by Farley Mowat
It was easy enough to do.
Nicolas Denys, making a raid on the rookeries at Sambro Island near Halifax, found “so great an abundance of all kinds [of sea-birds] that all my crew and myself, having cut clubs for ourselves, killed so great a number... that we were unable to carry them away. And aside from these the number of those which were spared and which rose into the air, made a cloud so thick that the rays of the sun could scarcely penetrate it.”
Pressure on the bird colonies to furnish bait mounted inexorably. In 1580, more than 300 European ships were already fishing the northeastern approaches, and that number quadrupled before 1700. In 1784, there were 540 deep-sea vessels alone, most of them using birds for bait during at least part of the fishing season. By 1830, an additional fleet of several hundred New England schooners was fishing the Labrador coast and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, making extensive use of birds.
Apart from the shipborne fishery, growing numbers of planters and by-boat (transient) shoremen fished from innumerable coves and harbours, and all of these regularly used seabirds for bait. Some continued to do so, particularly in Newfoundland and Labrador, well into modern times.
Dr. Arthur Bent visited the Magdalen Island Bird Rocks in 1904 and found that they were being regularly raided by bait-seeking fishermen who would scale the cliffs with ladders and ropes and slaughter as many as 500 gannets in an hour. Bent noted that forty vessels were supplying themselves from the Bird Rocks, the gannets “being roughly skinned and the flesh cut off in chunks.” Another method, still in use in the twentieth century at Cape St. Mary’s, where the sheer cliffs guarding a gannet colony cannot be scaled, was to set water-logged planks or logs adrift nearby, with a herring tied to each. The gannets, diving in their spectacular way from great heights, would not detect the fraud in time and so would break their necks in scores and hundreds. Gannets, murres, razorbills, and other deep divers were taken in quantity with small-mesh nets into which the birds swam, and drowned.
Even cormorants were used for bait. Although initially their colonies were to be found everywhere along the coasts at least as far south as Georgia, by 1922 they had been so reduced that the great cormorant was for a time thought to have been “extirpated as a breeding bird in North America.”
Until late in the nineteenth century, American and Canadian bankers used to make an early voyage that depended for bait on adult oceanic birds. Called the “shack fishery,” it mainly used the flesh of the graceful shearwaters and fulmars. The birds were killed by dorymen using five- or six-fathom lines to each of which a multitude of small mackerel hooks baited with cod livers was affixed. The procedure they followed is described in an 1884 report to the United States Fish Commission.
“The fishermen derive much gratification from the sport, not only from the excitement it affords but on account of the prospective profits in obtaining a good supply of birds for bait. When a victim has been hooked it struggles most energetically to rise in the air, or by spreading its feet it holds itself back as it is dragged through the water. At times a bird may disengage the hook but usually the barbed point is well fastened and the bird is landed in the boat. The fisherman crushes its skull with his teeth or strikes it with his ‘gob stick’. This may continue until perhaps two hundred birds are captured.”
Sometimes shearwaters were taken to the ship alive.
“Perhaps a dozen or so of them are put in a hogshead on the deck of the vessel then the fishermen bring about an internecine war by stirring them up with a stick. The birds evidently imagine their comrades are avowed enemies and, pitching into their neighbours, a general fight and terrible commotion ensues while the feathers fly in all directions, much to the amusement of the men. The fishermen also sometimes tie two together by the legs which enables the birds to swim, but keeps them in unpleasant contact, the consequence being that they fight until one or both succumb.”
Shearwaters and fulmars were still being slaughtered for bait by Newfoundland fishermen as late as 1949.
Not even the small, robin-sized petrels (also called Mother Carey’s chickens) were immune. “The most common and effective way of killing them was with a whip which was made by tying several parts of codline to a staff five or six feet in length. The petrels were tolled by throwing out a large piece of codfish liver and when they had gathered in a dense mass, swish went the thongs of the whip cutting their way through the crowded flock and killing or maiming a score or more at a single sweep. The cruel work went on until maybe 400 or 500 were killed.”
Although adult seabirds were preferred because their flesh held together better on the hook, the available supply seldom came close to meeting the demand. So the young were butchered too. On some rookeries, in some seasons, hardly a young bird reached maturity. A fisherman from Bonavista Bay in Newfoundland once described to me a bait raid in which he took part.
“ ’Twas late in June-month and the young turrs [murres] was well growed. We was seven men and a half-a-dozen youngsters in two trap boats, and we had gob sticks with iron heads onto them. We come up to the rock just after sunrise and went right off to work. Everywhere you walked the young turrs was thick as hair on a dog. Ticklasses [kittiwakes] and old turrs was overhead in thousands and thousands and the stink when the sun come up was like to choke a shark. Well, we set to, and it was whack-whack-whack until me arms got that tired I could hardly swing me stick. I was nigh covered-up with blood and gurry and the slime they hove up when they was hit. Fast as we knocked ’em over, the young lads hauled them off to the boats in brin bags. She was only a little bit of an island, so it didn’t take we all day to clean her up. And I don’t say as how what we left behind was enough to make a good scoff for a fox. Them boats was built to carry fifty quintal [about two-and-a-half tons] and they was well loaded. Enough bait so as every boat in the cove could fish free and easy for a fortnight afterwards.”
Here now is a look at the status of some of the major threatened seabird species of the northeastern seaboard of America.
Often called Mother Carey’s chicks, or sea swallows, the little storm petrels are the disembodied wraiths of the ocean, riding the vortex of wind and water far at sea except for the brief interval when they come ashore to reproduce. They breed in shallow burrows they excavate in sod or soil and in crevices amongst the rocks, flying to and from their rookeries only in darkness. So secretive are they that one can walk across a turf-clad clifftop honeycombed with their burrows and be unaware that hundreds and thousands of them lie quiet underneath one’s feet. Leach’s storm petrel once bred in enormous numbers on islands and headlands south at least to Cape Cod, but the encroachments of modern man and his associated animals have deprived them of most of their one-time rookeries, except in Newfoundland. According to Dr. David Nettleship of the Canadian Wildlife Service, the population status is uncertain in Newfoundland and Labrador but still declining elsewhere in eastern Canada and New England.
The magnificent northern gannet, with its white plumage and black-tipped wings spanning nearly six feet, was once one of the most spectacular seabirds of the eastern seaboard. In 1833, even after the species had already endured more than three centuries of unrelenting slaughter, Audubon could still write of a summer visit to the Bird Rocks in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in this wise: “At length we discovered at a distance a white speck which the pilot assured us was the celebrated rock of our wishes. We thought it was still covered with snow several feet deep. As we approached I imagined that the atmosphere around us was filled with [snow] flakes but... I was assured there was nothing in sight but the gannets and their island home. I rubbed my eyes, took out my glasses, and saw the strange dimness in the air was caused by the innumerable birds... When we advanced the magnificent veil of floating gannets was easily seen, now shooting upward as if intent on reaching the sky, then descending as if to join the feathered masses below, and again diverging to either side and sweeping over the surface of the ocean.”
I
n Audubon’s time, the gannet colony on Bird Rocks is believed to have numbered over 100,000 individuals. When Europeans first appeared on this continent there were scores of such rookeries, many harbouring at least this many breeding birds. By the middle of the nineteenth century, only nine rookeries still survived in all of North America. By 1973, the six remaining colonies mustered a grand total of 32,700 pairs of adult gannets—a decrease of about 20 per cent since as recently as 1966. By 1983, there had been a further decrease in the Gulf population of as much as 10 per cent, the result chiefly of toxic chemical poisoning in the fish that sustained the Bonaventure Island colony.
The small size and restricted distribution of the remaining North American gannet populations make the bird highly vulnerable to further, and perhaps fatal, decline due to toxic pollution, increased human fishing efforts, and accidental spills that must inevitably occur with the development of an offshore oil industry.
Two species of cormorant, the great and the double-crested, formerly bred not only along sea coasts from mid-Labrador southward but beside freshwater lakes and rivers, too. They were exceedingly abundant and remained so into the seventeenth century, probably because Europeans considered their rank and oily flesh unfit for food. However, once birds became staple bait for the cod fisheries, both species began to suffer colossal wastage. Crowded together in great colonies on bare rocks or in dense stands of trees, their young could be easily killed in enormous quantities and, because of their stringy musculature, the meat “hung together” well on the cod hooks.
When bird bait ceased to be of much importance, there was no slackening in the devastation of the cormorants. By the beginning of the twentieth century many fish stocks had visibly declined, and fishermen concluded that cormorants were among the principal villains. This led to a deliberate attempt to wipe them out, chiefly by raids on their rookeries during which all eggs and chicks would be ground under foot and as many adults as possible shot down. A latter-day refinement is to spray the eggs with kerosene as they lie in the nests. This seals the microscopic pores in the shells and results in the asphyxiation of the embryos within. Since the adults are not aware that the eggs will never hatch, they often continue to brood them until too late in the season to attempt a second laying.
The campaign against the cormorants has been so successful that, by 1940, fewer than 3,000 great cormorants existed in Canadian waters. Having been granted a modicum of protection after World War II, the species might have been expected to recover, but such has not been the case, mainly because malevolent persecution by commercial and sport fishermen continues. In 1972, I investigated a raid on a major breeding colony of double-crested cormorants on the Magdalen Islands. Five men armed with .22 rifles had spent a morning shooting adults off their nests in a spruce grove, leaving the ground littered with parental corpses. What seemed far worse was the multitude of dead and dying young, both in the nests and on the ground—victims of starvation consequent upon the deaths of their parents.
As fish stocks continue to diminish, the vendetta against cormorants, and other fish-eating animals, can be expected to intensify, with the connivance of some game and fisheries officials who still cling to the discredited belief that cormorants are indeed a menace to the fisheries.
Four species of the marvellously accomplished, black-capped fliers called terns once bred in uncounted colonies on islands, beaches, and sandbars in both fresh and salt water throughout the Atlantic seaboard. They do not seem to have been deliberately attacked by man until the middle of the nineteenth century, when their colonies were devastated by feather hunters supplying the millinery trade. Tern wings, tails, and sometimes the entire skins were used to embellish women’s hats, and such was the intensity of the ensuing carnage that all terns became comparatively rare. A large share of the blame for their ongoing diminishment must, however, be laid to the loss of nesting sites through human occupation, degradation of the beaches where the birds once bred, and toxic chemical poisoning. All four species are in trouble, with the roseate and Caspian terns reduced to vestigial remnants and the once superlatively abundant Arctic and common terns suffering the most serious current rate of decline.
With one exception, the gulls seem to have benefited from recent human activities. The small, black-headed laughing gull, once common on the Atlantic seaboard from the Gulf of St. Lawrence south, is now a rarity. However, herring, ring-billed, and black-backed gulls and kittiwakes have staged a quite remarkable comeback from a centuries-long decline during which they and their eggs were taken in enormous quantities for human food. Paradoxically, their success is largely due to the massive and wasteful destruction of sea life by modern fisheries, and to the consequent surfeit of offal and carrion available to them. They have also benefited hugely from the enormous outpouring of gull-edible garbage excreted by our society.
Auks, guillemots, murres, and puffins form the family called Alcidae. Its members are sea animals par excellence, spending the great bulk of their lives on and under the waters and as little time as possible in the air or on the land. Most are intensely colonial on their breeding grounds, and many also tend to live in great congregations when at sea. Of all seabirds, this is the family that has suffered most at the hands of modern man, and suffers still.
The razorbill looks very much like a great auk but is only about a third as large. Although it has so far escaped its cousin’s fate, principally because of its retained ability to fly, it is now one of the two least numerous members of its family—an unfortunate distinction it shares with the black guillemot.
Generally living in mixed colonies with its relative, the murre, the razorbill was formerly found from about Cape Cod northward but is now restricted to Atlantic Canada and the west coast of Greenland. The fifty-seven existing Canadian sites contain only about 15,000 pairs—an insignificant remnant of a species that probably numbered well over a hundred times that many at first European contact.
The two species of murres, common and thick-billed, taken together were, in all likelihood, the most numerous seabirds in North American waters when Europeans first arrived. The thick-billed murre bred from the northern Gulf and eastern Newfoundland to Baffin Bay. It was secure from modern man in its Arctic habitat until fairly recently and still musters a population in excess of three million individuals, although its numbers are declining. By contrast, its surviving breeding population in the ten remaining rookeries on the eastern Atlantic seaboard amounts to 2,500 pairs at most.
Nettleship says the thick-bill has suffered “major declines in numbers throughout most of the North Atlantic during the last 30–40 years (probably a 30–40% reduction in the eastern Canadian arctic).” The chief causes for this will be looked into a little later, but the salient fact that emerges from these figures is that even animals well insulated from the rapacity of modern man, as were the Arctic thick-billed murres, can have no guarantee of a future in the world we are moulding.
It has recently been revealed that hunters in powerboats using modern shotguns still kill as many as 400,000 murres, most of them migrant thick-billed murres, in the waters off Newfoundland and Labrador every winter; at least another 200,000 are reportedly killed by Greenlanders. In the case of this species, the kill today is probably greater than it has ever been in the past.
The common murre once occupied much the same range as the razorbill. Its colonies were to be found on as many as 200 rookeries in the Gulfs of Maine and St. Lawrence and along the coasts of the Canadian Maritime Provinces. It is now found at only twenty-six sites, restricted to the northern part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, and southern Labrador and to one tiny colony of fifty pairs in the Bay of Fundy.
The gnomish Atlantic puffin, long a figure of fun for cartoonists and storytellers, is in perilous condition. Its breeding distribution in the western Atlantic is today restricted to the region from mid-Labrador south to the northern part of the Gulf of Maine, with a scattering of small colonies on the wes
t Greenland coast. Nearly 70 per cent of the total extant North American population, amounting to about 700,000 breeding birds, is concentrated on three islands in Witless Bay in southeastern Newfoundland. Here, in what is now a provincial seabird sanctuary, the last effectives of a species that once numbered in the several millions are making their final stand.
Like the storm petrels, puffins are intensely colonial and generally nest in burrows, which gave them some protection from natural predators and, later, from eggers and bait hunters, although they still suffered heavily from such assailants. If this had been all they had to suffer at our hands, they might have managed to sustain themselves; but along with the storm petrels, the majority of their colonies were destroyed by the plague of alien animals we unleashed upon them. These included feral cats and dogs that dug out the burrows; sheep, goats, and cattle that trampled them in; and hogs released on bird islands to root out and fatten on young and old alike.
They also included another marauder Europeans brought to North America in their train. In the early summer of 1959, I visited the bold islet called Columbier that rises almost sheer from the sea near St. Pierre. The steep and spongy slopes and the flat centre of the island were so honeycombed with puffin burrows that it was difficult to move without stepping into one. The air was filled with feathered bullets, as hard-flying parent puffins exploded underfoot or drove in from seaward to protest my intrusion. Below me, I could see flotilla after flotilla of them on the water waiting for me to leave. Although I could only guess at their numbers, I am sure there must have been at least 10,000 on Columbier.