Pilgrims of the Air by John Wilson Foster

Author:John Wilson Foster [John Wilson Foster]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910749333
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

He might have been talking about the casual exhaustion of space by the passenger pigeon. Between Shelbyville and Frankfort, where nine-tenths of the country was forest swarming with pigs, pigeons, squirrels and woodpeckers (the pigs plump on beechmast), Wilson stepped off the road to Lexington to visit a pigeon city apparently recently abandoned by the birds – ‘the greatest curiosity I have seen since leaving home’. He could see it was several miles broad and was told it was at least forty miles long. The trees were dead, killed as if girdled with an axe, the simile used by Harris before him. When he got to Lexington he amused himself by beginning a poem called ‘The Pilgrim’ in which he sees himself ‘Condemn’d through distant lands to roam’, a solitary Pilgrim steering down the Ohio. His ways can be dark and lonely – and though a naturalist, he detests ‘that vile hag, the big-horn’d owl’ while ‘pigeons darkening many a mile, / Roar like a tempest o’er the wood’. And this Pilgrim has no compunction in floating down the river corpses of eagles and ducks that he has shot, though Michelet thought Wilson a peaceful friend to birds and was himself ‘a bird in thought and heart’. With an unintended droll irony, his artist friend, Charles Robert Leslie, thought Wilson looked like a bird, with piercing eyes, a beak-like nose, and a spare bony form. Audubon, too, noted the hooked nose. Certainly he had the energy of the birds he studied and collected.

And no bird had greater energy or stamina than Columba migratoria, the migratory pigeon, as Wilson knew it. Before he reached Frankfort and Lexington, having left the abandoned pigeon nesting, he was crisscrossing in the early April afternoon the looping and shallow Benson Creek, a tributary of the Kentucky, when pigeons which he had noticed flying northward that morning began to fly over heading south-east. When he found an opening by the side of the Creek unimpeded by the trees he noted the speed and steadiness of the birds, flying in strata formation and above the range of gunshot. It was a prodigious procession, broad beyond his horizon. Wondering, he sat down at half past one to observe. Wanting to make Frankfort before sundown he got up more than an hour later and reached Frankfort at four o’clock, all the while the ‘living torrent’ flowing incessantly above him, though sometimes there were smaller detachments. He surmised the breadth of the front was roughly the breadth of the birds’ new city (three miles or so) which he later found in Green County on his way to Nashville (though it was south-west of Benson Creek, not southeast). The flight brought up its rear just after six in the evening.

At Benson Creek he paid attention to the pigeons because he was interested in the length and breadth of the flocks and the numbers involved. He had already seen such flocks from his skiff as he rowed down the Ohio in February,

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