On Sun, 17 Dec 1995, Thomas Weir wrote:
> It would seem to me that the only way such an abundant species could
> have been eliminated was through avian disease, such as avian malaria,
> etc. This disease may have been introduced from introduction of foreign

I seem to remember (and I already wrote Dale this off-line, so he gets to
hear it twice) the following about Passenger Pigeons, but I cannot find
where I read it, thus take it with some NaCl. I thought that the huge
numbers of PAPI in breeding colonies made up for their rather poor
parenting practices. That is, they had small clutches and broods, and
were not very defensive, making their offspring (hatched and unhatched)
very vulnerable to predation. But by saturating an area with nests, they
easily outnumbered the predators and the species thrived (with a small
loss each year to predators). Once the extensive marketing harvest had
reduced the population below this 'critical mass' required to reproduce
as a population, they just dwindled. With the PAPI this was a fairly
high critical mass.

Now with that all said, I'd surely invite someone to call me on it if
this is in error, as I said earlier, I'm trusting my memory to this.

-------------
Michael R. Smith
Univ. of Washington, Seattle
whimbrel at u.washington.edu
http://salmo.cqs.washington.edu/~wagap/mike.html