Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador: Supplement to an Address Presented by Lt.-Colonel William Wood, F.R.S.C. Before the Second Annual Meeting of the Commission of Conservation in January, 1911Wood, William
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Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador: Supplement to an Address Presented by Lt.-Colonel William Wood, F.R.S.C. Before the Second Annual Meeting of the Commission of Conservation in January, 1911
Canada is blessed with many unique natural resorts of animal
life and I have been particularly impressed with the
invasions that have been made on the wonderful nesting
places of the waterfowl. In my repeated stays on the coast
of Gaspe and the islands of the Gulf, now running over a
dozen years, I have had my attention forced to the hideous
sacrifices of bird life that are constantly going on; for
example in the Magdalen islands with their extraordinary
array of shore birds. The great lagoons within the islands
afford ideal breeding conditions, and an extraordinary
attraction for the hunter as well.
My observation leads me to the conviction that the shooting
law is not in the least respected on these islands, except
perhaps by the residents themselves. In some cases the
outsider is obliged to wait for the fall migration of the
ducks and geese and so comes within the law, but there are
plenty of early migrants that arrive during the close
season, only to be quickly picked up by the summer hunter,
who realizes that he is too far away to incur the law's
force.
As far as the shore birds are concerned, it is not the
occasional hunter that does the real damage. The islands are
becoming widely known to students of birds, and it is the
bird student, the member of the Audubon Society, (in most
instances, I regret to say, men of my own country) who are
guilty of ruthless slaughter of the shore birds for their
skins, and particularly for their eggs; all this in the
protected season.
The situation is even worse on the Bird rocks. That is a
protected area and yet is subject to fearful attacks from
the egg hunters. I do not mean the commercial "eggers," but
the member of the Audubon Society who has a collection of
birds' eggs and skins and wants duplicates in order to enter
into exchange with his colleagues. I met there on one of my
visits an American "student" who had taken 369 clutches of
eggs of each of the seven or more species of waterfowl there
breeding, thus destroying at one swoop upwards of two
thousand potential birds. It is no wonder that, with such a
hideous desecration of the rights of the birds, the
population of the Rocks is rapidly decreasing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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