40 
that practically every man and boy in the place who could 
get a gun was out shooting them. There is no record of a 
single bird having been killed there since. Mr. Mackay says 
that only about a dozen golden plover were seen in the Boston 
market in 1904, up to September 16. 
The killdeer plover is said by old gunners to have been 
common once on the coast, and occasionally plentiful in the 
interior and along the Connecticut River. Several observers 
confirm this. It was once not rare in some portions of 
Worcester County, and common in Berkshire County; it is 
now rare everywhere, so far as I can learn. 1 
The long-billed curlew, or sicklebill, the largest *of the 
curlews, has not been common in migrations on the Massa- 
chusetts coast within the memory of old gunners. It is now 
merely casual. Mr. Mackay refers to it as follows : “ Only 
rare stragglers left, less than half a dozen having been taken 
in Massachusetts in twenty years. Very few left in South 
Carolina, where they were formerly very abundant.” 
The Hudsonian or jack curlew was a very abundant species 
sixty-five or seventy years ago. “ On Nantucket and Tucker- 
nuck they were then shy, as now. They gradually decreased 
until about fifteen years ago. After that about one hundred 
and fifty birds appeared annually in July and remained 
through the summer. A few are killed each year, hut the 
numbers remain about the same. They are the most common 
curlew now on Nantucket. They are much fewer now in the 
Boston market than in former years.” (Mackay.) This is 
now the only common curlew left to us, as the others are now 
mere stragglers. 
The Eskimo curlew, or doughhird, was once an abundant 
migrant. This curlew is the most highly esteemed by epi- 
cures of all shore birds; for this reason it has been hunted 
incessantly whenever it appears. “ About 1872 there was 
a great flight of these birds on Cape Cod and Nantucket; 
they were everywhere. Enormous numbers were killed. 
They could he bought of hoys at six cents apiece. Two men 
killed three hundred dollars’ worth of these birds at that 
1 A canvass of the State in 1907 revealed only one locality in which this bird was 
breeding. 
