Page:The Passenger Pigeon - Mershon.djvu/139

 Rh time is money, and the netters could save many more dead than alive.

I knew of a man paying $300 for the privilege of netting on one salt spring near White River. It was a spring dug for oil, boarded up sixteen feet square. He cut it down a little and built a platform, and caught once or twice each week. He got 300 dozen at one haul in this house. He said they were piled there three feet deep.

I once pulled a net on a bait bed and we saved 132 dozen alive, but many got out from underneath the net, there being too many on the bed. The net used was 28x36 feet. I have lost 3,000 birds in one day because the railroad did not have a car ready on the date promised. I threw away what cost me $250 in eight hours, fat birds, because the weather was too hot. I have bought carloads in Wisconsin at 15 and 25 cents per dozen, but in Michigan we usually paid from 50 cents to $1 a dozen. I have fed thirty bushels of shelled corn daily at $1.20 per bushel, and paid out from $300 to $600 per day for pigeons.

I never allowed game to be shipped to me out of season; if it came, I never paid for it.

About two years ago I was told by a man who just got back from the Northwest, Calgary, that the birds were so thick in the north that they darkened the sun. They were probably nesting, as he said they were seen every morning. . . . Up to ten years ago I was