Catching Pigeons.
Steel engraving.
In: Samuel G. Goodrich’s Recollections of a Lifetime, or, Men and Things I Have Seen, vol. 1 (New York, 1859).
Samuel G. Goodrich recalls his boyhood around 1805, when vast flocks of wild pigeons streamed through the skies of Fairfield, Connecticut. He recounts the thrill of netting dozens of birds on West Mountain using live decoys whose fluttering, as if feeding, attracted the wild flock to the trap. The “rushing sound of the pigeons pouring like a tide over the tops of the trees” struck him with awe.
The print features a handsome male pigeon, copied after Alexander Wilson’s drawing, while a pair in the middle ground mimics Audubon’s. In the right background stands the hunters’ blind—the “bough house”—from which ropes stretch ready to spring the nets over the feeding birds. Other birds perch on the bough house itself and on the bare branches of a tree.