The Ninth Upland Game Bird

In 1914, just 52 years ago, in Cincinnati, the last passenger pigeon died. It was a female, and her life in the zoo kept extant for 14 years after the final sighting of free birds the most numerous game-bird species ever known. Long before that -- I don't suppose anybody knows or cares just when -- settlers from Europe had begun to import rock doves, distantly related birds of about the same size, which we now call domestic pigeons. They were brought in for various uses: for farm flocks, for fanciers of the ornamental strains, for shooting and racing and even message carrying. And perhaps these pigeons were sometimes brought over in much the same spirit as were English sparrows and European starlings -- the human urge to introduce an old, familiar species in a new land, an adult from of homesickness. Though we still have farm flocks and fanciers around, as well as men who keep pigeons to race and to use in training dogs and falcons, most domestic pigeons are no longer domestic. They are in the stage between domestic and wild called feral, and many have gone beyond that into true wildness--that is, a state in which their existence no longer depends in any way on man, his structures or the products of his cultivation; these live in cliffs and feed on open ground. The majority of pigeons, of course, live the feral life, nesting in barns or on building ledges, feeding on waste or sharing handouts with regular farm creatures when the farmer's back is turned. They are wary, sharp-eyed, bold and furtive by turns--necessary qualities for adapting to the raider's life. As a consequence, having wiped out our native wild pigeon, we find ourselves with what is essentially a new wild pigeon of very different characteristics. It is one of those ironies of nature which, because it took a century to develop, nobody much noticed.

Now, usually we count ourselves as having eight chief upland game birds: the pheasant, the various quail, the grouse, partridge, wild turkey, doves, woodcock and snipe (these are gunners' categories, of course, a separation into target styles, rather than a naturalist's grouping in families). The feral pigeon is, it seems to me, really our ninth. As are the pheasant and partridge, he is an exotic; as is true of carp, another exotic introduced with great enthusiasm at one time--and, of course, true of English sparrows and of starlings, too--this transplanted pigeon is not an unmitigated success. But, wisely or not, we seem to have him irrevocably established, and most men I know, whether they think him game bird or pest, will shoot one when they have the chance.

So, for that matter, will I, though it took me a while to get used to the idea. First, I suppose, this was because, in the city passages of my boyhood, pigeons were the birds we fed, watched, admired and, when a mishap came, wept for. Even now I wonder at the insistence of city managers that a town without birds would be preferable to accepting the deposits of dung on roofs and sills that are the price of having life in the air above the streets, squadrons of wings in flight, iridescent feathered bodies picking through parks and gutters. That boyhood feeling was part of my initial reluctance to shoot pigeons. Another part must have been my share of the guilt that all Americans feel about this family of birds; and yet another, my feeling that pigeons in the countryside weren't quite wild--that they must have belonged to someone who valued them.

The country part of my boyhood was spent in the woods rather than on a farm, and consequently, I had seldom seen the feral rock dove as other than a city creature until I moved to Iowa. One morning there, I was walking back along a country road from duckhunting, with a friend I'll call Henry Akers. We weren't talking; we were rather disgruntled, first from having seen no ducks, then from having walked unexpectedly into a bevy of quail. The quail season had opened the day before--in fact, having failed to find quail locally, we were planning a more distant hunt. It's quite possible that, just as we came out of the woods, Henry said something like:

"If we drive south about an hour from here, we'll be down where birds are," when 20 quail burst up out of the grass around his feet and went buzzing off. Henry is quicker than I, and had time to send one unavailing duckload after them; I never even got my gun to my shoulder. The bevy scattered into woods across the road.

We were without a dog that morning and failed at trying to walk up singles. Then, as we resumed our stroll down the road, a quail flew right across in easy range, and Henry and I missed the crossing shot in turn--bang, bang, bang--properly loaded this time. So we were feeling uncharitable when the pigeon flew over. We saw him coming from a long way off, leaving a barn and winging steadily toward us, rather high, straight over the road.

"Damnit, here comes a shot I'm going to make," Henry said, rather grimly, stopped and set his feet. He's the kind of man who occasionally issues a challenge to himself in that tone, and so I kept my own gun down; besides, I had that panicky thought about the bird's belonging to someone, and was about to ask if this weren't possible when Henry's gun went smoothly up, swung in a fast arc, fired, followed through, and the high pigeon came tumbling down.

Is it true that different birds fall differently? It seems to me that a duck, well hit, folds its wings and dives. A pheasant, even though it's dead on impact, fights air reflexively all the way down. A quail drops. But a pigeon tumbles, wing over wing, as Henry's did.

"Great shot," I said. Then I asked my question. And Henry, picking up his bird, explained:

"The farmers don't want them. Oh, I guess there are a few pouters and homers and fancy breeds around, and you could get someone pretty sore if you shot his prize blue fantail. But mostly they're living in those barns like sparrows. They feed from one barnyard to another, and if there's any kind of poultry disease on one place, the pigeons spread it to the next. Most of these farmers will ask you in to shoot them, if they know you like to."

"Any good to eat?"

"Take him home and try him," Henry said.

The feeling about pigeons as food around here is, again, the same general feeling that prevails toward carp--that, being scavengers, they shouldn't be eaten. This ignores a traditional European use of the rock dove, which fills a couple of pages in Escoffier. Of course, the bird, while edible enough in maturity in stews and casseroles, has been a delicacy--a broiling and roasting bird--when young, full-sized and flightless. This desirability of the squab form, actually, was a heavy factor in the tragedy of the passenger pigeon--netters took the young by wagon-loads in the spring for sale to city markets, breaking up the huge nesting flocks and aborting the year's hatch. This is still a practice, I learned when I was in Uruguay, in the pampas of South America, where there are other New World wild pigeons still thriving.

It was a couple of months after I took Henry Akers' bird home to cook (it turned out tough but not unflavorful) that I actually saw something of the disregard in which country people hold pigeons and, at the same time, something of what it is like to hunt them in a less-than-casual way. I know a mechanic, a sort of mad genius with all metallic things. He collects and repairs guns, his thirst for restoring machinery to operation apparently unsatisfied by long hours under the cars at the shop where he works. Call him Martin. He probably handles more guns and shoots them less than anyone I know.

But now and then Martin will get some piece of iron back into shooting condition and want to try it, and when those weekend days come, he has no patience for the chances and vagaries of searching fields for game. He knows dozens of farmers whose tractors and other farm machinery he has fixed, and most of them are men with barns and pigeons.

On this particular Saturday afternoon, Martin had just finished adjusting the trigger pull of a Parker I owned.

"Now, keep it out of the water and it won't rust up in there and double on you," he said. Somewhere in behind the firing pins, where my cleaning brush didn't reach, it had become rusty enough so that when one pin was released, the one beside it was sometimes jarred sufficiently to make both barrels of the gun go off at once. The gun had nearly knocked me down a couple of times--had done it quite literally, as a matter of fact, just at the end of duck season. I was standing in some slippery mud, fired at a pintail and caused a double blast, and did a heels-up pratfall in shallow water, very surprised. Whether it was a hunting joke or a painful matter--the water was intensely cold--depended, I remember, on whether the pintail was hit or missed; he was lying out there good and dead, and I laughed instead of cursing. But now all the seasons were closed for the year, I'd gone along with a gun that had me a little spooked, shooting worse and worse because of it, and Martin (continued on page 187) Upland Game Bird(continued from page 106) scolded me for delaying so long in having it fixed:

"Why didn't you bring it to me when you still wanted to hunt? You're going to spend a whole year now remembering how bad it treated you, before you can hunt again."

"I guess I can shoot clay," I said.

Suddenly he grinned a grimy grin. "Aw, let's try on some birds."

"But the season----"

"You too fine to shoot pigeons?"

I called home to say I'd be delayed, got in Martin's car with him and we drove out west of town. He had four or five guns he was going to try, but the only one I remember specifically was a monstrous French thing made, he told me, for the tropics. It was a double-12 with a curious breech arrangement designed to put enough push behind shells while loading to force them into the chamber, in a place where cases are swollen by perpetual dampness. I rather imagine that gun had shot wild pigeons before, at the edge of some equatorial rain forest, for there are many tropical varieties of pigeons.

The farm we stopped at was a big one, with two barns about a quarter mile apart; and the farmer, when we got there, was feeding buttermilk to hogs. He had the place posted against hunting, but when he recognized Martin and heard it was pigeons we were after, the farmer set down his pail and rubbed his hands.

"Let me run 'em out for you," he said.

Martin and I placed ourselves at one end of the barn. Way up near the peak was a small slatted window, but several slats were broken out.

"That's where they'll come from," Martin said, laying his assorted shotguns around him on the ground, except for the French one, which he loaded. It was about 4:30 in the afternoon.

"You take the first," he said.

Inside the barn I could hear the farmer, chucking ears of corn and shouting, and suddenly there was a blue-and-white pigeon perched at the edge of the opening, 50 feet up. It looked down at us, launched itself in a downward arc and, with an audible snap of its wings, was away and flying. I swung up my gun and shot. It felt rather late, but I was quite confident, even on the overhead-going-away shot, since the range was short; I missed.

"Way behind him," Martin said. "They don't take any time at all to get started." He mounted the French gun like a trapshooter, was ready when the next bird came out, and dropped it.

Imitating him, I mounted the Parker and waited, but what came out was the farmer, from a ground-floor opening behind me.

"Don't seem to be any more in there," he said, and I was about to lower my gun to turn and look at him, when two pigeons came out together. It was beautiful, if I do say so myself. I got the high bird, who was rising straight away from my barrel, and swung to hit the low one in a repetition of the shot I'd missed at first. As a man who seldom makes doubles, and shoots worst when watched, I was very pleased.

"There you go," Martin said.

I smiled at the farmer to receive his congratulations as well.

"What'd you do, miss that first one that come out?" the farmer said, disgusted. "I want these pigeons shot, not educated."

He went back to his corn, and Martin picked up a different shotgun, but no more birds came out of the barn. For a moment, though, looking up at the little window, I'd been as close as I may ever be to living in a past when live pigeons came out of a trap, in pairs or singles, to bewitch a target gunner.

There must be a time of day, which one could determine by local observation, when pigeons could be predicted to be present in a given barn and to come out in this way. It would, I think, vary with time of year, for feral pigeons, though not migratory, seem to change their feeding and roosting habits seasonally--around here they leave town and congregate in large farm flocks in the winter, dispersing after nesting is over.

But my own interest would be less in figuring out how they might set themselves up as inadvertent trap birds than in trying to work out something more like pass shooting. I remember that Martin and I turned our eyes away from the barn and saw a flock between us and the second barn, circling, lowering over picked corn, almost settling and then dashing away into high air again for some pigeon reason. Even at that distance, a couple of hundred yards away, they had the look of pass birds to me--a style of flight singly and in formation that I associate not only with doves, which are related, but with ducks, which are not. It's a style that gives an impression of great speed, orderliness of shifting mass, both in straight flight and in circling, as if such birds were made to out fly the gun rather than depending, as do other ground feeders, on surprising the hunter.

It was five by then, 45 minutes till sunset.

"Tell you what," Martin said. "They're going to be coming in to roost, here or at the other barn. Maybe both. Why don't I go down there, and I'll bet we send them back and forth?"

That was a fine idea, for all I knew. I unloaded and laid my gun down, picked up his spare shotguns and started walking him to his car in the barnyard; on the way he stopped.

"Will you look over there?"

He pointed to a grazed field, just over the fence from us, where a couple of sows were tending their litters. Out beyond them, 50 yards or more, two pigeons were hopping around, pecking at something or other.

"Test of pattern at extreme range?" I guessed, thinking he meant to fire the Winchester pump he'd had ready but hadn't used.

"Here, hold this," Martin said, shucked shells out of the pump and piled it into my arms with the other four. Then he opened his mackinaw, and I saw more guns, pistols, strapped to his body and sticking out of his inner pockets. The man was an arsenal.

I think the one he selected was a .32, and damned if he didn't set that overweighted body, holding a box of 12-gauge shotgun shells in his left hand for balance, and shoot the head off a pigeon at 50 yards.

"Huh," Martin grumbled. "Fella brought this back. Tried to tell me I hadn't got it sighted in right for him."

We got Martin and his weapons loaded and he drove off for the other barn in his sagging mechanic's car.

I returned to the first barn and found a place about 30 yards out from it by a high, weedy fence. It was 15 or 20 minutes before I heard something for which Thoreau's phrase is the most accurate I know--"the slight, wiry, winnowing sound of their wings." Thoreau was writing about passenger pigeons, and it has seemed curious to me, ever since I read it, that our great naturalist and sometime vegetarian should describe so casually, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, how he and his brother "obtained one of these handsome birds ... and plucked and broiled it." They even potshot it, as a matter of fact, for Thoreau observes that it was one "which lingered too long upon its perch." It has modified a little my feeling about the passenger pigeon, from one of inherited guilt to one of accepting the unforeseeable dooms and reprieves of history, to think of Thoreau at his campfire, 100 years ago, eating the legendary bird, licking its juices from his fingers, in perfect unawareness of what might happen to its then-innumerable kind.

I heard the winnowing sound, looked up and saw 20 pigeons, high and loafing over me. Mindful of the farmer, I tried to shoot very carefully and realized, chagrined, missing both my shots, that the apparent loafing was ten times faster than it seemed. The birds scattered; one came wheeling back over me just as I reloaded, and I led like a mathematician, not shooting till my barrel was a good five lengths in front. Even so, I hit rather poorly, one of those shots where feathers come streaming down and the bird flies on, which meant that I was still a little bit behind. I shot again and finally dropped him.

The rest of the flock was halfway to the other barn by now; I watched, heard the double report of one of Martin's guns and saw at least one pigeon fall.

Fairly sure that they'd be back, and thinking that my position away from the barn put me at too great range, I trotted over to stand by the building again, under the eaves. One doesn't precisely have to hide to shoot pigeons, I'd been told, but it's just as well to have something overhead that partially obstructs their line of vision.

There were 40 birds when the pigeons came back to me, and they were determined to make it to the barn this time. I picked one just before he could get over the roof, fired, and he dropped onto the roof and slid off, over to one side of where I was standing. In a moment the others, who had gone out of sight overhead, came low into the barnyard in front of me, and I shot another as they swept by--though I'd be unwilling to swear it was the same bird I aimed at.

I reloaded, thinking it was over for the moment; but the pigeons wouldn't go back to Martin. They kept wheeling; new birds joined them. I moved back to where we'd stood at first, in sight of the small window, realizing they would try to get into the loft that way; the whole flock took to flying off, turning and swooping toward the barn; and each time they returned I had two more shots, though I don't suppose I hit with as many as half of them.

It was, without question, the fastest shooting I've ever had, and I was regretting that Martin, with all those different guns to try, wasn't with me, when I heard tires squeal, looked around and saw his lopsided car pull up.

Even a car coming wasn't enough to discourage the pigeons by now, nor was the sight of me running over to help Martin out with his guns. I glanced back, and there were the birds, suddenly still, settling all along the roof peak in the sunset. And just as suddenly, as we were running back toward them, clanking and awkward, dusk fell and they were gone.

"Inside the barn," Martin said, stopping. "Hell, I'll get us a coon-hunting light out of the trunk; they'll sit in there now, but you can shoot 'em off the rafters with a twenty-two pistol."

"Wouldn't that make, uh, holes in the roof?" I asked. The matter of pigeon shooting was taking on such a wonderland quality that I said it quite tentatively.

But this time the obvious was correct, and Martin calmed down.

The final thing I saw was the farmer with a gunny sack. I'd suggested, after we got our several shotguns cased, that we take the coon light and pick up the birds we'd shot--but the farmer was there before us.

"Let him have them," Martin said.

"Oh, sure. I didn't know he'd want them."

"He'll use them for garden fertilizer," Martin said. "Or else throw them to the hogs."

"Sorry you didn't get more chances," I said as we drove off.

"Aw, I'm not much of a shooter," Martin said. "But sometime when I feel more like it, we'll find us a big flock and really waste some shells."

Not all the pigeons I have seen harvested are so disprized. In Costa Rica, on my only Central American hunt, we shot--or shot at--huge gray birds in the dawn, coming out of the fog like shadows, visible as pigeons only for an instant, and impossible for me to hit. Dr. Cubero, the man who took me to the orchard in the mountain pass just off the Pan-American highway, got five with his box of shells and didn't seem dissatisfied.

"When I was younger," he told me, "I could hit perhaps fifty percent."

These were true wild pigeons, red bills, I'd guess, though I had no field guide with me to identify them and have to rely on memory (and on a description that fits my recollection in Dan Holland's book The Upland Game Hunter's Bible). Since I didn't ever hit one, I can't even guess what lead is necessary. But I can say that for a feral domestic pigeon, rock dove, in full flight, 30 yards up--for I have shot quite a few more since I hunted them with Martin the mechanic--six lengths may be about right if your gun swing is reasonably fast.

The more I hunt feral pigeons, the more I value them. They are, for the present, still classed as a domestic bird under the game laws of most states, so that the matter of how and when to hunt them is up to landowners and to gunners themselves (except that they may not be used in organized trap shoots, so far as I know). This is, of course, a great convenience, as we train our dogs and test our shooting, but convenience carries responsibility: I wonder, for example, if they shouldn't be given the spring off, whether as a matter of law or simple gunner's practicality, for nesting? Further: Holland says, in his upland game book, that there are colonies now, especially in the West, of the really wild sort "wherever the ground remains open the year around for feeding purposes." And I wonder if there isn't some way of encouraging this kind of colony?

I don't know how we square it with farmers and city managers, but I wonder, too, if we shouldn't start, quietly, asking our game-management men to make some studies of pigeons--to determine, for example, whether they really are carriers of farm diseases to any important extent, now that most commercial poultry is raised indoors? Whether they actually present any particular sanitation hazard in city streets, now that horse-drawn vehicles have left the traffic pattern? And as hunters, I wonder if we shouldn't begin thinking in terms of learning, even for the barn dwellers, where they pass and at what times--instead of shooting them at the roost, as is most often done and as I have most often done myself?

I'm suggesting--heretically, I guess--that our feral pigeons are, in fact, game birds, what game-board men call a resource, and must consequently come to be valued as one. Just the other day, I received some indirect support for this view--an example of a use that hadn't occurred to me at all--talking with a man named J. R. Smith, who is in charge of game management for the Wisconsin Conservation Department.

"We raise a big pea crop in Wisconsin," Mr. Smith told me. "After the harvest, the pigeons flock into the pea fields to eat what remains on the ground. Men up here have begun to find that if they build blinds at the field edges and set out decoys, they have wonderfully sporty shooting."

It sounded to me like only the beginning.

Many hunters could, I'm sure, give further reasons for considering the feral pigeon an upland game bird; I have only one more reason, which is more personal than it is objective: At some time in my experience with any of the birds I like to hunt, there has been a moment when it appeared to me too beautiful or too appealing to kill. This is transient, and after it happens I go back to hunting as before, but with a heightening of feeling that makes me, perhaps, more scrupulous in observing such rules as I have evolved for myself in the field.

The moment as far as pigeons go came for me, once again, at a barn at sunset, and I was by myself. I had been having desultory shooting, hitting some and missing others, from a flock of 30 or 40 pigeons that gradually ceased to work the area.

My attention died away and I was pondering some unconnected thought or other when I heard, not a winnowing or wiry sound but low thunder, and looked west. Two or three hundred birds were dropping out of the sun, toward me and the barn, with orange light streaming all around behind them. They were left and right, high and low, the great flock made up of 30 little flocks, each flying its own complicated figure, and shining with that crazy light that changed them into colors impossible to believe. They took my breath away, and with it my will to shoot them. It was one of those strokes a man's eyes can sustain but not recover from, that leaves him ever after unable to see, except as a blessing, what the whole world knows to be a nuisance.