4 BIRD CONSERVATION IN LABRADOR 
is left entire. The dead birds they collect and carry to their boat. 
* * * The light breeze enables them to reach another harbour a 
few miles distant, one which, like the last, lies concealed from the 
ocean by some other rocky isle. Arrived there, they re-act the scene 
of yesterday, crushing every egg they can find. For a week each 
night is passed in drunkenness and brawls, until, having reached 
the last breeding-place on the coast, they return, touch at every isle 
in succession, shoot as many birds as they need, collect the fresh 
eggs, and lay in a cargo. At every step each ruffian picks up an egg 
so beautiful that any man with a feeling heart would pause to con¬ 
sider the motive which could induce him to carry it off. But nothing 
of this sort occurs to the egger, who gathers and gathers until he 
has swept the rock bare. The dollars alone chink in his sordid mind, 
and he assiduously plies the trade which no man would ply who had 
the talents and industry to procure subsistence by honourable 
means.” 
Mr. M. Abbott Fraser*, in 1884, was much impressed with the 
destruction of bird life by the fishermen. Fie says: “During the 
week the men are all busy out in their dories fishing, but their Sun¬ 
days are their own and are generally spent on the islands gathering 
eggs and shooting birds, and they stop at nothing, but shoot every¬ 
thing which flies whether eatable or not, and shoot just for the sport 
they find in destruction; and as they keep it up during the whole 
season the poor birds have but a slim show.” tie also saw a few 
Halifax eggers on the coast. 
Mr. D. N. Saint-Cyr visited the Canadian Labrador Coast in 
1882 and 1885. He says:f “It is unfortunately too true that cer¬ 
tain settlers on the coast, but more especially strangers, from Nova 
Scotia, from the State of Maine and the island of Newfoundland, 
pillage the sea-birds’ eggs, which they carry off to sell in their own 
country. These years past as many as thirty schooners have been 
counted, engaged in obtaining loads of wild birds’ eggs in the islands 
of the Gulf, and, to make matters worse, when these pillagers observe 
that the eggs are hatching, they break them, in order that the old 
birds may lay more. Then all these fresh eggs are taken away, and 
it is thus that thousands upon thousands are destroyed every year.” 
The visits of the Halifax eggers, for commercial purposes, have 
long since ceased, but the robbery of eggs and the destruction of nest¬ 
ing birds still continues. The conditions, as I found them in my 
four trips to the Labrador peninsula, which have included a survey 
of 1,100 miles of the coast, from the bay of Seven Islands to Nain, 
are most deplorable, and are rapidly leading to. the utter extinction 
of the water birds. Spring shooting confined to migrating birds, 
although undesirable, is not so pernicious in its effect as the shooting 
of birds on their arrival at their breeding grounds. This is practised 
in the case of all the birds that nest on the coast. At Perroquet 
island, in Bradore bay, for example, the arrival of the puffins or 
“perroquets” in the spring is eagerly awaited by the inhabitants, 
*Ornithologist and Oologist, Vol. 12, 1887. 
f Sessional Payers No. 37, Quebec, 1886. 
