A Lot of Birds

 (Note before reading: People with a weak stomach shouldn’t read any further.)

     One of the area’s historians was a man named Fred Baguhn from the Owego area. I found this story in his papers archived at the State Historical Society.

     In 1876 the passenger pigeons roosted in number so great as to bend down the branches of the trees. Trappers took them in huge nets 59 feet wide and 100 to 300 feet long. Nets were placed on poles ten feet high and arranged to drop at the pull of a string. On a block of wood was placed a pigeon that had been blinded by sewing its eyelids together with a common sewing needle and thread. These were called “stool pigeons.”  

     The technique of this operation was to wait until a large flock of pigeons appeared, coming in the right direction to pass over the spot where the net was set, whereupon the stool pigeons that were perched on the stools would be thrown high into the air. Being unable to see, the birds would fly around in bewilderment until they could find their way to the ground. The incoming flock would thus see their kind flying about and alighting and would follow them to the ground. There would be a scattering of grain leading them to the net, and when a sufficient number of pigeons following this scattered grain to the net, had come under it, it would be sprung, and drop upon them. 

     Of course, their heads projected through the meshes. The trappers then, to avoid mutilation, got on their knees and ambled back and forth across the net picking up the birds and crushing their heads with their teeth. The birds were tied in small bundles for shipment to Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Minneapolis. The two years of large flocks were 1877 and 1878. Early residents of Owego observed that they broke limbs from trees at Pigeon Point, and that with a lantern in the night, they could be clubbed from their perches by the bagful. 

     So if anyone wondered why this area is called Pigeon Point… and where the term “stool pigeons” comes from…