SPECIES EXTINCT OR EXTIRPATED. 419 



Mr. Williams told liim, he asserts, that when the birds 

 arrived in this condition they were chased by men and boys, 

 who knocked them down with clubs as they attempted to 

 rise. If the August storm passed, and these birds did not 

 land on the island, very few would be seen in the markets 

 that year.^ Mr. Sumner says that these birds were so fat 

 that if shot when flying they burst open when they struck 

 the ground. It is well known that this was their condition 

 when they left Labrador. 



We have some records of the immense flights of these 

 birds that appeared periodically on our coasts during the 

 early days of the last century, but we can only surmise what 

 was their abundance when the country was first settled. The 

 flights may have decreased in Massachusetts even before the 

 settlement of the west, and the beginning of the destructive 

 spring shooting there. 



Audubon says that on July 29, 1833, while he was near 

 the harbor of Bras d'Or, Labrador, these Curlews came from 

 the north in such dense flocks as to remind him of the Pas- 

 senger Pigeon. Mr. E. W. Tucker (1838) writes that Curlews 

 in vast flocks were exceedingly abundant on the Labrador 

 coast.2 Dr. A. S. Packard was there in 1860, and notes a 

 flock which was perhaps a mile long and nearly as broad. He 

 describes the sum total of their distant notes as resembling 

 the wind whistling through the rigging of a ship. At times 

 it sounded like the jingling of many sleigh bells. 



The Dough-birds continued so plentiful until long after 

 the middle of the nineteenth century that the fishermen of 

 Labrador and Newfoundland made a practice of salting them 

 down in barrels. A Newfoundland correspondent, quoted by 

 Hapgood in Forest and Stream, says that they reached that 

 island in millions that darkened the sky. "Millions" of 

 these birds and Golden Plover arrived in the Magdalen 

 Islands in August and September. There they went to the 

 high beach to roost in such masses that on a dark night a 

 man armed with a lantern to dazzle their eyes and a stick to 



1 Sumner, Wm. H.: History of East Boston, 185S, p. 53. 



2 Tucker, E. W.: Five Months in Labrador and Newfoundland in 1S38, 1839, p. 110. 



