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Volume CXXXIII, Number 10 |
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Arctic hunters find thousands of birds, but no polar bears
KATHRYN OSTROFSKY
COLUMNIST
The crew of college students, including Alpheus Packard, class of 1861, who spent the summer of 1860 doing scientific research on the southern coast of Labrador did meet a few natives of the area. They only met two Esquimaux, one of whom was extremely skilled at hunting seals, cooking their meat and making boots and moccasins out of their skins.
The party also met a few families of the nomadic Mountaineer Indians, who followed the deer and in late summer came down to the mouth of the river to hunt curlew, eider ducks, and baby seals. Some of the natives and settlers lived on the coast in the summer and up to seventy miles inland, where firewood and game were plentiful. Their annual schedule was that they would leave the shore at the end of October, spend one month chopping wood (a family will burn 30 cords during the course of a winter), then spend one month hunting and trapping.
On this remote coastline, Packard reflected, "people are born, live and die, who have never seen a horse, cow, sheep, or cat, or a civilized dog." There was, however, one "small, stunted, homely, Quebec cow feeding on the side of the hill. Here was a clear case of unnatural selection. The scenic features of this coast do not demand a cow to grace the foreground." She had been brought to Labrador the spring before, and the children in the small settlement, who were "more used to seals and sea-cows, had not yet recovered from their astonishment at this freak of Nature."
The college boys' ignorance about the wildlife was demonstrated by the fact that three of the party went to the breeding grounds of some shore birds and stuck their hands into burrows. Their thoughtlessness was punished by sharp pecks and bites to the hands. Except for this breeding ground, the young scientists noticed a distinct lack of birds throughout June and July. The shore birds all anchored at their various breeding grounds-the ducks inland, the sea birds 60 miles down the coast. The boys eagerly awaited the birds' arrival, and on the afternoon of August 10, Alpheus Packard heard a shout of "Curlew!" He looked up and saw that "over across the neck, a mile away, was a flock of these birds, darkening nearly a square mile of the sky."
The boys saw thousands upon thousands of birds, but he did not see a single polar bear. The boys were told that it had been about ten years since the last polar bear was shot on this coast. Had there been a polar bear for Alpheus to shoot, Bowdoin may have adopted it as a mascot back in 1861, but perhaps because of Mr. Hayward, the school under the pines had to wait decades for famed arctic explorer Donald B. MacMillan to find its mascot.
Out of all his activities in Labrador, Alpheus Packard remembered most fondly the experience of dredging up samples from the murky depths of the Strait of Belle Isle:
"Those days of dredging on the Labrador coast," he recalled, "where there was such an abundance and luxuriance of arctic varieties, were days never to be forgotten."
Time on the island passed too quickly for the boys to accomplish all that they desired, "and it was not without regret that we left the rugged untamed shores" of Labrador. Professor Chadbourne's Greenland/ Labrador scientific expedition began their return voyage to New England.
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