Labrador Duck

Status Extinct. Formerly a regular visitor along our coast in winter. According to Audubon (1839), Professor McCulloch of Pictou procured several in his neighbourhood. Later, a male and female from the McCulloch collection were said to have been presented to the Dalhousie University Museum (Downs 1886), where they were on display for many years. According to Lloyd (1920), who examined both specimens, the female was an American Scoter, but whether it had been originally misidentified or subsequently exchanged is not known. The male, still the property of Dalhousie University, is in the National Museum of Canada, having been loaned to that institution in 1968 as the only extant specimen of the species in Canada. Other specimens from around Halifax are rather confusingly discussed by Gilpin (1880, 1882b), Jones (1885), Downs (1886, 1888) and Dutcher (1891, 1894). According to McLaren (1985) it seems that only two birds (not the three or four inferred by Gilpin 1880) were actually collected one purchased in the Halifax market in 1852 that ended up in the Brewster Collection at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and another taken at about the same time and sent to a Colonel Drummond in Scotland.

Remarks Very little is known of the life history of this bird, and the causes that led to its extinction are not understood. Possibly it was a colonial nesting species and therefore particularly vulnerable. Perhaps never abundant, the colonies may have been raided systematically year after year by natives and fishermen who took the eggs for food, thus seriously interfering with normal reproduction. It is generally believed that its extinction was not the result of overshooting. The last definite record is on 12 December 1878, when one was shot at Elmira, New York.