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Birds eating rice

Also issued separately, Washington, 1901, as thesis (Ph. D.) University of Wisconsin
[The] recent testimony of the value of wild fowl to the Indian suggests their much greater utility in past years; and such in fact the following citations prove. When it is remembered that wild fowl are today relatively scarce, that through the Central States the sight of any considerable number of wild pigeons is rare, even to one skilled in woodcraft, but that our fathers yet living saw them in such flocks that they shut out the light of the sun, a better perspective will be obtained for judging of the number and value of wild fowl when the Indian and his natural foods were undisturbed by the white man.
from
Albert Ernest Jenks, The Wild Rice Gatherers of the Upper Lakes: A Study in American Primitive Economics (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, 19th Annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1900), 1098.