THE BIRDS 375 
he presently came within a proper distance of the bird, 
and struck his dart into it; but, as the weapon did not 
enter a mortal part, the penguin swam and dived so well, 
that he would have lost both the bird and the dart, had he 
not driven it near enough the vessel for me to shoot it.” 
The last auk seen alive was in 1852. 
The Labrador duck doubtless occurred in abundance in 
past times along the Labrador coast. Audubon was shown 
nests supposed to belong to this species, but he saw none 
of the birds, and there is’much doubt as to the identity of 
the nests. Cartwright speaks in his Journal several times 
of shooting pied ducks, and there are reasons to believe 
that these were Labrador ducks, although the evidence is 
of course not absolute. That this duck is now extinct, 
there seems no doubt, as none has been seen or shot since 
about 1874. 
Another bird which seems to be going the same way 
towards extinction, a bird which has been in times past 
perhaps the most characteristic bird of Labrador, is the 
Eskimo curlew. This bird visited the coast regions in 
countless multitudes every autumn on its southward mi- 
gration. Professor Packard, writing of the Eskimo curlew 
in 1860 in Labrador, says: — 
“On the 10th of August the curlews appeared in great 
numbers. On that day we saw a flock which may have 
been a mile long and nearly as broad; there must have 
been in that flock four or five thousand! The sum total 
of their notes sounded at times lke the wind whistling 
through the ropes of a thousand-ton vessel; at others the 
sound seemed like the jingling of multitudes of sleigh- 
bells.” 
