BIRDS HUNTED FOR FOOD OR SPORT. 179 



one report a fluctuating or continuous decrease in the numbers 

 of this species. Other reports along the Atlantic coast, from 

 Nova Scotia to South Carolina, also indicate a decrease; but 

 locally, at least, reports of increase come from the latter State. 

 Dr. J. C. Phillips, in a carefully prepared article on the 

 autumn migration of the Canada Goose in Massachusetts,^ 

 computes the width of the coast autumnal flight at tliirty-six 

 miles, and the number of birds passing in this belt at thirty- 

 four thousand three hundred and forty. The direction of the 

 flight here seems to parallel the coast between Boston and 

 Portland. He reckons the number of Geese shot at the vari- 

 ous shooting stands in Massachusetts at nineteen hundred 

 birds in 1908. This is not excessive shooting as compared 

 with the score of a club in Currituck Sound, N. C, where over 

 one thousand Geese were killed in the season of 1909-10. 



Dr. A. S. Packard describes the decrease of Geese in 

 Labrador, where Captain French saw Geese in enormous 

 numbers in Old Man's Bight. Packard twelve years later 

 (1890) did not see a Goose on the whole coast. The fact 

 that the Geese have been holding their own so well along the 

 Atlantic coast of Massachusetts for the past two decades may 

 perhaps be explained partly by the betterment of conditions 

 on one of their breeding grounds, the island of Anticosti in 

 the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Formerly the island, which is 

 about one hundred miles in length and larger than Long 

 Island, N. Y., was inhabited by squatters and wreckers, who 

 killed every Goose they could find during the breeding season. 

 This island has many swamps, ponds and marshes, with little 

 islands in them where Geese can breed nearly unmolested if 

 not troubled by man. For years it was owned by Meunier, 

 the French chocolate king, who evicted the squatters and 

 maintained a colony of his own servants at every accessible 

 landing or harbor. The island is now one vast protected 

 nursery for water-fowl, and Geese have increased greatly 

 there. The Geese bred on this island appear to cross the 

 neck of the peninsula of Nova Scotia in their southward 

 migration, whence, in company with flocks from farther 



• Auk, 1910, pp. 267, 268. 



