Bird Beaks
• From the Jones Cove Site, Frenchman Bay
• About 2,000 years old
• Longest approx. 9 cm
If we define an artifact as something made or used by people, then these items are not really artifacts at all. But when they were collected in 1928, the Abbe Museum’s curator thought they were tools. He suggested that they might be sewing tools, like crochet hooks.
When Dr. Richard Will examined the collection in 2003, he immediately recognized the bones for what they are — the beaks of ducks.
The bones are evidence for what people were doing, of course. People hunted many kinds of birds and duck bones are common in coastal shell midden sites like the one from which these beaks came.
French explorer Nicholas Denys (1672) described Native hunters sneaking up on sleeping ducks in birchbark canoes. They hunted them at night, when the birds rafted together by the thousands. Using birchbark torches to frighten the birds into flight, the hunters could then knock them down with sticks or their paddles. He told of whole canoe loads being taken in the night.
These items were originally thought to be sewing tools, but in fact are the beaks of ducks.