The Department of Agriculture never publishes and circulates anything that has already been published, no matter how valuable to the public at large.  Our rules are different.  Because I know that many of the people of our country need the information, I am going to reprint here, as an object lesson and a warning, the whole of the Biological Survey’s valuable and timely circular No. 79, issued April 11, 1911, and written by Prof.  W.L.  McAtee.  It should open the eyes of the American people to two things:  the economic value of these birds, and the fact that they are everywhere far on the road toward extermination!

* * * * *

OUR VANISHING SHOREBIRDS

By Prof.  W.L.  McAtee

The term shorebird is applied to a group of long-legged, slender-billed, and usually plainly colored birds belonging to the order Limicolae.  More than sixty species of them occur in North America.  True to their name they frequent the shores of all bodies of water, large and small, but many of them are equally at home on plains and prairies.

Throughout the eastern United States shorebirds are fast vanishing.  While formerly numerous species swarmed along the Atlantic coast and in the prairie regions, many of them have been so reduced that extermination seems imminent.  The black-bellied plover or beetlehead, which occurred along the Atlantic seaboard in great numbers years ago, is now seen only as a straggler.  The golden plover, once exceedingly abundant east of the Great Plains, is now rare.  Vast hordes of long-billed dowitchers formerly wintered in Louisiana; now they occur only in infrequent flocks of a half dozen or less.  The Eskimo curlew within the last decade has probably been exterminated and the other curlews greatly reduced.  In fact, all the larger species of shorebirds have suffered severely.

So adverse to shorebirds are present conditions that the wonder is that any escape.  In both fall and spring they are shot along the whole route of their migration north and south.  Their habit of decoying readily and persistently, coming back in flocks to the decoys again and again, in spite of murderous volleys, greatly lessens their chances of escape.

The breeding grounds of some of the species in the United States and Canada have become greatly restricted by the extension of agriculture, and their winter ranges in South America have probably been restricted in the same way.

Unfortunately, shorebirds lay fewer eggs than any of the other species generally termed game birds.  They deposit only three or four eggs, and hatch only one brood yearly.  Nor are they in any wise immune from the great mortality known to prevail among the smaller birds.  Their eggs and young are constantly preyed upon during the breeding season by crows, gulls, and jaegers, and the far northern country to which so many of them resort to nest is subject to sudden