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 Published: 31 July 2007
© 2007 William G. Thomas III, Brooks Miles Barnes, Tom Szuba and
Southern Spaces 
