An Abundance of Wildlife Early European voyagers landing on the East Coast
of North America were astounded to see animals in
numbers they had never before witnessed. Fish swarmed
in the millions.
Captain John Smith came upon vast schools of fish in
tributaries of the Potomac River, near the Chesapeake
Bay, in 1608: "…in diverse places that abundance of
fish lying so thick with their heads above the water [that]
as for want of nets (our barge driving among them) we
attempted to catch them with a frying pan, but we found
it a bad instrument to catch fish with. Neither better fish,
more plenty, nor more variety for small fish had any of us
ever seen in any place so swimming in the water…" (Hawke 1970).
Lobsters were so prolific that one haul of a fisherman's
net would bring in more than 100; settlers used them as
fertilizer and fish bait. Huge sturgeon 10 feet long swam
up major rivers to spawn along the East Coast. Offshore,
whales and herds of dolphins migrated along the coasts.
The northern right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) fed on
plankton in shallow lagoons as it migrated to its breeding
grounds off Florida.
The now-extinct Atlantic gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus)
was a common marine resident, swimming and feeding offshore.
At the present sites of Boston, New York and Philadelphia,
vast saltwater marshes surrounded river deltas. Shorebirds
and waterfowl darkened the sky with their millions.
Along the craggy rock‑strewn coasts of Maine and
the Canadian maritime provinces lived a large mink,
almost double the size of the American species found
elsewhere in the country. Unlike any other type of mink
in the world, the animal was a coastal species that soon
became known to colonists and fur trappers as the sea
mink (Mustela macrodon). One sea mink killed in 1867
measured 32.5 inches in length, enormous in comparison
to the American mink, which does not exceed 23 inches
(Mowat 1981). The sea mink's pelt had twice the value
of the inland species in the fur trade (Allen 1942).
An early account by the English naturalist Joseph Banks,
who traveled to Newfoundland in 1766 to study the local
fauna, described the sea mink as "bigger than a Fox, tho
not much, in make and shape nearest compared to an Italian
Greyhound, legs long, tail long and tapering" (Mowat 1981).
It is unlikely that the sea mink was as long‑legged
as a greyhound, but available information indicates
it was quite different from any closely related species.
Bones from the sea mink have been found along the
coast of Maine and New Brunswick (Allen 1942).
The fur traders decimated these minks long before
scientific or biological studies could be carried out.
One early observer described the avid pursuit of sea
minks in Maine:
Some seventy‑five years ago, and for many
years thereafter, my father, who was a fur‑buyer,
used to have nearly all the furs taken on the island
of Penobscot Bay . . . these sea mink used to
bring considerably more than others on
account of their great size . . . they were persistently
hunted. . . with dogs trained for the purpose. As the
price of mink rose, they were hunted more and grew
scarcer, 'til in the sixties, when mink skins
brought eight or ten dollars apiece, parties who
made a businessof hunting nearly or quite
exterminated the race. Some of these
men went from island to island, hunting any
small ledge where a mink could live. They carried
their dogs with them, and besides guns,
shovels, pick‑axes and crow‑bars, took a good supply
of pepper andbrimstone. If they took refuge in holes
or cracks of the ledges, they were usually dislodged by
working with shovels and crow‑bars,
and the dogs caught them when they came out.
If they were in the crevices of the rocks where they
could not be got at and their eyes could be seen to shine,
they were shot and pulled out by means of an iron rod
with a screw at the end. If they could not be seen, they
were usually driven out by firing in charges of pepper.
If this failed, then they were smoked with brimstone, in
which case they either came out or were suffocated in
their holes. Thus in a short time they were nearly
exterminated (Beard 1947). The last known sea mink
was killed in 1880, and its pelt was sold to a fur buyer in
Jonesport, Maine (Mowat 1981). Only fragments of bones
and teeth found in excavations of Indian cooking sites attest
to its existence (Nowak 1999).
A beautiful North American waterfowl species also
disappeared. The male Labrador duck
(Camptorhynchus labradorius) had striking black‑and
‑white plumage, while the female was mousy brown.
During the 19th century, these birds were often seen
in fall and winter off New York's Long Island and on the
New Jersey coast. Named for the Canadian peninsula
where naturalists of the day assumed that they bred,
eggs reported to belong to this species had been seen
by a naturalist, but the nests were never found
(Greenway 1967). This duck had a soft bill, and inside
its mouth, lamellae filtered its food. The Labrador duck
was assumed to have a specialized diet, possibly of small
surface invertebrates that it filtered while dabbling at the
surface. The ducks also fed on mollusks, as hunters
discovered when they caught them with fishing lines
baited with mussels (Fuller 1987).
Labrador ducks were strong flyers who flew in tight, small flocks
(Day 1981). Along with virtually all waterfowl of the day, they
were shot for the feather and food markets. Gunners killed entire
flocks of waterfowl, bringing them to market, where they were
heaped in piles. The ducks were killed for no purpose, since
they were not sought after as food and considered too "fishy
" by most customers. Many of the birds shot by hunters were
left to rot, unsold at markets (Day 1981, Greenway 1967).
The Labrador duck, first described scientifically in 1789, was
always considered rare, and the last known specimen was a
bird shot off Long Island 86 years later, during the autumn of
1875. This male is kept in the US National Museum of Natural
History (Fuller 1987). The Labrador duck was apparently hunted
to extinction, a victim of the totally unrestricted waterfowl hunting that
characterized the 19th century, based on its prevalence in game markets
(Day 1981).
Further north, a flightless bird walked upright on its flippered
feet. At a length of 3 feet, the great auk (Alca impennis) was the
size of a large penguin, and could have been mistaken for one.
Like many northern seabirds, it had a black back and white belly
, but each side of its face was dramatically marked with a large,
white oval. Its bill was long and hooked. Great auks were far
larger than any of their cousins – the murres, puffins and guillemots
of the North Atlantic. At one time, these birds ranged along most
of the coasts and islands of the North Atlantic, from northern France
through Scandinavia, England, Scotland and Iceland, to North America's
eastern coast as far south as Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts
(Greenway 1967). Based on fossil evidence, great auks were once
as numerous as most other sea birds of the region (Greenway 1967).
The very oldest bones, excavated on the island of Jersey in the English
Channel, are between 70 and 90 thousand-years-old (Greenway 1967).
As the only flightless bird in the North Atlantic, it was once widespread
and numerous. When people approached the birds while they were on
land nesting, great auks would immediately waddle to the water's edge
and dive in. They were rapid and expert swimmers, using their wings to
propel them. When cornered on land, however, they were helpless.
Both parents raised the chicks, and they refused to desert their nests,
even when attacked. For centuries, hunters took advantage of this trait,
pursuing and killing them during their breeding season. Ship crews
slaughtered thousands for provisions and took live birds on board for
future meals.
Gradually over the centuries, great auks disappeared from
most European coastlines and offshore islands as a result of
hunting. The last record in the British Isles was on St. Kilda
, an island west of northern Scotland, where some local residents
captured a Great Auk in 1821; although kept captive with a
string attached to its foot, it managed to escape (Fuller 1987).
Twenty years later, as recounted by an older resident, another
auk was found asleep on a rock on the same island and captured,
kept for three days, and then killed because these superstitious
people feared that it was a witch (Greenway 1967).
Great auk feathers were harvested in grisly "factories" on Funk Island
off Newfoundland in the 18th century. Collectors built pens of piled
boulders into which they would drive the hapless great auks from their
nests. Once the auks were cornered in the pens, the men would swing
spiked clubs at the birds, killing or wounding them (Day 1981). The birds
were then thrown over the enclosure walls into piles near the fires; there
the dead and wounded birds were dropped into boiling cauldrons or thrown
directly on the fires (Day 1981). The boiling water caused the feathers to float
to the surface, where they were scooped up and stuffed into bags; the corpses
were next dragged down to the water where they were dumped (Day 1981).
Some observers, including Captain George Cartwright, an early colonist on
Labrador, watched boats coming ashore laden with hundreds of carcasses
from Funk Island. He wrote in July 1785, "If a stop is not soon put to that
practice, the whole breed will be diminished to almost nothing" (Birkhead 1994)
. By 1800, all the island's great auks had been killed. The ashes and pens stil
l remain on Funk Island as the only reminder of this extraordinary bird.
Islands off Iceland and Newfoundland became the last
refuges of thegreat auk. When word spread in the 19th
century that the species wasnearing extinction, hunters went in
search of them for museums and
egg collections. The eggs and skins of the Garefowl,
as it was knownto Europeans, were sold at auction in
London and to European museums
for very high prices. Hundreds of English pounds
were offered for each
egg, encouraging fishermen to comb islets for
the last of the nesting birds.
The only remaining birds known to survive were
killed on Eldey Island off
southwest Iceland on June 2, 1844; three Icelandic
fishermen who discovered
two birds, a breeding pair with a single egg, strangled
the adults and threw
them into a boat (Birkhead 1994). These last great auks
were killed for their
skins, which were sold to a dealer (Birkhead 1994).
Other marine creatures barely avoided extinction
during the period
of unregulated killing of wildlife that began in the
1600s. The Atlantic
walrus (Odobenus rosmarus rosmarus) herd off the
Canadian coast numbered
at least a quarter of a million animals prior to
European exploitation.
Between 1633 and 1642, vessels from the
Massachusetts Bay Colony
made a number of expeditions to Sable Island
off Nova Scotia to kill the
walruses for their tusks and oil. Glover Allen
(1942), in Extinct and
Vanishing Mammals of the Western Hemisphere,
chronicles one sealing
voyage in 1641 in which 12 men who spent eight months
on Sable Island
returned with "400 pair of sea horse teeth, which were
esteemed and worth
300 pounds." The walrus colonies in the Gulf of St.
Lawrence numbered
seven or eight thousand at that time; they were killed
off by American
sealers, who worked at night while the walruses slept
on land (Allen 1942).
Gradually, the Atlantic walrus became exterminated
in all areas on the
continent. From 1925 to 1931, the last large population
in the Canadian
Arctic on Baffin Island was devastated by the killing of
175 thousand animals
(Nowak 1999). Although finally given protection, the
species has not shown a
substantial recovery because of the high kill by native
peoples, which equals
annual recruitment in the western Atlantic (Nowak 1999).
Only 25 thousand
walruses remain in this region. Russia classifies the
species as vulnerable
and the population in the Laptev Sea as rare (Nowak 1999).
They may have
increased somewhat along the coast of Norway, in the
Svalbard region and
Barents Sea (Nowak 1999).
Although the Pacific gray whale has now recovered
from near‑extinction from
whaling, few people are aware that this species once
lived in the Atlantic as well
(Allen 1942, Mowat 1981). Large numbers of Atlantic
gray whales migrated along
North America's eastern coast until as late as the end of
the 18th century (Mowat 1981).
Whalers of the 1740s saw whales whose descriptions
matched those of the gray whale,
but the existence of this species was not verified until fossil
remains were uncovered
(Allen 1942, Mowat 1981). Early Basque whalers had
eliminated gray whales from
European waters centuries before (Mowat 1981). Atlant
gray whales swam south
along the shore of the coasts of Maine, Massachusetts and
Long Island, down to the
Florida Keys, where their calves were born (Mowat 1981).
This whale, known as the
"Scrag" in the Northeast, was a familiar species off the coasts
of Nova Scotia and Maine
in early colonial times. It gave rise to place names such as the
Scrag Islands, Scrag Rocks
and Scrag Harbor – now known as Sag Harbor (Mowat 1981).
These whales fed in shallow
bays on abundant bottom‑dwelling crustaceans, making them easy
prey for whalers. They
were killed beginning in the early 1600s by harpooners off Nantucket
Island, Cape Cod and
Long Island Sound in the shallow shoals of their migration route
(Mowat 1981). By the early
1700s, New England whalers had completely eliminated this whale
(Mowat 1981).
Beginning in 1609, Samuel de Champlain sailed down the
St. Lawrence River to
the Great Lakes (Peck 1990). Other explorers and settlers
established trading posts
and villages. Furs were major items of trade, and soon beaver
and other furbearers
were traded in the millions by the French and English. Early
travelers found wild
turkeys (Melagris gallopavo) so abundant boys threw stones
at them for recreation
(Peck 1990). Two French explorers observed great numbers
of fish in the Great
Lakes and the upper Mississippi River, which soon became
exploited. Vast
numbers of cisco, members of the Salmonidae family, once
lived in the Great
Lakes. The Blackfin Cisco (Coregonus nigripinnus) and
Deepwater Cisco
(Coregonus johannae), native to Lake Michigan and Lake
Huron, were
considered "jumbo herring" by fishermen from early times
(Day 1981).
By the late 19th century, large fishing vessels with huge
nets caught up
to 15 million tons from one lake alone per year; one ne
t haul might yield as
much as 10 tons in a day (Day 1981). Fishing continued,
even in winter,
through ice holes, and prior to the availability of freezing
facilities, dumping
of unsold catches amounted to many tons (Day 1981).
These fish became
commercially extinct after World War I, and subsequently
were declared
extinct by the World Conservation Union, along with another
Great Lakes
species, the longjaw cisco (Coregonus alpenae) (Baillie and
Groombridge 1996).
This overfishing was repeated in the Atlantic waters off New
England and southern
Canada. Cod, halibut and flounder abounded here, providing
ample fish for centuries
to local fishing communities. Huge cod weighing 180 pounds and
halibut the size of
barn doors were often caught in these times. Factory fishing ships
began fishing here
in the 1950s and soon depleted the stocks. National legislation
banned these vessels
from the Atlantic coast and smaller vessels took their place.
With few restrictions on
take — and far too many fishermen — the stocks crashed in
the 1980s and early 1990s.
With the encouragement of the National Marine Fisheries Service
(NMFS), fishermen
turned to small sharks known as dogfish. Within a few years, they
also became depleted
because of their extremely slow reproductive rate, a fact apparently
not appreciated by the
NMFS. Fishery conservation legislation has been enacted, but these
stocks may never
return to former abundance.
Some fisherman are being compensated for their boats by a
federal program,
in order to ease fishing pressure on remaining stocks, bu
t others are turning to
small fish, such as menhaden. These fish are fed on by
humpback whales
(Megaptera novaeangliae), threatened species not yet
recovered from past
whaling, as well as by puffins and other seabirds. Many
seabirds are
undergoing population decline as a result of a dwindling
food supply and
the drowning risk posed by fishing nets. Shorebirds, too,
are affected by
overfishing. Horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus) lay
their eggs along
the east coast each year, providing abundant food for
shorebirds on their
northward migration, and for many types of other wildlife
as well. These
crabs are captured by the millions for use as fish bait,
which has reduced
their numbers dangerously in some areas. The shorebirds
have also declined
precipitously in recent years, some species by 90 percent.
Entire food chains
are being disrupted as a result of over exploitation of the sea.
Ocean pollution
has contaminated Atlantic coastal waters, causing die-offs
of dolphins, fish
and manatees.
All along the East Coast, colonists built cities at river
deltas, which were
surrounded by vast salt marshes. These locations were
considered prime
seaport and manufacturing sites, and the marshes were
filled in and polluted.
Tens of thousands more acres of marshes along the
Northeast coast have
been ruined by construction of drainage ditches to control
mosquitoes and
halt malaria. In fact, these ditches created habitat for
mosquito breeding and
caused the water level in the marshes to drop. Waterbird
populations declined
sharply as a result, and they no longer filled their role as
fish and shellfish nurseries,
water filterers and flood controls. In a recent development,
dikes in 10 thousand
acres of marshes on Long Island are being blocked to open
normal flow channels
between marsh and bay, and exotic reeds are being removed
(Lambert 1997).
The marshes that have been returned to their natural state
showed an immediate
tripling in the number of waterfowl wintering there, and a doubling
of wading birds
such as ibis, egrets and herons; shorebird populations quintupled;
these marshes
have at least 130 species of breeding birds, and 300 species use
them for wintering
or migration (Lambert 1997). The marshes give a glimpse of the
wealth of wildlife
that once inhabited eastern coasts; with similar programs, they can
be restored to
help build up stock of fish and shellfish.
In most areas, however, housing and development
now occupy the sand
dunes and former marshes. Some barrier islands off
the coasts, which buffer
the beaches against the erosion effects of storms, have
been preserved in
portions of the East Coast, such as Virginia, North Carolina
and Georgia.
Elsewhere, roads, houses and businesses clutter these
islands, and
development has endangered many native birds.
Georgia's beautiful
coastal marshes were given official protection after
they were nearly
destroyed by phosphate mining, when it was shown that
their value as
shrimp and fish nurseries far outweighed their short-term
value for
phosphate.
At the southern tip of the United States, the
Florida Everglades
, one of the largest wetlands in the world, once
provided nesting and
feeding ground for millions of egrets, herons,
pelicans and other
waterbirds. This sawgrass wilderness sheltered
vast numbers of
American alligators (Alligator mississipiensis).
Cougars, known a
s Florida panthers (Felis concolor coryi), were
common, and preyed
on the small Everglades white-tailed deer. Water
diversion projects
for agriculture and the new human population of
Miami and coastal
cities resulted in a drying out of the Everglades.
Exotic plants have
proliferated in the marshes, overwhelming the
native grasses and
choking waterways. Ninety percent of the populations
of waterbirds
disappeared. The Florida panther recently became
extinct in Everglades
National Park, one of its last refuges. The alligator
has recovered from
nearly disastrous hide hunting in Florida, but remains
rare in many parts
of its original range. A project to restore some of the
waterflow to the
Everglades was enacted into law in the 1990s
(see Aquatic Ecosystems chapter).
The American crocodile (Crocodylus acutus), a
saltwater species
inhabiting coastal areas, was once numerous in
Florida Bay and in
the mangroves of the Keys. Today, this is one
of the most endangered
species in the country, numbering fewer than
400 animals. Early hide
hunting reduced them and, in this century,
pollution and loss of mangroves
in their habitat have pushed this species close
to extinction.
Many Everglades bird species are also endangered,
and one has recently
become extinct — the dusky seaside sparrow
(Melospiza maritima nigriscens).
This sparrow, with its unusually dark coloration,
was a victim of the massive
destruction of wetlands in Florida. By the time it
received the protection of the
US Endangered Species Act, this subspecies was
nearly extinct. Its limited habitat
of spartina grass on Florida's central Atlantic coast
had been flooded for mosquito
control and drained for the construction of nearby
NASA facilities (Ehrlich et al. 1992).
In an 11th-hour attempt to save these little sparrows,
a captive breeding program was
set up, mating them with a related subspecies to preserve
some of their genes.
The last purebred dusky seaside sparrow died at the age
of 13 in 1987
(Ehrlich et al. 1992). The breeding program was not
successful, and by 1997,
the related subspecies had also become endangered.
Two spectacular waterbirds, the American flamingo
(Phoenicopterus ruber),
and the scarlet ibis (Guara rubra), were once residents
of south Florida. Both
species were eliminated in the 19th century when, as
William T. Hornaday (1913
) observed, they "attracted the evil eyes of the
'milliner's taxidermists.'"
The feather trade of the late 19th century nearly
exterminated the majority
of North America's wading birds and many of its
seabirds through unregulated
slaughter for plumes to adorn ladies' hats. Egrets,
roseate spoonbills, herons,
terns and other birds with long or colorful feathers
were killed indiscriminately.
In 1900, the Lacey Act and state laws extended
protection to these birds by
banning sale and interstate commerce, and the
Migratory Bird Treaty Act
, signed with Canada in 1918, protected native
North American non‑game birds
from capture, killing and sale.
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