APPENDIX 2

ANALYSIS OF THE RECORDS FOR MAMMALS AND GAME BIRDS OF THE FORESTS OF PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND DURING THE BRITISH AND POST-CONFEDERATION PERIODS (1758 — circa 1900)

INTRODUCTION

One of the aims of this source-book has been to extract from the records of the British and post- Confederation periods (1758 to c.1900) all of the references to the native mammals and 'game birds’ of the forests of Prince Edward Island.‘ In so doing I am following up an earlier report which considered the equivalent records of the French period (1534-1758).2 In this appendix I shall carry out an analysis of the British period records in order to expand the picture of the ecological role of the mammals and game birds in the forests of the island already given in that report. Also, since most of the mammalian predators that inhabited the island at the time of the arrival of Europeans became extinct during this later period, it will be of interest to see what we can learn from the records about the factors that led to these extinctions.

During this later period fourteen recorders made a total of fifteen lists of all or some of the mammals of Prince Edward Island, and these are presented in Table 2-1. In addition I have included in Table 2-1 two other lists: list 15 (Le. Questionnaire 1876) is a composite list that I have assembled from the responses of 18 elderly island residents to several questions on the forest mammals and birds of the island contained in a questionnaire sent out in 1876 to the ”oldest inhabitants” (the individual responses to this questionnaire are presented in Table 2—2), while list 16 has been assembled from scattered comments on forest

1 Apart from the two ‘game' birds, I have not carried out an

analysis of the many bird lists found in the historical literature for the island. Although all of these lists contain birds that were forest ortree dwellers; many of them contain only the common birds, and then only list these generically. Also, it is not always easy to identify particular species from the names given. It is not until Bain's list of 1891, containing about 152 species; that a modern scientifically based ornithology for the island begins. (Bird lists are given by Holland 1765 (October); [Cambridge] 1796; Walsh 1803; Stewart 1806, Johnstone 1822; MacGregor 1828; Bagster 1861; Sutherland 1861; and Bain1890.)

2 Sobey 2002, Appendix 2.

mammals contained in a series of newspaper articles on pioneer life on the island published in the newspaper The Presbyterian and Evangelical Protestant Union in 1877 and 1878 ([Lawson] 1877-1878). Many of the list-makers also made short comments on the abundance and/or ecology of some or all of the animals in their lists, and in addition to the list-makers, other recorders made short comments on particular species — these additional recorders are listed in the footnotes to Table 2-1.

The lists range in length from one recorder (Hill 1839) who mentioned only five species, to one (Bain 1890) who included nineteen species in his list. With the exception of two recorders - Walsh (1803) who spent only two weeks on the island, and Rowan (1876) who seems to have spent some months — all of the list-makers appear to have been resident on the island for at least a year, and most, for many years.3 Even so, given the elusive nature of most of the island’s mammalian fauna, it is very unlikely that all of the recorders would have seen every animal they listed, and it is especially likely that animals that were known to have occurred in the past would have continued to have been reported long after their extirpation. Also, we should be aware that there is a strong likelihood that some of the information they give may derive not from their own direct observations, or even from the anecdotal experience of other islanders, but from general written sources from elsewhere.

It is evident that there is a bias on the part of the recorders in the selection of the animals that they record and in the amount of information they include on each. As was so for the French period, the smaller mammals (the shrews, bats and rodents) were either ignored by most, or else were treated generically, except by a few of the late

3 See Appendix 3 for the length of time that each recorder spent

on the island.

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