Page:The Passenger Pigeon - Mershon.djvu/210



Memorandum prepared by Mr. Robert Ridgway, Curator of the Division of Birds, U. S. National Museum, to accompany letter to Mr. W. B. Mershon, Saginaw, Mich.

If Mr. Mershon will communicate on the subject of Passenger Pigeons with Mr William Brewster, 145 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Mass., he may get some data which will (or ought to) dismiss from consideration the idea that the passenger pigeon could have been exterminated in the manner suggested by Mr. Ames. During a visit to northern Michigan, Mr. Brewster talked with a great many pigeon netters. I have forgotten the figures, and may be very inexact in my recollection of them, but my recollection is that at one "roost" there were one hundred netters who averaged one thousand (it may have been ten thousand) pigeons per day. When it is considered that this was the rate of destruction at one locality in one State only, that the same was going on in other States, and that tens of thousands were being killed by hunters and others, and this year after year, I cannot see anything surprising in the eventual extermination of the species, no matter how numerously represented originally.

Nothing in the history of the Passenger Pigeon is more certainly known than the fact that its range to the southward did not extend beyond the United States.