226 SEA-SIDE ORNITHOLOGY. 
the severity of the winter to more open waters, where 
their numbers were immensely reinforced by myriads of 
sea-dueks from more northern seas, and which are so ab- 
surdly designated by fishermen and gunners as “Coots.” 
The numbers of these wild-ducks, of various kinds, off our 
entire coast, according to tradition, appear to have been 
well-nigh fabulous. Then, too, all the islands along the en- 
tire coast abounded with several varieties of gulls and terns, 
some of which are no longer to be met with, and all in very 
greatly diminished numbers. 
Now how changed the whole scene! Wild-ducks no 
longer breed on any portion of our entire coast. The ex- 
.ceptions are so very few that they only prove the too gen- 
eral rule. Here and there a few remote uninhabited islands 
aside from the haunts of fishermen, and remote from the 
tracks of commerce, afford to a solitary species of gull, and 
to the decimated terns a precarious retreat, where, late in 
the season, a few succeed in rearing their young, and thus in 
postponing the day of the final extermination of their race. 
For, so long as the Solons of our General Court encourage; 
by their fapislation, their unchecked and wholesale destruc- 
tion, the day cannot be far distant when these graceful and 
harmless birds will have become wholly, as they are now 
almost, a “bright vision of the past.” 
Thus, with the increase of population along the coast 
during the warmer months, when the portions least fre- 
düeuted at other times swarm with pleasure-seekers, and 
with the ceaseless activity with which every island is ran- 
sacked by the insatiate "toilers of the sea," the distinctive 
characteristics of our maritime ornithology has become very 
nearly destroyed. So many blanks and gaps now mar its 
symmetry, and dwarf its once fair proportions, that the sub- 
~ ject loses nearly all the claims it would have presented half 
| a century ago. 
In seer v of what is left to us of the sea-side ornithol- 


New ] Paea, four or five groups sugges egest themselves. 




