importance for the Native Americans living in the southeastern United States. The bird's fat was stored, often in large quantities, and used as butter. Archaeological evidence supports the idea that Native Americans ate the pigeons frequently prior to colonization. What may be the earliest account of Europeans hunting passenger pigeons dates to January 1565, when the French explorer René Laudonnière wrote of killing close to 10,000 of them around Fort Caroline in a matter of weeks: There came to us a manna of wood pigeons in such great numbers, that over a span of about seven weeks, each day we killed more than two hundred with arquebuses in the woods around our fort. This amounted to about one passenger pigeon per day for each person in the fort. After European colonization, the passenger pigeon was hunted more intensively and with more sophisticated methods than the more sustainable methods practiced by the natives. Yet it has also been suggested that the species was rare prior to 1492, and that the subsequent increase in their numbers may be due to the decrease in the Native American population (who, as well as hunting the birds, competed with them for mast) caused by European immigration, and the supplementary food (agricultural crops) the immigrants imported (a theory for which Joel Greenberg offered a detailed rebuttal in his book, A Feathered River Across the Sky). The passenger pigeon was of particular value on the frontier, and some settlements counted on its meat to support their population. The flavor of the flesh of passenger pigeons varied depending on how they were prepared. In general, juveniles were thought to taste the best, followed by birds fattened in captivity and birds caught in September and October. It was common practice to fatten trapped pigeons before eating them or storing their bodies for winter. Dead pigeons were commonly stored by salting or pickling the bodies; other times, only the breasts of the pigeons were kept, in which case they were typically smoked. In the early 19th century, commercial hunters began netting and shooting the birds to sell as food in city markets, and even as pig fodder. Once pigeon meat became popular, commercial hunting started on a prodigious scale. Passenger pigeons were shot with such ease that many did not consider them to be a game bird, as an amateur hunter could easily bring down six with one shotgun blast;