TOWNSEND AND ALLEN: LABRADOR BIRDS. 297 



strewn that some care was necessary to avoid treading upon them — 

 and to procure birds it was only necessary to knock them upon the 

 head as they stumbled past. Tiger [the dog] dug out many Puffins, 

 whose eggs I speedily appropriated, and after I had filled my collect- 

 ing box I was glad to leave a place where such wholesale murder 

 is daily committed. Although such great quantities of eggs are 

 carried away or, destroyed by the eggers, it seems as if the number 

 of birds could hardly have been larger than at present." He refers 

 to these birds as Murres, Razor-billed Auks, and Puffins. 



Again on July 23, 1849, at the Island of Great Mecatine, he says: 

 "In the harbor we had now entered we found one of the Labrador 

 eggers so much talked off — a small schooner from St. John's, New- 

 foundland, with a piratical-looking crew. She had just completed 

 her cargo, only twenty hundred dozen eggs! and was to return home 

 the next day." 



In 1884, Mr. M. Abbott Frazar found the sea birds much diminished 

 in numbers owing largely to the "eggers." To the Halifax eggers 

 he attributed the decrease of only one species, namely, the Murre, 

 and he describes at some length their proceedings. "But," he goes 

 on to say, "the fishermen should be held responsible for the greatest 

 general destruction. During the fishing season every bay and sheltered 

 place will have its proportion of from one to twenty fishing schooners 

 anchored there for protection. During the week the men are all 

 busy out in their dories fishing, but their Sundays are their own and 

 are generally spent on the islands gathering eggs and shooting birds, 

 and they stop at nothing but shoot everything which flies whether 

 eatable or not, and shoot just for the sport they find in destruction; 

 and as they keep it up during the whole season the poor birds have 

 but a slim show." 



Bamston, writing in 1861, recounts the slaughter of geese of several 

 species by the natives of Hudson and James Bay. Canada, Snow, 

 and Blue Geese gathered in vast numbers at the southern shores of 

 Hudson Bay in both spring and fall; and upon these birds the inhab- 

 itants, Indians, whites, and Eskimos, depended for much of their 

 sustenance. Bamston estimated the total yearly kill of geese in 

 southern Hudson Bay at from 74,000 to 80,000, of which about three 

 quarters were taken in the fall of the year. He "would place the 

 Moose Indians as killing, at all seasons, 10,000; Rupert's River natives, 

 8,000; Eastmain and to the north, including Esquimaux, 6,000" 



