76 SEA-BIRDS 



Newfoundland it was probably already driven to skerries out of reach 

 of the Indians' canoes. Maybe in prehistoric times the great auk 

 also had a wider breeding-distribution in north-west Europe, or at 

 least a very much denser distribution in Iceland-Faeroe-Britain. At 

 the last, in its final miserable nineteenth-century years of slaughter, 

 it was demanded for collectors (though while it was alive they did 

 not pay much for it, contemporary accounts show). For years its 

 passing was not known, and it was still sought high and low, by 

 Steenstrup, Wolley, Newton, Grieve, Lucas; the devoted interest 

 of these ornithologists only served to show that ornithology came not 

 quite in time to save the auk, and that ignorance and greed are some- 

 times more powerful than knowledge and truth. 



* ^ 4f 



The end of the great auk was the only extinction in historical 

 times of a primary North Atlantic seabird; but a secondary sea-bird, 

 the Labrador duck, followed it in 1875 or 1878. Man the ignorant 

 killer was again the agent of its death, armed this time with a shotgun. 

 The evidence against him, in this particular case, is circumstantial; 

 for nobody knows much about the population of Camptorhynchus 

 labradorius, except that within colonial times it never appears to have 

 been great. Nobody knows where it nested, though it was probably 

 on the Labrador coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence; no doubt it suffered 

 from nesting-time persecution by Indians as well as winter-shooting 

 by the colonists in the Nova Scotia and eastern U.S. coast; it wintered 

 south to New Jersey. 



Two North Atlantic sea-birds which were nearly exterminated 

 by heedless exploitation are the diablotin of the West Indies, and 

 the cahow of Bermuda, two closely-allied gadfly-petrels. The diablotin 

 (or black-capped petrel), Pterodroma hasitata, still survives, probably 

 in very small numbers, on Haiti and Dominica, while its close relation, 

 P. cahow of Bermuda, now numbers probably fewer than a hundred 

 individuals. But once these birds did not merely survive; they swarmed. 

 The diablotin was first discovered by J. B. du Tertre (1654) on Guade- 

 loupe; he thought it a rare bird of the mountains. In 1696 J. B. Labat 

 (1722) describes a remarkable hunt for diablotins on the Soufriere 

 of Guadeloupe, using eight-foot poles, hooked at the end, in the 

 burrows; six men caught 213 in a morning. Already, Labat com- 

 mented, the settlers were wiping the birds out. By the nineteenth 

 century it was rare, and most of the surviving burrows on the Soufriere 

 were destroyed by the great earthquake of 1847. But one was caught 



