THE BIRDS OF COBB^S ISLAND, VIRGINIA 67 



Maine to Florida and around the shores of the Gulf of 

 Mexico as far as Texas the hunting was carried on. 



Expeditions were fitted out each summer for collecting 

 the birds. Hunters would take a sailing vessel, provide 

 food and ammunition in sufficient amounts to last them 

 for several weeks, and setting sail would cruise from 

 island to island in search of the birds. Upon reaching a 

 beach inhabited by terns the vessel would be brought to 

 anchor, and here the crew would stay shooting and skin- 

 ning as long as the occupation continued profitable, which 

 was usually until the birds were all dead or driven away. 



By 1890 the numbers of the terns along the Atlantic 

 coast of the Southern States had become so depleted that 

 many of the annual expeditions of the feather gatherers 

 were discontinued. Individual hunters here and there 

 still seek out the few remaining breeding places of the sea 

 swallows and keep up the work of extermination. 



One day I stood upon the deck of a two-masted sharpie 

 lying at anchor in Bogue Sound on the North Carolina 

 coast. I was talking to an old man whose long thin hair 

 fell in waves on his shoulders. He was a professional 

 bird hunter and in the captain's cabin near which we stood 

 had, with a companion, skinned many thousands of sea 

 birds. ^ ' I have hunted the terns in their nesting places, ' ' 

 he said, ^^from New England southward to the West 



