BIRDS HUNTED FOR FOOD OR SPORT. 107 



Many years ago the Wood Duck was the most abundant 

 of all wild-fowl in many well-wooded regions of the United 

 States. Hundreds flocked along the wooded streams and 

 about the woodland ponds. Even within the past fifty years 

 this splendid Duck has been very numerous in the forested 

 regions of some of the States east of the Mississippi. There 

 are men now living who remember when it afforded the best 

 Duck shooting to be had in the interior of Maine, and when 

 Wood Ducks flying to and from their nests were familiar sights, 

 comparable to robins and blackbirds. Mr. Edward F. Staples 

 of Taunton, who has hunted in the vicinity of Lakeville, 

 Mass., for nearly fifty years, states that the Wood Duck was 

 plentiful up to about 1878, and that the sport was glorious. He 

 has known one man to shoot sixty in a morning, but he now 

 sees only one small flock in a summer. Mr. Charles E. Ingalls 

 of East Templeton, Mass., says that thirty years ago the 

 Wood Duck was very common everywhere in that region. 

 He has seen three hundred to five hundred come into the 

 swamp at the head of the reservoir in East Templeton in an 

 evening many times, night after night, during the fall, but 

 they are now among the rarest of game birds. They were shot 

 at any time, spring or fall, whenever they exposed themselves. 

 William Dutcher, in an investigation of the status of this bird 

 in the United States in 1907, obtained similar reports through- 

 out the country, and Dr. A. K. Fisher has called special atten- 

 tion to its threatened extinction in a bulletin of the Biological 

 Survey. Within my own recollection it bred commonly over 

 a considerable part of Massachusetts, but at the beginning of 

 this century the species was evidently in danger of extinction. 



The following notes exhibit something of its former abund- 

 ance and recent decrease: Rather abundant at Boston; have 

 seen hundreds in a flock (Audubon, 1835). Sometimes taken 

 in nets; a Mr. Burns, thirty miles west of Albany, sends a 

 large number to the New York market annually, taken in 

 this way (Giraud, 1844). Rare on the sea-coast, but abso- 

 lutely swarms during the month of September among the lily- 

 pads of the western swamps (B. Roosevelt, 1866). Plentiful 

 (Turnbull, eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, 1869). 



