BOARD OF GAME AND FISH COMMISSIONERS 
85 
old beach that borders the Red River Valley on the east. It is now apparently 
an extinct bird in Minnesota. 
As late at least as 1883 it was still breeding in southern Jackson County 
(J. W. Preston) and Gleason saw a single bird of this species near Euclid, Polk 
County, on June 17, 1897, which at that date may be assumed to have been a 
breeding bird. This report of Gleason’s is the very last record of the Long-billed 
Curlew in Minnesota known to the writer. It ceased to be generally abundant 
somewhere about 1880 and rapidly decreased in numbers, even as a migrant, 
until it disappeared entirely about the close of the last century. In June, 1893, 
Dr. Wm. C. Portman of Jackson, Jackson County, told the writer that “a few 
years previous to that date it was very abundant on the high prairie about Jack- 
son” and that he had found the nest and eggs there. It was not found by Roberts 
and Benner in Grant and Traverse counties in 1879 and was never met with during 
various trips to Heron Lake, beginning in 1893. F. L. Washburn, who visited the 
Red River Valley in September, 1885, to study the bird life in the interests of the 
Zoological Survey, says of this species in his manuscript report: “Only a few 
individuals observed. I was informed by sportsmen at Ada that it was not pres¬ 
ent this year in regions where it was extremely abundant last year. The bird 
was spoken of familiarly at Georgetown and a few were shot near Crookston 
and Ada.” Among the later records is one from Madison, Lac qui Parle County, 
October 13, 1892, and another from New Richland, Waseca County, May 19, 1893, 
both by Dr. C. T. Cooke; and Rev. Severn Gertkin of Collegeville, Stearns County, 
reported in notes from that locality that “four Long-billed Curlews passed through 
on April 19, 1894.” The only Sickle-bill that the writer ever encountered in 
his forty years of traveling about the state was a single bird flying about “Craig’s 
Prairie” in southern Sherburne County on August 10, 1880. 
This huge shore bird, nearly two feet long, with its immense, downwardly 
curved bill, six or eight inches in length, must have been a striking object in its 
days of plenty, as it moved about among the vegetation of the higher uplands 
which it often frequented in search of insects and berries; or as it waded through 
the shallow water of lakes and ponds probing the bottom for larvae, worms, 
snails, and crawfish, which it easily secured with its long, forceps-like bill. When 
migrating in flocks the birds flew high in the air in wedge-shaped formation and 
uttered a loud, mellow whistle which was easily imitated in decoying them within 
gunshot range. They can still be seen and studied in unsettled and protected 
regions farther west in the United States and Canada where they still occur 
in considerable numbers. Their destruction here in the northern Mississippi 
Valley and along the Atlantic seaboard was largely due to the ruthless 
slaughter to which they were subjected by shore bird hunters. But it seems prob¬ 
able that this big, conspicuous bird, like other wild creatures of its kind that 
make their homes in places coveted by men, would not have long survived by the 
side of civilized conditions, even if encountering no more than the usual unavoid¬ 
able molestation. 
HUDSONIAN CURLEW. There are no satisfactory records of the occur¬ 
rence of this maritime bird in Minnesota. It is included in Dr. Hatch’s list of 
1880 and in Cantwell’s list of 1890, and in Hatch’s Notes on the Birds of Minnesota, 
1892, occurs the following: “I formerly met with this species more frequently than 
of late years, and why so I can not explain to my own satisfaction. They were 
