XVIII Nesting Habits of the Passenger Pigeon 209 _By Dr. Morris Gibbs, in "The Oölogist"_ XIX Miscellaneous Notes 217 ILLUSTRATIONS The Passenger Pigeon _Frontispiece_ _By Louis Agassiz Fuertes_ FACING PAGE Audubon Plate (_color_) 24 Passenger Pigeon and Mourning Dove 88 Fac-simile of "Among the Pigeons" 92 H. T. Phillip's Store 104 Band-tailed Pigeon (_color_) 130 Comparative Size of Pigeon and Dove 156 Young Passenger Pigeon 198 Pigeon Net 218 INTRODUCTION For the last three years I have spent most of my leisure time in collecting as much material as possible which might help to throw light on the oft-repeated query, "What has become of the wild pigeons?" The result of this labor of love is scarcely more than a compilation, and I am under many obligations to those who have so cheerfully assisted me. I have given them credit by name in connection with their various contributions, but I wish that I might have been able to give them the more finished and literary setting that would have been within the reach of a trained writer or scientist. I am merely a business man who is interested in the Passenger Pigeon because he loves the outdoors and its wild things, and sincerely regrets the cruel extinction of one of the most interesting natural phenomena of his own country. If I have been able to make a compilation that otherwise would not have been available for the interested reader, I need make no further apologies for the imperfect manner of my treatment of this subject. It is hard for us of an older generation to realize that as recently as 1880 the Passenger Pigeon was thronging in countless millions through large areas of the Middle West, and that in our boyhood we could find no exaggeration in the records of such earlier observers as Alexander Wilson, the ornithologist, who said that these birds associated in such prodigious numbers as almost to surpass belief, and that their numbers had no parallel among any other feathered tribes on the face of the earth; or that one of their "roosts" would kill the trees over thousands of acres as completely as if the whole forest had been girdled with an ax.