TRADITIONS OF WATERFOWL 



Locally, the numbers of swans and geese killed probably were small. 

 Here were a pair on this pond, there several at a nearby lake, a few more 

 in waters beyond. In the settler's mind a modest harvest of local birds did 

 not seem beyond reason in view of the great flights that passed through, 

 spring and fall. * In a few years, however, such predation gradually thinned 

 nesters down to widely scattered birds. When the last families were taken, 

 their traditions were dead. The lakes, many of them, the rushy borders, and 

 the muskrats upon whose houses these wildfowl nested, have survived to 

 please the settlers' grandchildren; but the native geese and swans are 

 gone. 



In other species we find similar endings of breeding traditions — some- 

 times complete, as where the Carolina Paroquet and the Heath Hen have 

 been exterminated, sometimes only regional, as where the Raven has gone 

 from southern Wisconsin, the wild turkey from New England, or the Prairie 

 Chicken and Sandhill Crane from many places. Some, like the Raven, dis- 

 appeared in the face of intolerable environmental changes. For many kinds, 

 however, favorable environment remains, but local breeders have been 

 killed. 



Tracing the histories of lost species, we note, as with the Trumpeter 

 Swan and the Canada Goose, that the end came quickly for those that were 

 vulnerable on their breeding range. For some, however, the nesting grounds 

 were beyond the reach of man, and it was on the flyways and the wintering 

 places that whole breeding populations were shot out, none surviving to 

 go north. Forbush points out (1912:552) that where northern-breeding 

 species are regularly over-shot along certain flyways, there may be no 

 birds to return to their Arctic nesting places the following seasons. He 

 suggests that, as in the olden days of shorebird gunning, a few families 

 "reared in the same locality in the far north, start down the Atlantic coast 

 in their migration. Gunners in the Bay of Fundy first decimate the birds, 

 which then cross to Cape Cod, pass a blind occupied by an experienced 

 gunner, who gets nearly all of them, and the next gunner a little farther 

 down the beach kills what is left. There will be no more birds coming down 

 the Atlantic coast from that nesting place for some time." Meinertzhagen 

 (1935) saw the results of heavy shooting on the coast of Syria. "The stream 

 of migrants which used to pass north up the coast no longer does so . . . 

 which would indicate that particular communities of birds use especial mi- 



• Owen Wister (1955), in the diary of his western trips, tells how the flightless young of 

 Canada Geese were chased down as food for camp supper. 



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