240 THE Birps Asout Us. 
for them. The flock of ducks that sports about the 
river here to-day may to-morrow be hundreds of 
miles away. This tremendous power of flight makes 
migration scarcely a task, and as a result the greater 
number of wild fowl breed in the far north. Were it 
not for this, the list of recently extinct species would 
soon be swelled to a very significant extent. As it 
is, the numbers of many species have materially de- 
creased and one, at least, has disappeared. 
Under date of November g, 1748, Peter Kalm, a 
Swedish naturalist then staying in Southern New 
Jersey, wrote,— 
“All the old Swedes and Englishmen born in America, whom I 
ever questioned, asserted that there were not near so many birds fit 
for eating at present as there used to be when they were children, 
and that their decrease was visible. They even said that they had 
heard their fathers complain of this, in whose childhood the bays, 
rivers, and brooks were quite covered with all sorts of water-fowl, 
such as wild geese, ducks, and the like. But at present there is 
sometimes not a single bird upon them; about sixty or seventy years 
ago, a single person could kill eighty ducks in a morning, but at 
present you frequently wait in vain for a single one. A Swede above 
ninety years old assured me that he had in his youth killed twenty- 
three ducks at a shot. This good luck nobody is likely to have at 
present, as you are forced to ramble about for a whole day with- 
out getting a sight of more than three or four. ... The wild 
Turkeys, and the birds which the Swedes in this country call Par- 
tridges and Hazel-hens, were in whole flocks in the woods. But 
at this time a person is tired with walking before he can start a 
single bird. 
“The cause of this diminution is not difficult to find. Before the 
arrival of the Europeans the country was uncultivated and full of 
great forests. The few Indians that lived here seldom disturbed the 
birds. They carried on no trade among themselves, iron and gun- 
powder were unknown to them. One-hundredth part of the fowl 
which at that time were so plentiful here would have sufficed to feed 
