16 GAME BIRDS, WILD-FOWL AND SHORE BIRDS. 



Audubon states that forty or fifty Ducks were often killed 

 at one shot with a small gun at Chesapeake Bay. 



Murphy says that pot-hunters sometimes killed twenty 

 to forty " at a round " with a large naphtha lamp and reflector 

 in a boat at night; and that he had been told that two men 

 killed, in this way, with big guns, fifteen hundred birds from 

 7 P.M. to 3 A.M.; also,, that two men in sneak boxes, armed 

 with six guns, killed five hundred and sixteen birds in a day.^ 

 Grinnell says that four men on the Chesapeake enticed or 

 tolled in a flock of Redheads and Blackheads, and gathered 

 forty-seven birds from six shots; while poachers with big guns 

 shot into flocks at night, sometimes kilHng seventy-five to one 

 hundred birds at a shot.^ 



Many years ago there was a record of one gunner who 

 from a battery killed five hundred Ducks in one day; and a 

 more recent record of one who killed three hundred in a day's 

 work.^ 



Mr. W. W. Levy killed one hundred and eighty-seven 

 Ducks in one day on Chesapeake Bay, and shot seven thou- 

 sand Canvas-backs in the season of 1846-47. A party of 

 gunners often filled a small vessel with Ducks in two or 

 three days, and dispatched it to the markets of Baltimore, 

 Philadelphia or New York.* 



Lewis states that in 1854, when the second edition of his 

 work was prepared, the gunners in the vicinity of Havre de 

 Grace killed three thousand Ducks on the first day of the 

 shooting season.^ No wonder that the glories of Chesapeake 

 Bay as a shooting ground have long since departed. 



In Ohio, before the game laws were enacted, the explosion 

 of guns in the marshes resembled the skirmish fire of an 

 army. A market gunner of Sandusky killed one hundred and 

 eighteen Ducks at a shot.* 



On the Kankakee marshes Huntington saw boats come 

 in loaded to the guards with Ducks; some barely floated. On 



1 Murphy, John Mortimer: American Game Bird Shooting, 1882, p. 292. 



2 Grinnell, George Bird: American Duck Shooting, 1901, pp. 481, 482. 



3 Ibid., p. 440. 



* Lewis, Elisha J.; The American Sportsman, 1855, p. 269. 



5 Itnd., p. 288. 



» Huntington, Dwight W.: Our Feathered Game, 1903, p. 142. 



