue, flock after flock. until : sun-down. To calculate the sum total of birds passing even on i one day. appears to be impossible. I think. the great-est masses fly near the shore of the great Canadian lakes. and sometimes so low that they may be easily killed with a horse-pistol. or even knocked down with along pole." Joseph Pickering wrote in “Inquiries of an Emi ant" (1831): “Pigeons: in great flocks, going out daily nort ward. some people ‘thh nets and decoy pigeons. will catch several hundred - I in aday, when they sometimes take only their breasts. and salt in barrels, and make beds of their feathersu." ‘ John James Audubon. the naturalist related that in the. autumn of 1813 he left his house on the banks of the Ohio to go ,kj to LouiSVllle and he observed pi eons flying in eat numbers ' from the north-east to the sout »west. After t ey had been passing for an hour he dismounted and proceeded to make a dot with a pencil on paper for every flock that passed. He found in a short time that he was putting down dots at the rate of 163 in 21 minutes. ' Audubon resumed his journey but still the pigeons came. the light of day darkened as if by a solar eclipse. For 55 miles Audubon travelled along with the 1pigeons flying overhead. the flight continuing for three days. e estimated the birds flew past in columns of about one mile wide and calculated the speed of flight at about 60 miles per hour. The birds, of course. consumed eat quantities of grain. . One of t e last eat kills recorded was in 1878 when three hundred.tons of ressed birds were shi ped b hunters in Michigan. By the year 1899 the eat flig ts of t e assenger igeon were over and only the odgT air could be found) breeding in the provmce of Ontario, exce t or an area in the north-west where quite a few could still be ound. Fifteen years later the passenger pigeon has 'oined the dodo - just a name in record books With a few stufied birds left in museum cases,- Passenger Pigeons extinct {