Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/147

 The flocks of wild pigeons were at times so vast that they darkened the sky as they pursued their way on the wing, or broke down the limbs of the trees upon which they lighted in passing. Hamor asserted that their number surpassed the power of imagination to conceive, and that it frequently required three or four hours for the mighty cloud of these birds to pass a single point, although the rate of speed maintained by them was enormous. The account of these phenomenal numbers was received in England with incredulity, but the testimony was confirmed by so many witnesses, that no doubt could remain as to its correctness. Similar flights of pigeons have been observed in more recent times, and in proportions leading to the belief that the witnesses of the seventeenth century undercalculated rather than overcalculated the number seen; in the period when Hamor recorded what he had followed with his own eyes, the wild pigeons had been propagating for countless ages without being diminished by those agencies which civilized man has in later times successfully brought tobear for their wholesale destruction.