On the Dennis marshes and flats, at Chatham, the Nauset, Wellfleet, and Billingsgate, Cape Cod, and on the flats around Tuckernuck and Muskeget Islands, Mass., they used to be more numerous than in all the rest of New England combined, and being very gregarious they would collect in those places in exceedingly large numbers, estimates of which were useless. This was previous to 1850 and when the Cape Cod Railroad was completed only to Sandwich. Often, when riding on the top of the stage coach on the cape beyond this point, immense numbers of these birds could be seen, as they rose up in clouds, during the period that they sojourned there. It was at this time that the vicious practice of "fire-lighting" them prevailed, and a very great number of them were thus killed on the flats at night in the vicinity of Billingsgate (near Wellfleet). The mode of procedure was for two men to start out after dark at half tide, one of them to carry a lighted lantern, the other to reach and seize the birds, bite their necks, and put them in a bag slung over the shoulder. When near a flock they would approach them on their hands and knees, the birds being almost invariably taken on the flats. This practice continued several years before it was finally prohibited by law. I have it directly from an excellent authority that he has seen in the spring, six barrels of these birds (all of which had been taken in this manner) at one time, on the deck of the Cape Cod packet for Boston. He has also seen barrels of them, which had spoiled during the voyage, thrown overboard in Boston Harbor on arrival of the packet. The price of these birds at that time was 10 cents per dozen; mixed with them would be turnstones and black-bellied plover. Not one of these birds had been shot, all having been taken with the aid of a "fire-light." Arthur T. Wayne (1910) says: On May 18, 1895, I saw, on Long Island beach, a flock of these birds which I estimated to contain fully fifteen hundred individuals, while on May 21 of the same year, I observed a flock that had alighted on the beach, and that comprised without a doubt more than 3,000 birds. Excessive shooting, both in spring and fall, reduced this species to a pitiful remnant of its former numbers; but spring shooting was stopped before it was too late and afterwards this bird was wisely taken off the list of game birds; it has increased slowly since then, but it is far from abundant now and makes only a short stay on Cape Cod.