SPECIES EXTINCT OR EXTIRPATED. 413 



marked "like a Magpie," and it was so named by the earlier 

 writers and ornithologists. Morton lived at Merrymount, 

 now Wollaston, in Quincy, Mass., and shot wild-fowl about 

 Boston Bay. He probably found this bird common there in 

 his time, for, although considered a "sea-fowl," it entered the 

 bays and tidal rivers along the coast. Audubon never saw 

 the bird alive. The specimens from which his drawings of 

 the species were made were shot by Daniel Webster at 

 Martha's Vineyard, Mass., and are now in the collection of 

 the National Museum at Washington, D. C. 



Freeman (1807) includes the Shoal Duck as one of the 

 species found on Martha's Vineyard.^ 



Dr. D. G. Elliot says that between 1860 and 1870 he saw 

 a considerable number of these birds, mostly females and 

 young males, in the New York markets, and that a full- 

 plumaged male was then exceedingly rare; but no one then 

 imagined that the species was approaching extinction.^ 



Maynard (1870) records the Labrador Duck as rare during 

 the winter on the Massachusetts coast. ^ 



The extermination of this bird never has been satisfac- 

 torily accounted for; but Newton considered that the whole- 

 sale destruction of eggs and nesting birds on the Labrador 

 coast, as witnessed by Audubon, could have had no other 

 effect.^ 



If this bird's breeding range was limited to the southern 

 and eastern coast of that peninsula, and if it bred, as is 

 stated by Newton, only on the small, rocky islands off the 

 coast, or, as King says, on the mainland near it, the whole- 

 sale slaughter that went on for many years by eggers, feather 

 hunters and Eskimos may have been a chief factor in its 

 extinction. Audubon's story of the Labrador eggers, as pub- 

 lished in his Ornithological Biography, graphically exhibits 

 a terrible destruction among the sea birds of the Labrador 

 coast; but long before his time a forgotten yet still greater 

 slaughter of wild-fowl occurred on those coasts to supply the 



1 Freeman, J.: A Description of Dukes County, Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc, Vol. Ill, 2d ser., p. 54. 



2 Elliot, D. G.: Wild Fowl of North America, 1898, pp. 172, 173. 



' Maynard, C. J.: Birds of Eastern Massachusetts, Appendix to Naturalists' Guide, 1870, p. 143. 

 * Newton, Alfred: Dictionary of Birds, 1893-96, p. 222. 



