Sea of Slaughter (9 page)

Golden plover, peeps, and other beach birds survive. Of the smaller shorebirds, only one, the piping plover, once a common breeding species all along the eastern seaboard from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Virginia, seems in immediate danger. Although reduced to a tiny remnant population during the days of uncontrolled hunting, it was making a successful comeback until, in recent years, man so encroached upon the beaches where it breeds that it is now officially listed as a threatened species. At most, no more than 300 pairs can still be found in Atlantic Canada.

We may take some encouragement from the survival of the other species but, considering the nature of the beast that lurks within our own, it should be qualified by an ever-present awareness that the carnage committed on the shorebirds in the recent past can all too readily break out again directed at some other form of animate creation.

When Europeans arrived
on the
northeastern seaboard they encountered an infinity of ducks, geese, and swans amongst myriad other birds. Nicolas Denys gives some idea of their profusion in the 1620s. “All my people are so surfeited with game... they wish no more, whether Wild Geese, Ducks, Teal, Plover, Snipe... [even] our dogs lie beside this meat [without touching it] so much are they satiated with it... So great an abundance of Wild Geese, Ducks and Brant is seen that it is not believable, and they all make so great a noise at night that one has trouble to sleep.”

Two kinds of swans were amongst the multitudes. The trumpeter bred across the continent, perhaps as far south as Nova Scotia and east to Newfoundland. Today it is no longer to be seen east of Manitoba and its entire existing population has been reduced to about 2,000 pairs, mostly concealed in remote lake valleys in Alaska and British Columbia. The smaller, whistling swan once migrated along the Atlantic coasts in enormous flocks, but now is seldom if ever seen on the eastern seaboard.

The swans were slaughtered not for meat alone, but especially for their densely feathered breasts, known and much valued in the millinery and clothing trades as “swan skin.” There are records of over a thousand whistling swans being butchered on a single occasion, stripped of their breast skin and feathers, and left to rot.

Canada, snow, and brant geese abounded along the northeastern coasts, especially in migration. The snow goose is now never seen there; the brant is fast vanishing due partly to a mysterious die-off of eel grass, which is its main winter food, perhaps a result of our pollution of the sea. Old Honker, the Canada goose, still remains in evidence, but in sadly diminished numbers.

Some two dozen kinds of ducks originally lived in or migrated through the northeastern region and, as all early records attest, were found in astounding numbers. They were so abundant initially that most species remained relatively numerous until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Thereafter they were subjected to such prodigious carnage at the hands of market and sport hunters that many species were devastated to the point of near annihilation; and one was exterminated.

Sportsmen and commercial hunters alike shot them over live decoys, frequently from hunting boxes sunk in marshes or floating at surface level. In the 1800s, one such typical “hide” built by a market hunter yielded forty-four brant to a single shot and between 1,000 and 1,500 during one winter.

Batteries of 8-gauge shotguns were mounted in shoreside “blinds,” and smooth-bore guns with a calibre not much less than that of a small cannon were carried on swivels in low-slung punts that could be concealed in reeds and rushes. Some of these punt guns fired a quarter-pound powder charge and could kill or wound hundreds of swimming waterfowl with a single discharge.

Dr. Bent describes a favourite method used by New England sportsmen, the “duck stand”: “This consists of a small house or shanty equipped with sleeping bunks for several men... Along the shore is built a fence or stockade... there are portholes cut in the fence so that several men can shoot through it without being seen. The house and the fence are completely covered with branches of freshly cut pine and oak... which renders the whole structure practically invisible... The stand is built where there is a beach or a point in front of it... Sets of wooden decoys... are anchored at some distance out... A large supply of live decoys, semidomesticated black ducks, mallards and Canada geese, are kept in pens... behind the enclosure, and a few are tethered on the beach... or allowed to roam about... With all this elaborate equipment ready for action the gunners, I can hardly call them sportsmen, spend their time inside the house, smoking, talking, playing cards, or perhaps drinking, while one man remains outside on the watch... Should a flock... alight in the pond, he calls the others and they all take their places at the port-holes, with heavy guns, ready for the slaughter. The quacking of the decoys gradually tolls the wild birds in toward the beach... Each gunner knows which section of the flock he is to shoot at and waits in anticipation until the birds are near enough and properly bunched, when the signal is given to fire. If the affair has been well managed most of the flock have been killed or disabled on the water, but, as the frightened survivors rise in hurried confusion, a second volley is poured into them and only a few escape.”

Dr. Bent's description of what happened to the wood duck is representative of the fate of many of its inland dwelling relatives: “The wood duck has always been able to hold its own against its natural enemies, but it has yielded to the causes of destruction brought about by the hand of man and by the encroachments of civilization. The wholesale cutting down of forests and draining of swampy woodlands has destroyed its nesting sites and made its favorite haunts untenable. Its beautiful plumage has always made it an attractive mark for gunners, collectors, and taxidermists, and its feathers have been in demand for making artificial trout flies. Almost anyone who has found a wood duck's nest has been tempted to take the eggs home to hatch them, as the ducks are easily domesticated and make attractive pets. It is so tame and unsuspicious that it is easily shot in large numbers and it has been extensively caught in traps. From the great abundance, noted by all the earlier writers, its numbers have been reduced to a small fraction of what they were; in many places, where it was once abundant, it is now unknown or very rare; and it has everywhere been verging towards extinction. Fortunately our attention was called to these facts... before it was too late, and now that suitable laws have been enacted for its protection... it has been saved from extinction.”

Even the smallest of eastern seaboard ducks, the diminutive teal, received no quarter, as Audubon tells us: “Nothing can be more pleasing to an American sportsman than the arrival of this beautiful little duck... He sees advancing from afar... a flock of green-winged teals... Hark! two shots in rapid succession! Here and there lies a teal, with its legs quivering; there, one is whirling round in the agonies of death; some, which are only winged, quickly and in silence make their way toward a hiding place, while one, with a single pellet in his head, rises perpendicularly with uncertain beats, and falls with a splash on the water. The gunner has charged his tubes... and the frightened teals have dressed their ranks, and flying, now high, now low, seem curious to see the place where their companions have been left. Again they fly over the dangerous spot, and again receive the double shower of shot. Were it not that darkness has now set in, the carnage might continue until the sportsmen should no longer consider the thinned flock worthy of his notice. In this manner... I have seen upwards of six dozen shot by a single gunner in the course of one day.”

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sport hunting amounted to nothing less than unbridled massacre. During one autumnal weekend in 1884, my own paternal grandfather and three companions armed with double-barrelled 10-gauge shotguns, shot 140 canvasbacks, 227 redheads, about 200 scaups, 84 blacks, about five dozen teal, and enough additional assorted kinds to quite literally fill the four-wheeled farm wagon that brought them and their trophies home. I have some old sepia-toned photographs of the results of that particular foray, which was by no means unique.

Although sport hunting was bad enough, it was as nothing to the slaughter conducted by market hunters. During the 1880s, millions of wild ducks, geese, and swans were sold in public markets and private butcher shops in towns and cities of Canada and the United States, to which must be added millions more that spoiled because of lack of refrigeration or were wounded or killed but not recovered. This was big business, employing thousands of commercial hunters, wholesalers, and other middlemen. Incidentally, the manufacturers of guns, shot, and shell earned enormous profits.

At the peak of this industrial destruction it is believed that eight million waterfowl were being slaughtered annually. By the beginning of World War I, this massacre—both spring and fall—had so reduced waterfowl populations that the extirpation of a dozen or more species seemed assured. It was at this crucial juncture that Canada and the United States collaborated in framing the Migratory Birds Convention Act, which became law in 1917 and, for the first time, provided a mechanism for protecting waterfowl and many other migratory birds. After the war, prohibition of the spring hunt and the imposition of bag limits began to allow most ducks and geese to recover somewhat.

One species, the flamboyant harlequin duck, has not managed to do so, and its continuing survival remains in doubt. For the piebald Labrador duck, protection came too late. This large and strikingly patterned black-and-white bird was originally known as the pie duck. It was unique in that it was found
only
on the northeastern seaboard of America, breeding on islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on the Labrador coast, and, probably, on the Newfoundland coast; wintering along the shores of New England perhaps as far south as Cape Hatteras. Closely related to the eider family, it resembled them in many of its habits and suffered in the same way from New England and Canadian eggers and feather pirates who raided the island colonies of both, stealing the eggs, then ripping up the nests and shooting females to obtain the valuable down.

Eiders initially abounded in the waters of the northeastern seaboard. Yet here is what naturalist Charles Townsend had to say about them at the beginning of the twentieth century. “If this senseless slaughter [egg hunting and the feather trade] is not stayed the eider will continue to diminish until it is extinct. On the Maine coast—the bird's most southern [existing] breeding station—there were less than a dozen pair breeding in 1905... Farther north... on the Nova Scotia coast not more than two or three [pairs] remain to breed, while on the coast of Newfoundland and of the Labrador Peninsula... where they formerly bred in immense numbers, but a remnant is left... Before the arrival of the white man—nature's worst enemy—the Indian, the Esquimaux, the fox and the polar bear helped themselves from the abundant feast... Little or no harm was done... this natural pruning had little effect upon the birds as a whole. During the nineteenth century, however, the drain on those wonderful nurseries of bird-life was fearful and now but a pittance of the mighty host remains.”

Robbed of their eggs, their nesting colonies ravaged to provide down, shot on the breeding islands
and
in both spring and fall migration by commercial and sport hunters along the southward coasts, the western Atlantic population of eiders and pie ducks both seemed doomed.

Fortunately for the eider it had sister populations in the Canadian Arctic, Greenland, and the northeastern Atlantic, from which, after the Migratory Birds Convention Act came into force, colonists began repopulating the North American seaboard. Unfortunately for the pie duck, it had no sister population anywhere in the world.

The last Labrador duck reported from the United States was shot in New York in 1875, and there are no later records in the scientific literature. There are some residents' reports of it having been seen on the Labrador in the 1880s; but after that—nothing. Today all that remains of the pie duck are some forty-four stuffed skins scattered in museums and private collections, mostly in the United States.

Commercial egging and the feather trade are now things of the past, but the future of the surviving sea ducks is clouded by the same threats that hang over all seabirds: loss of breeding sites, reduction of available food, pollution poisoning, illegal egging, and unregulated hunting in remote regions such as the Arctic and parts of South America.

There is also the annual legal slaughter. In 1982 the bag by sportsmen in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec alone included 800,000 ducks and 100,000 geese. To this we must add an additional 20 to 30 per cent to cover the death of wounded birds and of those that died of poisoning after ingesting spent lead shot picked up from the bottoms of ponds, lakes, and swamps.

As late as the mid-nineteenth century at least one pair of loons nested on almost every lake and moderate-sized pond throughout the whole of the northeastern portion of the continent, from as far south as Kentucky and Virginia north to and including the High Arctic. The several species of great divers made their presence felt not only by their size and splendour, but especially through their voices, which conveyed the very essence of wilderness.

In autumn, the adults led their young out to sea where their aggregate numbers became apparent as they gathered to spend the winter along the coasts from Newfoundland to Florida. There they came to grief. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, when gunning became not just a sport but a fanatical passion, loons were popular as flying targets, even though they were generally considered to be inedible. So quick in diving that they were believed to be able to submerge between the flash of a gun being fired and the arrival of the shot; so strong and swift in flight that they were seen as an irresistible challenge to the skill of every gunner; and so imbued with life that only the heaviest charge could kill them outright, they were the sportsman's target
par excellence.
If a rationale was required to legitimize their slaughter, it could be said—and was, quite wrongly—that, as fish eaters, they were a menace to salmon fry and trout and ought to be exterminated. The gunners did their best; and so did sport fishermen, who made a practice of searching out the nests and smashing the eggs therein.

Surviving common loons today represent only a small fraction of those that, 100 years ago, filled the summer evenings with their haunting cries. Innumerable lakes and ponds know them no more, and each passing year sees fewer of them. During the past two winters, thousands have been found dead on Atlantic beaches, victims of poisoning by chlorinated hydrocarbons, heavy metals, and other toxins picked up in plankton eaten by small fish and concentrated in the loons' tissues until the dose proved lethal. There is reason to fear that the cry of the loon may soon become as rare as the cry of the wolf over the greater portion of this continent.