There has probably never been in all the world a species of bird more numerous than the passenger pigion, which moved about over the eastern half of the North American continent in the 19th century in flocks so enormous that they darkened the sun….

[How] did it happen that such a stupendous multitude was brought down?

The question is pretty well answered in this nature-novel by Allan Eckert ["The Silent Sky"]…. It is so well provided with details of the birds' existence, ingeniously invented incidents to point up man's extraordinary and wasteful brutality, and the birds' inability to adapt to it, that the melancholy story is made plain. One follows it with a sort of horrified fascination….

Mr. Eckert is not on firm ground when he endows the pigeons with a sense of smell and an ability to see in the dark. He is uncomfortably anthropomorphic on occasion...