/- 
3S)> (Ibe Mavstbe 
OFFICIAL ORGAN OF THE WISCONSIN, ILLINOIS AND MICHIGAN AUDUBON SOCIETIES 
One Year 25 Cents 
. 
Single Copy 5 Cents 
Published by the Wisconsin Audubon Society at Madison, Wisconsin 
Entered as second class matter August 23, 1909, at Madison, Wis., under the act of Congress of March 3, 1879 
VOL. XIII. 
SEPTEMBER, 1911 
NO. 1 
OUR VANISHING SHOREB1RDS 
By W. L. McAtee, Assistant, Biological Survey 
(From Biological Survey Circular, 79.) 
The term shorebird is applied to a 
! group of long-legged, slender-billed, and 
■usually plainly colored birds belonging 
I to the order Limicolae. More than 60 
species of them occur in North America. 
I True to their name they frequent the 
shores of all bodies of water, large and 
small, but many of them are equally at 
home on plains and prairies. 
Throughout the eastern United States 
shorebirds are fast vanishing. While 
formerly numerous species swarmed 
along the Atlantic coast and in the prai¬ 
rie regions, many of them have been 
so reduced that extermination seems im¬ 
minent. The black-bellied plover or 
beetlehead, which occurred along the 
Atlantic seaboard in great numbers 
years ago, is now seen only* as a strag¬ 
gler. The golden plover, once exceed- 
ngly abundant east of the Great Plains, 
s now rare. Vast hordes of long-billed 
fowitehers formerly wintered in Louis- 
ana; now they occur only in infrequent 
locks of a half dozen or less. The Eski¬ 
mo curlew within the last decade has 
probably been extermined and the other 
urlews greatly reduced. In fact, all the 
arger species of shorebirds have suffered 
leverely. 
So adverse to shorebirds are present 
onditions that the wonder is that any 
escape. In both fall and spring they are 
shot along the whole route of their mi¬ 
gration north and south. Their habit 
of decoying readily and persistently, 
coming back in flocks to the decoys again 
and again, in spite of murderous volleys, 
greatly lessens their chances of escape. 
The breeding grounds of some of the 
species in the United States and Canada 
have become greatly restricted by the ex¬ 
tension of agriculture, and their winter 
ranges in South America have probably 
been restricted in the same way. 
1 nfortunately, shorebirds lay fewer 
eggs than any of tire other species gen¬ 
erally termed game birds. They deposit 
only three or four eggs, and hatch onW 
one brood yearly. Nor are they in any 
wise immune from the great mortality 
known to prevail among the smaller 
birds. Their eggs and young are con¬ 
stantly preyed upon during the breeding 
season by crows, gulls, and jaegers, and 
the far northern country to which so 
many of them resort to nest is subject to 
sudden cold storms, which kill many of 
the young. In the more temperate clim¬ 
ate of the United States small birds, in 
general, do not bring up more than one 
young bird for every two eggs laid. 
Sometimes the proportion of loss is much 
greater, actual count revealing a de- 
1 
