342 GAME BIRDS, WILD-FOWL AND SHORE BIRDS. 



before its settlement, it possibly did not originally furnish 

 suflBcient food in the fall migration for the great body of the 

 Plover, and so, therefore, many of them took the shortest 

 route to South America, which was by sea. 



In the spring they probably leave the pampas, and passing 

 in one flight over the forested regions of interior South America, 

 cross the Gulf of Mexico and land on the plains of Louisiana 

 and Texas. When they land they are no longer fat. They 

 then move slowly northward over the prairies of the Missis- 

 sippi valley region. Very few stragglers are recorded authen- 

 tically at that season anywhere on the Atlantic coast. Before 

 the settlement of the west the Plover practically were un- 

 molested there by man, and they landed in such enormous 

 flocks on the prairies of Louisiana and Texas in the spring 

 that in those days of muzzle-loading guns the gunners killed 

 great numbers. Audubon states that on the 16th of March, 

 1821, he was invited by some French gunners to accom- 

 pany them to the neighborhood of Lake St. John, near 

 New Orleans, to observe the flight of thousands of these 

 birds. These gunners, who were familiar with the route that 

 the Plover would take, gathered in parties of from twenty to 

 fifty, and, sitting on the ground equi-distant from each other, 

 imitated the whistle of the birds so accurately that the Plover 

 came within a few yards, and were slaughtered unmercifully. 

 Several times he saw a flock of a hundred or more reduced to 

 a few individuals. This was continued all day, and at night 

 the gunners were as intent to kill as in the morning, when 

 they arrived. Dogs were used to bring the birds to their 

 masters after a considerable number had been killed. One 

 man killed sixty-three dozen, and Audubon having reckoned 

 the number of gunners in the field at two hundred, estimating 

 each to have shot twenty dozen birds, concluded that forty- 

 eight thousand Golden Plover fell there that day.^ 



Somewhat similar scenes were enacted in the fall on the 

 prairies of Illinois, when apparently the birds were moving 

 southeasterly toward the coast. The following notes exhibit 

 a part of this bird's history : Green Plover are here very com- 



' Audubon J. J.: Ornithological Biography, Vol. Ill, p. 624. 



