William G. Thomas III, et. al., The Countryside Transformed

Market hunting—the shooting or capture of wildfowl sold to milliners, restaurants, or poultry markets&mdashopened up with new layers of infrastructure and access to markets. Such large-scale hunting picked up pace with the arrival of the railroad. Although it provided another source of income for both permanent residents and transients, the hunting ran a course of deep exploitation. Market hunters caught ducks in nets and traps and in the winter nights killed them by torchlight. After 1900 the hunters enjoyed the advantages of automatic shotguns and white powder shells. Corn for bait and the automatic with eleven-shot extension was "the most deadly combination against ducks ever devised," one historian has concluded. Power boats, the ready availability of ice, and express rail shipments further abetted the slaughter. As if to add insult to injury, the waterfowl flights were disrupted by the roar of the boat engines and by potshots fired at them by bored guards from the catwalks of oyster watch houses.81

Every spring market hunters followed the flights of shorebirds and waterbirds north along the Atlantic coast. The waterbirds were valued for their plumage, which was used as ornamentation on women’s clothing. On Cobb's Island the birds were killed on their nesting grounds. In the early 1900s an ornithologist learned of "1,400 Least Terns being killed in one day. . . . The birds were packed in cracked ice and shipped to New York for skinning; ten cents being paid for each one." Another ornithologist writing at about the same time reported that the Least Terns on the island "have been thoroughly annihilated." The fate of the terns, and of the willets, curlew, ducks, geese, and other species, along the Atlantic coast was in many respects the same as that of the bison in the American west. Hunters fanned out along the railroad, used the newly-developed technology of ice packing, and connected into a booming urban market that catered to modern sensibilities, responded to advertising, and coursed with the new wealth of the consumer society.82

The diminished flights of shorebirds and waterfowl greatly concerned both conservationists and sportsmen. The two groups, within which the wealthy and influential were well represented, lobbied the local, state, and federal governments to protect the beleaguered birds. In 1894 an act of the Virginia General Assembly created the Eastern Shore Game Protective Association and gave it authority to license non-resident hunters and to employ wardens to enforce game laws. In 1900, the General Assembly authorized the county courts of Accomack and Northampton to appoint game wardens. The wardens, often employees of the life-saving service, were paid by the E.S.G.P.A. and by the Thayer Fund of the Audubon Society. Meanwhile, a series of federal statutes culminating in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 imposed bag limits and banned egging, spring shooting, and the interstate shipment of game. A conservationist visiting the Broadwater in 1923 happily reported that "the Federal law had resulted in an increase in the number of most of the shore birds."83