420 GAME BIRDS, WILD-FOWL AND SHORE BIRDS. 



strike them down could kill enormous numbers.^ It is a well- 

 known fact that thousands of shore birds were killed on Cape 

 Cod by similar methods in early days. 



Mr. W. J. Carrol quotes Mr. C. P. Berteau, who says that 

 he does not remember getting less than thirty or forty brace 

 of these birds in a two hours' shoot when he was in Labrador; 

 and that the Hudson Bay Company's store at CartwTight 

 sometimes had as many as two thousand birds, as a result of 

 a day's shooting by twenty -five or thirty men.- 



Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, and even 

 later, great flights of Eskimo Curlews continued to come to 

 Massachusetts. Old gunners say (1908) that, " sixty or 

 seventy years ago," so many Dough-birds and Golden Plover 

 alighted on Nantucket that the inhabitants used all the shot 

 on the island, and had to stop shooting until more could be 

 obtained from the mainland. 



The greatest flight within the memory of men now living 

 occurred on Nantucket, August 29, 1863, but it was composed 

 of much greater numbers of Golden Plover than of Curlews. 



Hapgood describes a flight that occurred a few days later, 

 September 3, 1863, on Cape Cod, when a party of several 

 gunners killed two hundred and eighty-one Eskimo Curlews 

 and Golden Plover in a little over one day.'^ 



Mr. Elbridge Gerry tells me that " about 1872 " Dough- 

 birds came in a great flight to Cape Cod and Nantucket. 

 They " were everywhere," and were killed in such numbers on 

 the Cape that the boys offered them for sale at six cents each. 

 Two market hunters killed three hundred dollars' worth at 

 that time. 



Mr. John M. Winslow of Nantucket states that in 1882 he 

 and Peter Folger of that town killed eighty-seven Dough- 

 birds there one morning, and there were probably five hun- 

 dred birds in the pasture where these were killed. Mr. Lewis 

 W. Hill writes that his grandfather, Mr. W. W. Webb, killed 

 about seventy at Cape Pogue, Martha's Vineyard, about the 

 same time. 



1 Hapgood, Warren: Forest and Stream Series, No. 1, Shore Birds, 1885, p. 17. 



2 Carrol, W. J.: Forest and Stream, Vol. 74, March 5, 1910, p. 372. 



' Hapgood, Warren: Forest and Stream Series, No. 1, Shore Birds, 1885, pp. 22, 23. 



