R.W. SHUFELDT. 



waders, pelicans and sea fowl oî many species were to been seen 

 in millions. I have seen gulls, terns, cormorants, men-o'-war 

 birds and the like, arise from their eggs on the breeding- 

 grounds in such numbers as to darken the sun for hours like a 

 total eclipse until they settled down again. Some of my friends 

 have been in the Bahamas and Florida recently (1912); were 

 they astounded at the vast number of roseate spoonbills and 

 flamingoes they saw? 



During the latter part of the seventies, I traveled nearly all 

 day along the South Platte River in an express train. Canada 

 geese literally covered the river and the rolling country on both 

 sides of it as far as one could see, for hours at a time, as we 

 passed on; and, as darkness approached, their numbers were 

 undiminished. It was an easy mailer to shoot a hundred or 

 more in a forenoon. Has this country anywhere anything of 

 the kind to show now? 



In 1867 there used to be a cat-tail swamp at Stamford, 

 Connecticut, near the steamboat-landing; it covered some ten 

 acres. One evening I saw the barn swallows go to roost there ; 

 they actually crushed the rushes down in many places, and 

 still the air was filled with thousand of the birds as darkness 

 came on. How many barn swallows does one see around 

 Stamford in a season in these days? A hundred pairs? I think 

 not! In Mexico, in 1859, I saw on the Coatzacoalcos River a 

 flock of many thousands of scarlet ibis; it was a never-to-be 

 forgotten sight as they all came down together and covered 

 several acres of a mud flat on the shores of the river. 



Again, I have seen Long Island Sound in the winter time, 

 forty miles from New York City, actually covered with a dozen 

 species of sea ducks, — flocks of thousands of each kind ; one 

 could hear the old wives for miles. Sometimes as many as four 

 or five swivel-gun sloops were at work among them, killing 

 from fifty to two hundred at a shot, and keeping this up all 

 day and every day, for the markets or often only for "sport". 



