TOWNSEND AND ALLEN: LABRADOR BIRDS. 357 



Dr. Wilfred T. Grenfell wrote us under date of March 10, 1906: 

 "Eskimo Curlew (borealis) are getting very scarce. I hear only of a 

 few dozen a year being killed. I didn't see one last year." Again 

 in September, 1906, in answer to further inquiries he wrote: "There 

 were Labrador Curlew this year on the coast about Hare Islands, 

 Sandwich Bay, in small numbers. . . . The Curlew became scarce in 

 the end of the eighties. In 1892 when I came on the coast I saw only 

 a few flocks of any size. Of late years I never saw more than five or 

 six." In a conversation with Dr. Grenfell during his visit to Boston 

 in January, 1907, he stated that in 1892 he saw two flocks each con- 

 taining two or three hundred, but he had not seen any numbers since. 



We met with none during our visit to the coast. We talked with 

 many natives and summer residents on the coast and they all agreed 

 that the Curlew though formerly very abundant, suddenly fell off in 

 numbers, so that now only two or three or none at all might be seen 

 in a season. Capt. Parsons of the mailboat Virginia Lake said that 

 they were very abundant up to thirty years ago. So abundant were 

 they that he often shot a hundred before breakfast during the season, 

 often killing twenty at a single discharge. The fishermen killed 

 them by the thousands. He thought that they diminished in numbers 

 rather rapidly between twenty and thirty years ago, and at the latter 

 date [1886] there was a great and sudden falling off. Now he saw 

 from six to twenty only during a season. Mr. William Pye at Indian 

 Cove, Cape Charles, told the same story, except that he put the sudden 

 diminution in numbers about 15 years ago or about 1891. He said, 

 and this was confirmed all along the coast, that the fishermen kept 

 loaded guns at their fish stages and shot into the flying masses of these 

 birds often bringing down twenty or twenty-five at a discharge. The 

 birds frequented the beaches and hillsides. On the hills they ate the 

 "black-berry" (Empetrum nigrum). They were exceedingly fat and 

 good eating. He advanced the theory, which we heard commonly 

 along the coast, that the shooting had nothing to do with the diminu- 

 tion in the numbers of the Curlew, but that they had troubled the 

 farmers in the "States" by eating their corn, and hence had been 

 poisoned by the wholesale. One fisherman even went so far as to 

 back up this statement by saying he had seen corn in their stomachs! 



To sum up the evidence, we can state that the natives of Labrador 

 persistently harassed the Eskimo Curlew but did not realize that there 

 was any diminution in their numbers until about 1888 to 1890. After 



