57 



known. It is believed that this bird lived formerly on d'Urville 

 Island and even on New Zealand itself, where cats had been in- 

 troduced many years before.^ Dr. Louis B. Bishop of New 

 Haven writes me that in 1901-02 he found the piping plover and 

 Wilson's plover breeding "tolerably commonly" and Virginia 

 rails and Clapper rails abundantly on Pea Island, N. C, but in 

 December, 1908, Mr. J. B. Etheridge, manager of the club on 

 the island, told Dr. Bishop that the piping plover had been 

 exterminated, Wilson's plover almost extirpated and rails greatly 

 reduced by cats from the Pea Island life-saving station. The 

 station was closed in summer and the cats were abandoned. 



Mr. Wilbur F. Smith of Norwalk, Conn., visited Wooden Ball 

 Island, off the coast of Maine, where there was a colony of 

 Leach's petrels. He found that the entire colony bad been de- 

 stroyed. Passing by one of the fishermen's cabins he noticed 

 the ground strewn with petrels' remains, some freshly killed. 

 The fisherman told him that the cats caught the birds at night 

 and brought them to the house to eat; he said that there were 

 but three cats kept and only one wild house cat had been seen. 

 A great colony of petrels on Great Duck Island has been deci- 

 mated in recent years by a few cats kept there by the lighthouse 

 keepers. 



Several years ago the least tern was very nearly exterminated 

 in New England by milliners' agents, but finally, by a stringent 

 enforcement of the law, they were saved from extinction. In 

 1907 a considerable number established themselves not far from 

 the lighthouse on Monomoy, at the elbow of Cape Cod, but the 

 birds could not rear young on account of cats which roamed the 

 beach. I visited the place in 1908 and found that the colony had 

 been broken up, and that the beach was pitted with many cat 

 tracks. 



Space will not allow many details of the cats' destructiveness 

 to birds on islands, but there is room for the sequel to the story 

 told by Mr. G. K. Noble in the "Warbler," of Sept. 1, 1913. 

 He asserted that on the south end of Muskeget Island a great 

 Massachusetts colony of sea birds protected by the town of 

 Nantucket, the breeding gulls and terns, had been nearly ex- 

 tirpated by cats. Mr. Howard H. Cleaves wrote me in 1914 that 

 the warden in charge said that if the cats continued to increase 

 they would exterminate the entire colony of some 45,000 birds 

 within five years. All over that part of the island that the cats 

 mostly inhabited could be seen the uneaten bodies of terns killed 

 on their nests, their heads torn off, and the wings and feathers 



» Rothschild, Walter: Extinct Birds, 1907, p. 25. 



