Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat

  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.

  Some of the most spectacular of all birds were the large, long-legged egrets, ibises, and herons, many of which were cursed with striking plumage that made them irresistible to sport and trophy gunners and for industrial exploitation by the infamous bird-plume trade. They were slaughtered in uncounted millions for the adornment of women’s hats and other such fashionable purposes during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although most species lived to the southward of the region with which we are concerned, several kinds were once found on the northeastern seaboard.

  The magnificent heron-like white ibis, clad in snowy plumage except for black wing tips and brilliant red legs and bill, has not been known to breed north of the Carolinas in recent times. Early references, however, suggest this was not always so. In 1536, Hore’s expedition to southern Newfoundland and Cape Breton “saw also certaine great foules with red bills and red legs, somewhat bigger than herons,” which could only have been this species. And in the account of the voyage of the Marigold to Cape Breton in 1593, we are told that “as they viewed the countrey they saw... great foule with red legs.” An indubitable white ibis was killed in Nova Scotia as late as 1959. It was listed as “accidental.”

  The showy roseate spoonbill, which is not even mentioned in the scientific literature as ever having been found in Canada, is another of the big waders that was at least a visitor to the Gulf of St. Lawrence region in early times. Nicolas Denys described and correctly named it in the mid-1600s as “the Palonne [Spoonbill] which has the beak about a foot long and round at the end like an oven shovel.”

  The statuesque great blue heron is still one of the most highly visible birds of the eastern seaboard, yet what we see today is no more than a shadow of its past abundance. Until well into the nineteenth century its tree-top colonies, often containing hundreds of nests, were to be found beside most rivers and lakes, and on many sea-girt islands, from the Gulf of St. Lawrence southward. As late as the 1870s it was not unusual to find congregations of herons numbering in the thousands gathered in stately phalanxes on the mud flats of the Bay of Fundy. Tidal marshes and wetlands everywhere along the coasts of New England abounded with the birds, both in migration and as breeding residents.

  They appear not to have been seriously molested until after mid-century, when sport fishing developed its enormous vogue. As sportsmen depleted available stocks of game fishes, the fraternity reacted as they have always done, by savaging those animals that could be thought of as competitors. Because the great blue heron ate small fishes (though almost exclusively of non-game species) and because it was so visible, a merciless campaign was mounted against it. Sport hunters assisted their fishermen compeers by shooting it whenever they had a chance. Breeding colonies were regularly ravaged and eggs, young, and adults massacred. On one occasion, a well-forested island in Penobscot Bay was put to the torch simply to destroy a heron rookery. Although now officially forbidden, harassment of the remaining colonies continues.

  Two species of cranes once migrated through and probably bred on the northeastern seaboard. The largest, the whooping crane, may well have been the most remarkable bird in North America. Standing nearly five feet high, it was a long-legged, long-necked, pure white creature, except for black wing tips and a crimson-coloured face. It is famous today because o
f the attention that last-ditch efforts to save it from extinction have evoked.

  That the whooper and the smaller sandhill crane were common in the northeastern region is confirmed by many references dating back to the mid-1500s. Both species were still abundant enough to constitute important staples in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century table fare. Even as late as the early 1700s, Charlevoix could remark: “We have two cranes of two colours; some quite white, and others of a light grey. They all make excellent soup.”

  Such huge and prepossessing birds could not hope to escape the rapacity of European man. Sport and market hunters slaughtered them mercilessly. By the mid-1800s, the whooping crane was gone and the sandhill reduced to extreme rarity in the eastern portion of the continent.

  After thirty years of dedicated effort, conservationists in the U.S. and Canada have been able to nurse the whooping crane back from a population of only thirty-one in 1955 to perhaps three times that number in 1984. These survivors mostly breed on the trackless muskegs of Wood Buffalo National Park in northwestern Canada and winter on the Aransas Refuge in Texas. Despite the care and protection given them, the long-term survival of the species remains in jeopardy.

  Birds that could be exploited for food, fun, profit, or all three were as abundant on dry land as in the marshes and over the seas. The best-known example of a land bird of apparently limitless profusion was the passenger pigeon, about which so much has been written that I need add little more. However, one aspect of its story has been overlooked. At first European contact the pigeons were abundant throughout the eastern seaboard region, as well as in the interior.

  Cartier noted them on Prince Edward Island in 1534. In 1605, Champlain visited some islands in the Gulf of Maine, “Upon [which] grow so many red currants that one can see nothing else in most places, and there are countless numbers of pigeons, whereof we took a goodly quantity.” Josselyn, in New England in the early 1600s, wrote of: “The Pidgeon, of which there are millions of millions. I have seen a flight of Pidgeons in the spring, and at Michaelmas when they return back to the Southward [stretching] for four or five miles, that to my way of thinking had neither beginning nor ending, length nor breadth, and so thick that I could see no Sun; they joyne Nest to Nest, and Tree to Tree by their Nests, many miles together in Pine-Trees. But of late they are much diminished, the English taking them with Nets. I have bought at Boston a dozen of Pidgeons, ready pull’d and garbidgd for three pence.”

  In 1663, James Yonge found them “innumerable” on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland. Lahontan, about 1680, wrote: “We resolv’d to declare War against the Turtle-Doves, which are so numerous in Canada that the Bishop has been forc’d to excommunicate ’em oftner than once, upon the account of Damage they do to the Products of the Earth.”

  Terribly vulnerable on their densely colonial nesting grounds, they were shot, gassed, blown up with black powder, seared with torches, netted, clubbed, and butchered in any and every way that could suggest itself to the fertile minds of the European invaders until, by about 1780, they had been effectively exterminated from the northeast. The story of their final destruction in the mideastern United States during the nineteenth century is so revolting that I am happy not to have to repeat it. The last recorded wild specimen seems to have been shot at Penetanguishene, Ontario, in 1902. The last passenger pigeon on earth, sole survivor of the billions that had greeted European man as he began his pillage of a continent, died captive in the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens in September, 1914.

  The wild turkey, ancestor of our domestic turkey, was initially abundant throughout eastern North America, at least as far north as southeastern New Brunswick. Essentially woodland birds, they could hold their own against bows and arrows but were helpless against guns. As settlement spread westward, the newcomers exterminated each successive turkey population for food, feathers, and the market. By the mid-1800s, the species was effectively extinct in northeastern North America. Attempts have been made to reintroduce it here and there, but these are usually only successful when the bird is semidomesticated on so-called game farms and preserves.

  Early Europeans encountered two kinds of game birds that were at once strange, yet vaguely familiar. One kind, in two forms, the English called “grous,” referring to what we now know as ruffed grouse and spruce grouse; the other they called “heath-cocke” or “pheysant.”

  The heath hen, as it later came to be known, was as large as the female European or ring-necked pheasant, which it superficially resembled. It was found from Cape Breton southward at least to Virginia, wherever open heathland or savannah existed. In aboriginal days, there were great stretches of such country, particularly near the coasts. In the 1670s, these big, meaty birds, whose barely surviving western cousins are called prairie chickens, were so numerous on “the ancient, brushy site of Boston, that labouring people or servants stipulated with their employers not to have Heath Hen brought to table oftener than a few times a week.” However, there was no stopping the wholesale slaughter of the birds through such mild restraints, and by the latter part of the eighteenth century they were already scarce. By 1830, the heath hen was extinct on the North American mainland, although a few hundred still survived on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. Despite attempts to protect them there, a disastrous grass and forest fire in 1916, coupled with steady poaching, eventually diminished the stock beyond recovery. By 1930, only a single representative of the once vast heath hen population remained alive. It attracted much attention from tourists and scientists, who came in such crowds to see it that it several times narrowly avoided being run over by cars. Sometime during the winter of 1932 it disappeared. The suspicion remains that it ended up in the “scientific” collection of some avid “naturalist.”

  Rock and willow ptarmigan were once enormously common in Newfoundland, Labrador, and along the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In winter, they formed gigantic flocks that drifted across the frozen barrens and blew through the spruce forests. In 1626, a planter at Renews on Newfoundland’s east coast killed 700 in one day. As late as 1863, one family living at the Strait of Belle Isle shot and snared 1,100 ptarmigan during a two-month period. In 1885, Napoleon Comeau reported a flock “over a half-a-mile long and from 60–100 yards wide, a continuous mass” on the north shore of the St. Lawrence estuary and, during that winter, the scattered residents of the district killed about 60,000. Another 30,000 were killed between Mingan and Godbout during the winter of 1895.

  They were shot in stupendous quantities in Newfoundland by local and market gunners, who were reinforced by visiting sport hunters from Canada and the United States who camped along the trans-island railway line. Individual bags of 300–400 birds were not uncommon in the late 1800s.

  Both species still exist in Newfoundland but are now comparatively rare, and the rock ptarmigan seems to be restricted to only a handful of localities in the western mountains of the province. Ptarmigan are probably still common in the interior of Labrador, but the great winter flocks that used to come out to the Gulf coast are no longer seen.

  Birds of prey have been treated as enemies ever since European settlement began. Eagles were and by many still are regarded as “wolves of the air” and accused of killing anything from human babies to small calves. All but the smallest hawks are still generically called “chicken hawks,” and every missing hen is laid to their door. Owls are believed to be inveterate killers of roosting fowl, up to and including domestic turkeys. Added to the catalogue of sins attributed to them by farmers come the even harsher accusations of sportsmen, who would eliminate all hawks and owls because of their supposed appetite for water fowl and upland game birds and, in the case of the osprey, of game fish. Shot, trapped, and poisoned as vermin, all large species of owls and hawks, and all eagles, have been devastated throughout North America, not least in the eastern Maritimes.

  The magnificent golden eagle, which once bred and ranged throughout the region,
has long been practically extinct in the East and is barely surviving elsewhere in North America.

  Because its livelihood was gained mostly from fish carrion, which commercial fishermen produce on a grand scale, the bald eagle did better. It still inhabited the Atlantic coast in fair numbers until the end of World War II. Thereafter the great birds rapidly began to disappear. Ornithologists noted that, although nests were built and eggs laid, the eggs seldom hatched or, if they did, the young were sickly and often died. It was not until Rachel Carson’s revolutionary book, Silent Spring, revealed the damage being done by pesticides and related poisons released into the environment by industrial man that anyone drew the right conclusion. Bald eagles were being rendered infertile by pesticides, particularly DDT. Nor were they alone. Almost every major avian predator was also suffering severely, some—such as the peregrine falcon—to the verge of extinction. In fact, the lordly peregrine now is extinct in eastern North America, except for a few pairs artificially raised and released in the faint hope of re-establishing a vanishing species in an environment that is constantly being flooded with new and even more virulent pesticides, herbicides, and other lethal chemicals.

  The bald eagle, be it said, is making a comeback in parts of southern Newfoundland and on Cape Breton Island. In the summer of 1984, Nova Scotia presented the government of the United States with six young eagles from Cape Breton, “to help bolster the numbers of the U.S. national symbol.” Today, only an estimated 1,600 pairs of bald eagles still survive in the lower forty-eight United States, out of an aboriginal population in the hundreds of thousands.

  Pesticide poisoning and illegal hunting, especially by sport fishermen, almost brought an end to the fish eagle called the osprey and, in fact, have succeeded in exterminating it from about 80 per cent of its former range in eastern North America. The species is now showing signs of a resurgence, but any gains stand to be temporary if we continue to saturate the land and seas with new pollutants.