Old journals are remarkably casual about waterfowl. A modern enthusiast interested in reports of ducks and geese back before the dragline and battery gun can thumb through a lot of dusty pages without finding any references to flocks "blackening the sky."

There's little doubt pristine America was capable of producing incredible flocks. With twice as many wetlands and a breeding stronghold blanketed with native prairie, the continent's capacity to produce ducks in those times might have been 10 times what it is today.

But if our forebears failed to report what they saw, I guess they are to be forgiven. Over the generations, they must have suffered from a bad case of wildlife overload: 3 to 5 billion passenger pigeons, 40 to 50 million buffalo, 10 million elk, a few million Carolina parakeets. It would take a lot of ducks and geese to make an impression.

In fact, I'm impressed when waterfowl took center stage in reports that really should have focused on other things. When Lewis and Clark were building their winter quarters in North Dakota in 1804, Clark made this journal entry after a sudden cold snap on Nov. 9: "A great number of wild geese pass to the south, flew very high." The next day, he noted, "The geese continue to pass in gangs, as also brant to the south, some ducks also pass."

The day after that, he watched "The large ducks pass to the south."

The next fall, after passing through numberless herds of buffalo, elk, and antelope, the expedition ran into the fall migration along the Columbia.

"Saw great numbers of waterfowl of different kinds," Clark wrote. "Immense quantity of geese, brants, ducks and some of the large and small kind of swan and sandhill cranes."

On Nov. 5, 1805, he complained: "I [slept] but very little last night for the noise kept during the whole of the night by the swans, geese, white and grey brant, ducks on a small sand island close under the lard. They were immensely numerous, and their noise horrid."

It's worth noting that elk and deer were hard to come by on the Columbia that fall, so waterfowl kept the Corps of Discovery alive until they reached the Pacific.

In the midst of the abundance of the early 19th century, it was hard to believe all the men who ever shouldered a gun could erase an entire species, but in the mid-1840s, the disappearance of the great auk proved it was possible. In 1872, the Labrador duck followed the auk into the void, and the new breech-loading, repeating shotguns with chokes to provide denser patterns were putting dangerous pressure on the wood duck, a bird that had the poor judgment to spend its entire year in the dwindling forests of the eastern United States.