Shannon Mouland steadied himself in an aluminum boat, shotgun raised, as a thick-billed murre skittered above the slate-gray waters of the North Atlantic. Boom! And the bird cartwheeled into the sea.

Murres have been hunted by outport Newfoundlanders since the island's settlement by Europeans. In early days, it was really a subsistence hunt, as the birds — mostly referred to locally as "turrs" — ...