240 THE BIRDS ABOUT Us. 



for them. The flock of ducks that sports about the 

 river here to-day may to-morrow be hundreds of 

 miles away. This tremendous power of flight makes 

 migration scarcely a task, and as a result the greater 

 number of wild fowl breed in the far north. Were it 

 not for this, the list of recently extinct species would 

 soon be swelled to a very significant extent. As it 

 is, the numbers of many species have materially de- 

 creased and one, at least, has disappeared. 



Under date of November 9, 1748, Peter Kalm, a 

 Swedish naturalist then staying in Southern New 

 Jersey, wrote, 



" All the old Swedes and Englishmen born in America, whom I 

 ever questioned, asserted that there were not near so many birds fit 

 for eating at present as there used to be when they were children, 

 and that their decrease was visible. They even said that they had 

 heard their fathers complain of this, in whose childhood the bays, 

 rivers, and brooks were quite covered with all sorts of water-fowl, 

 such as wild geese, ducks, and the like. But at present there is 

 sometimes not a single bird upon them ; about sixty or seventy years 

 ago, a single person could kill eighty ducks in a morning, but at 

 present you frequently wait in vain for a single one. A Swede above 

 ninety years old assured me that he had in his youth killed twenty- 

 three "ducks at a shot. This good luck nobody is likely to have at 

 present, as you are forced to ramble about for a whole day with- 

 out getting a sight of more than three or four. . . . The wild 

 Turkeys, and the birds which the Swedes in this country call Par- 

 tridges and Hazel-hens, were in whole flocks in the woods. But 

 at this time a person is tired with walking before he can start a 

 single bird. 



" The cause of this diminution is not difficult to find. Before the 

 arrival of the Europeans the country was uncultivated and full of 

 great forests. The few Indians that lived here seldom disturbed the 

 birds. They carried on no trade among themselves, iron and gun- 

 powder were unknown to them. One-hundredth part of the fowl 

 which at that time were so plentiful here would have sufficed to feed 



