From Sunday's New York Times 7/6/03
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/weekinreview/06READ.html

Save the Bandtail Pigeon, An Oregon Hunter Says

A longtime hunter in the coastal range of Oregon takes stock of his
favorite prey, the bandtail pigeon, in the summer issue of The Double Gun
Journal, a publication for sportsmen and collectors.

"Over the years ? principally in the 1950's, 60's, 70's, into the early
1980's ? I hunted bandtails in scores of locations in the Coast Range,"
Worth Mathewson writes. But in the early 1980's, "I began to curtail my
pigeon shooting ? then quit entirely. It wasn't a pleasant decision. It was
based on the sharply declining numbers of this large wilderness pigeon."

What caused this? "Its declines have had nothing whatsoever to do with
habitat, lack of food sources, changes in farming practices or anything
else so commonly, and correctly, associated with reduced numbers of birds
shot for sport. The bandtail suffered gravely from overshooting. Nothing else."

The author said there are signs of recovery; last year, British Columbia
and Washington managed to hold brief shooting seasons. But the bandtail is
one of the slowest-reproducing game birds, so it will be many years, Mr.
Mathewson says, before strong flocks return. But the author recalls: "There
have been mornings in years now long passed, where almost instantly I have
been engulfed with the flocks. If I was shooting well, everything was over
sooner than I wished. I nearly always made a point of lining up the birds
on a log or stump to admire them."