This reminds me of a comparable situation with terns and shorebirds of all
kinds in South, and maybe Central, America. Here are some poorly remembered
snippets of information from my contact with the Massachusetts Audubon
Society, Manomet Bird Observatory, and Peter Trull, who visited
[Venezuela? Brazil? I can't remember] in the early 1980s:

For quite a while, and maybe still currently, the majority of all band
returns of wintering Common and Roseate Terns came from *one individual
fisherman* who sent scores of them from the coast of South America
somewhere. This individual was unique only in that he sent the bands to
Washington. The wintering grounds of the Roseate Tern are still largely
unknown, and partly to investigate the tern mortality and partly to look
for wintering terns in general, Pete Trull went down to S.A. sometime in
the early eighties.

He found that all the local coastal people consumed any shorebirds/terns
they could kill. Typical dinner was a few dozen shorebirds of various
sizes in the pot. Terns were captured when they landed on fishing boats,
which they apparently do quite regularly there, showing little fear.
Sandpipers were killed using "whip wires." In this technique, one end of
a fine wire, maybe sixty feet long, is fixed to a stake at the water's
edge on a beach, and the other is held by a boy, usually, standing on the
upper beach. When a flock of shorebirds flies past, the boy rapidly whips
the taut wire up and down. It is apparently very effective at harvesting
shorebirds flying along the beach. Getting through the day/ week/ winter
on those beaches was a difficult proposition.


Chris Hill
Seattle, WA
cehill at u.washington.edu

On Thu, 26 Jan 1995, Michael Price wrote:

> Hi Tweeters
>
> A little second-hand snippet of fascinating, if saddening, info:
>
> A New Zealand shorebird bander said that the most returns for banded
> godwits, presumably Bar- and Black-tailed Godwits, come from restaurants in
> China. There's any number of mordantly witty lines that come to mind, but
> to me it's too much of an echo of the slaughter by nineteenth-century
> market gunners.
>
> Michael Price
> Vancouver BC Canada
> michael_price at mindlink.bc.ca
>