TOWNSEND AND ALLEN: LABRADOR BIRDS. 
357 
Dr. Wilfred T. Grenfell wrote us under date of March 10, 1906: 
“Eskimo Curlew ( borealis ) are getting very scarce. I hear only of a 
few dozen a year being killed. I didn’t see one last year.” Again 
in September, 1906, in answer to further inquiries he wrote: “There 
were Labrador Curlew this year on the coast about Hare Islands, 
Sandwich Bay, in small numbers. . . . The Curlew became scarce in 
the end of the eighties. In 1892 when I came on the coast I saw only 
a few flocks of any size. Of late years I never saw more than five or 
six.” In a conversation with Dr. Grenfell during his visit to Boston 
in January, 1907, he stated that in 1892 he saw two flocks each con¬ 
taining two or three hundred, but he had not seen any numbers since. 
We met with none during our visit to the coast. We talked with 
many natives and summer residents on the coast and they all agreed 
that the Curlew though formerly very abundant, suddenly fell off in 
numbers, so that now only two or three or none at all might be seen 
in a season. Capt. Parsons of the mailboat Virginia Lake said that 
they were very abundant up to thirty years ago. So abundant were 
they that he often shot a hundred before breakfast during the season, 
often killing twenty at a single discharge. The fishermen killed 
them by the thousands. He thought that they diminished in numbers 
rather rapidly between twenty and thirty years ago, and at the latter 
date [1886] there was a great and sudden falling off. Now he saw 
from six to twenty only during a season. Mr. William Pye at Indian 
Cove, Cape Charles, told the same story, except that he put the sudden 
diminution in numbers about 15 years ago or about 1891. He said, 
and this was confirmed all along the coast, that the fishermen kept 
loaded guns at their fish stages and shot into the flying masses of these 
birds often bringing down twenty or twenty-five at a discharge. The 
birds frequented the beaches and hillsides. On the hills they ate the 
“black-berry” (Empetrum nigrum). They were exceedingly fat and 
good eating. He advanced the theory, which we heard commonly 
along the coast, that the shooting had nothing to do with the diminu¬ 
tion in the numbers of the Curlew, but that they had troubled the 
farmers in the “States” by eating their corn, and hence had been 
poisoned by the wholesale. One fisherman even went so far as to 
back up this statement by saying he had seen corn in their stomachs! 
To sum up the evidence, we can state that the natives of Labrador 
persistently harassed the Eskimo Curlew but did not realize that there 
was anv diminution in their numbers until about 1S88 to 1890. After 
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