TOWNSEND AND ALLEN: LABRADOR BIRDS. 
297 
strewn that some care was necessary to avoid treading upon them — 
and to procure birds it was only necessary to knock them upon the 
head as they stumbled past. Tiger [the dog] dug out many Puffins, 
whose eggs I speedily appropriated, and after I had filled my collect¬ 
ing box I was glad to leave a place where such wholesale murder 
is daily committed. Although such great quantities of eggs are 
carried away or destroyed by the eggers, it seems as if the number 
of birds could hardly have been larger than at present.” He refers 
to these birds as Murres, Razor-billed Auks, and Puffins. 
Again on July 23, 1849, at the Island of Great Mecatine, he says: 
‘‘In the harbor we had now entered we found one of the Labrador 
eggers so much talked off — a small schooner from St. John’s, New¬ 
foundland, with a piratical-looking crew. She had just completed 
her cargo, only twenty hundred dozen eggs! and was to return home 
the next day.” 
In 1884, Mr. M. Abbott Frazar found the sea birds much diminished 
in numbers owing largely to the “eggers.” To the Halifax eggers 
he attributed the decrease of only one species, namely, the Murre, 
and he describes at some length their proceedings. “But,” he goes 
on to say, “the fishermen should be held responsible for the greatest 
general destruction. During the fishing season every bay and sheltered 
place will have its proportion of from one to twenty fishing schooners 
anchored there for protection. During the week the men are all 
busy out in their dories fishing, but their Sundays are their own and 
are generally spent on the islands gathering eggs and shooting birds, 
and they stop at nothing but shoot everything 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.” 
Barnston, writing in 1861, recounts the slaughter of geese of several 
species by the natives of Hudson and James Bay. Canada, Snow, 
and Blue Geese gathered in vast numbers at the southern shores of 
Hudson Bay in both spring and fall; and upon these birds the inhab¬ 
itants, Indians, whites, and Eskimos, depended for much of their 
sustenance. Barnston estimated the total yearly kill of geese in 
southern Hudson Bay at from 74,000 to SO,000, of which about three 
quarters were taken in the fall of the year. Lie “would place the 
Moose Indians as killing, at all seasons, 10,000; Rupert’s River natives, 
8,000; Eastmain and to the north, including Esquimaux, 6,000” 
