Page:The Passenger Pigeon - Mershon.djvu/226

Rh north of the American boundary line can readily appreciate the utter inadequacy of an acceptable food supply for these countless millions of pigeons; and we can also readily understand how very soon the breaking up of the original hardwood forests of eastern Canada would tend to decrease the visible food supply and cause these hungry millions to seek new pastures.

The breaking of these feeding grounds would first be instrumental in scattering or breaking up the largest flocks, and even the very long distances the bird was able to fly from breeding to feeding ground would be exceeded, necessitating next the nesting in smaller colonies, where careless nesting habits with continued changing conditions would tend to continue to decline their numbers, while the tenacity with which even the smaller roosts were clung to by man, like leeches to a frog, and the hapless victim shot, netted and stolen from the nest before maturity, was but another effectual and not the least responsible agent in the relegation of the pigeon to that past from which none return.

When I decided to attempt the preparation of a review history of the pigeon in Manitoba, I felt that, having had practically no experience with the bird myself, I should have to depend upon the reports of representative pioneers of the country for my facts as to the numbers of the birds formerly found here, and the period of their decline and disappearance. I accordingly drafted a series of questions which I submitted to