6 BIRD CONSERVATION IN LABRADOR 
collected for their consumption by the crews of fishing schooners. 
Many of these vessels are scantily and poorly provisioned and make 
up for this by inroads on the birds. Up to a few years ago a dozen 
barrels of murre eggs have been collected by a crew of twenty men 
from one island. As many of the terrified nesting birds are clubbed 
and shot, as possible. The manner in which bird life is squandered 
at such times is almost too terrible to be thought of. 
Besides the eggs and nesting birds, the young of several species 
of water birds, particularly of the great black-backed gull, are eagerly 
sought for the table. Sometimes the young are confined in coops and 
fattened before killing. The fact that this gull sometimes destroys 
young eiders and the eggs of nesting birds is often seized upon as an 
excuse for destroying both old and young of this species, but the 
majority ask no excuse. 
The recent adoption and increasing use of motor boats is putting 
the finishing touches on the birds. The fishermen are enabled to 
traverse much greater areas of the coast, to reach distant islands 
where birds are nesting, and to more readily approach birds on the 
water. Going to and from the fishing grounds the motor boat 
enables its owner to take wide detours and gather cargoes of eggs 
and nesting birds. When sails and oars are used these out-of-the- 
way spots are fairly safe. 
The destruction wrought by the Indians during their summer 
sojourn on the coast is increasing as other sources of food are dim¬ 
inishing. 
If the treatment of the bird population in Canadian Labrador 
where there are laws and game wardens, is bad, that in Newfound¬ 
land Labrador, where there appears to be neither, is still worse. In 
1906 I found a bad state of affairs* and a rapidly diminishing water 
bird population. Mr. A. C. Bent, who visited this coast in the sum¬ 
mer of 1912, says:f “I have heard that the sea birds on the Labrador 
coast were disappearing, but was not prepared to find them so 
scarce as they proved to be. They seem to have decreased very 
decidedly during the past few years, and, unless something can be 
done to protect them, many species will soon have disappeared 
entirely. Their nests are robbed persistently all during the summer 
by the resident white people, by the Eskimos, and by the large num¬ 
ber of Newfoundland fishermen that visit the coast in the summer. 
The birds are also shot freely for food at all seasons of the year.” 
The whole outlook is indeed a gloomy one. It was thoroughly 
understood by Audubon in 1833. He says: “Nature herself seems 
perishing. Labrador must slowly be depeopled, not only of aborig¬ 
inal man, but of all else having life, owing to man’s cupidity. When 
no more fish, no more game, no more birds exist on her hills, along 
her coasts, and in her rivers, then she will be abandoned and 
deserted like a worn-out field.” 
It is an old custom, and the wastefulness and terrible cruelty of 
it all does not appear to pentrate to these men’s consciences. The 
*See “Along the Labrador Coast.” 
\Bird Lore, 1913, Vol. XV, p. 11. 
