Forest and Stream, September 8, 1881

THE SCARCITY OF BAY SNIPE.

Tourists and sportsmen -- Field sports - Hunting : Waterfowl and shorebirdNatural resources -- Conservation - Game

Editor Forest and Stream:

I would like to hear from your readers as to their observations on the growing scarcity of bay snipe and plover. My own experience, confined to Long Island, is that they bid fair at the present rate, in a few years to afford no enumeration to the market gunner and no sport to the sportsman. I spent four days on the Rockaway marshes last spring and have been there once a week since July 11, without one days' fair sport; and some of the days have been in everyway favorable. The season, in fact, has been a failure there -- so it has been at Shinnecock Bay -- as I learn from gentlemen, who have been there two weeks at a time (not the hotel keepers.)

One theory is that the birds have changed their course and now fly down the Mississippi Valley. The following from a recent letter from Cobb's Island, Va., indicates that they have not merely skipped Long Island in flying down the Atlantic Coast: "The bay between the island and the mainland surrounds hundreds of acres of salt marshes. From May until October these marshes are the home of thousands of bay birds -- snipe, curlew, willett, and plover. May is the great shooting month on the island. The birds stop on their way to the breeding grounds and they are killed by thousands. In fact so many of them are killed at this season that there has been a marked diminution in the fall flight during the past two or three years. It is estimated that an average of one thousand birds were killed each day during the month of May last."

Is not this the solution of the matter? Are not breech-loaders and spring shooting, especially the latter, the cause of the decrease of bay birds? -- L.

New York Sept. 5.