by Farley Mowat
That winter, an old and rat-infested Newfoundland schooner drove ashore on the islet. The crew took to the boats and rowed to St. Pierre, but the rats landed on Columbier. In 1964, an ornithologist visited the islet and found no more than a few dozen puffins trying to rear their young. The rest had been driven away or had been eaten by the rats, which had multiplied into a Pied Piper’s legion.
Although the slaughter of seabirds by early Europeans was on a mind-boggling scale, it was no worse—if more direct—than the destruction being visited on them now.
Some of the most disastrous damage being done to seabird populations is the result of a technological breakthrough in the fishing industry—the introduction of gill nets made of synthetic monofilament. This material is virtually invisible under water, and diving birds become enmeshed in it, without ever knowing it is there, and drown.
Since the establishment of a drift-net fishery for Atlantic salmon off the west coast of Greenland in the late 1960s, an average of a 250,000 murres have been drowned annually, and, in one year alone, 500,000 to 750,000 of them perished in the nets. Along the coasts of Newfoundland, professional fishermen have been compelled to move these new nets away from the vicinity of seabird colonies because removing dead birds from the mesh consumes too much fishing time. On the other hand, some “part-time” fishermen deliberately set nets close to colonies, “fishing” for birds instead of cod. The casualties include all species of diving birds, but none suffer more catastrophically than puffins and murres. There appears to be no end in view to this senseless destruction; “nothing can be done about it,” according to Fisheries officials I consulted.
Innumerable seabirds are also being destroyed by oil spills and oil slicks. When the tanker Kurdistan broke up off southwest Newfoundland during the winter of 1978, much of her cargo of bunker oil floated back and forth for months at the mercy of wind and tide. From what I saw and was told by observers who checked the beaches in Cape Breton and southern Newfoundland, I conclude that not less than 150,000 and perhaps as many as 300,000 seabirds, including ducks, perished as a result of this single spill. Marine insurers anticipate that at least one such major “accident” will occur in northwestern Atlantic waters every four or five years and at least one minor spill every six months. Even a minor one can kill 100,000 seabirds.
In the Arctic, the last remaining great colonies of northwest Atlantic seabirds will be at deadly risk if the projected northern oil-tanker traffic becomes a reality. Ecologists have calculated that a single major spill near the ice-ridden entrance to Lancaster South could, and probably would, effectively destroy the largest single concentration of breeding seabirds still extant in North America. And it is admitted by all who are involved that, sooner or later, such a disaster is statistically inevitable.
The story is not yet fully told.
Oceanic pollution, particularly in restricted waters, by poisonous chemical wastes, including pesticides, has been increasing through the past several decades. Many bird specialists are convinced that the rapid decline in fish-eating seabird populations in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (the sewer outlet for the entire Great Lakes drainage system) is primarily due to ever-rising concentrations of toxic chemicals in the birds’ tissues and, in particular, in their reproductive organs, making them (or their eggs, if they manage to lay any) infertile. Irrefutable evidence as to the existence of this sort of biotic damage has been available since the DDT investigations of the 1960s, but such evidence is generally overlooked. The reason seems obvious enough. If it be publicly admitted that fish are being poisoned, and in turn are poisoning their consumers—bird or human—who amongst us will continue to buy fish?
There is more.
Surveys of coastal headlands, beaches, reefs, islands, and islets from mid-Labrador south to Florida indicate that only about three out of every 100 suitable sites for seabird colonies are still occupied, even by vestigial populations. The numbers continue to decline as existing colonies are displaced and sites pre-empted or rendered useless to the birds by our intrusions, including such uniquely human ones as military installations and naval and air force target ranges.
Finally, we come to the most primal threat of all: starvation.
As far back as the late 1960s, a ghastly phenomenon was beginning to exhibit itself at one of the world’s largest surviving puffin colonies, on the island of Røst off the northwest coast of Norway. Although 500,000 chicks were being hatched there every spring, fewer and fewer were living to reach the age of flight. Year by year, the mysterious mortality grew worse until, by 1977, it was estimated that only one chick in 1,000 was surviving. Then a study by Norwegian ornithologists found the solution to the mystery. It was horribly simple. Gross commercial overfishing of herring and other small school-fishes in the northeastern Atlantic had brought about a collapse in their populations, and all the animals that depended on them for sustenance—including larger fish, and seabirds such as the puffin—were being starved. In 1980, almost the entire hatch of puffins on Røst perished of starvation. According to a report written at the time, “They were replaced by millions of [carrion] beetles. Tens of thousands of dried-out puffin chicks littered the colonies like little mummies... the stomachs of the dead chicks were crammed with gravel and earth, a sign of acute starvation.” The tragedy was repeated in the summer of 1981, and most of the puffin chicks hatched that year never found their wings but remained upon the island to rot or mummify.
The Røst shambles is being repeated in the northwestern Atlantic as a result of the destruction of capelin by the commercial fishing industry.1 By 1979, the offshore capelin stocks—once the stuff of life for countless other animals inhabiting the approaches to the continent—had been fished into commercial extinction, and the same process of destruction was being applied to the inshore stocks. With the disappearance of the capelin, starvation stalked the seabird colonies, especially those of the Alcidae. The last great puffinry in North America, in Witless Bay, began to suffer savagely. In 1981, fewer than 45 per cent of the chicks hatched there lived to become fledglings, and those that did were so undernourished as to have been unlikely to have survived the rigours of their first winter at sea. This massive starvation probably dates back to 1978 although no one was on the islands then to witness it. There is little doubt that, unless the exploitation of capelin by man is radically curtailed, the puffins, razorbills, murres, and other species of seabirds will be pushed even closer to extinction. Many other kinds of sea animals that are less visible to the human eye, including a score or more of fish species, will also be forced into severe and dangerous decline.
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1 For further details of this massacre, see the discussion of baitfishes in Chapter 11.
Unfortunately, those in positions of power in industry and government seem quite content to let the seabirds disappear. Their rationale is simplicity itself. If, and when, the capelin recover from the disastrous destruction of the 1970s and 1980s, few seabirds will remain alive. Therefore there ought to be more capelin available to enhance corporate fishing profits.
For some decades past, an internecine war has been in progress between the Canadian Wildlife Service and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans over the fate of all animals that can be seen to compete in any way with man for a share of the “harvest of the sea.”
It is a battle between David and Goliath, but in this case David has neither a lethal sling at his disposal nor the support of the mercenary god of modern times. The CWS does what it can; and Fisheries and Oceans undoes it. If the ultimate decision rests with Fisheries and Oceans, then the once-mighty colonial seabird population of the northeastern seaboard has but small prospects of survival.
3. Swiftwings
It was known to the Nascopie Indians of Ungava as swiftwings, in recognition of its superlative powers of flight. Other native peoples knew it by a variety of names, none more appropriate than the one given it by aboriginal Patagonians. They
called it by a word best translated as cloud of wonder because of its autumnal appearance in flocks of such overwhelming magnitude that they darkened the Patagonian skies.
Poles distant from Patagonia, the Inuit of the tundra plains bordering the Arctic Ocean from Bathurst Inlet west to Alaska’s Kotzebue Sound knew it, too. They called it pi-pi-piuk in imitation of its soft and vibrant whistle, which was their certain harbinger of spring. As late as 1966, an old Inuk living on the shores of Franklin Bay could still tell me what it had been like when pi-pi-piuk returned from whatever distant and unknown world had claimed it during the long winter months.
“They came suddenly, and fell upon us like a heavy snow. In my father’s time it was told they were so many on the tundra it was like clouds of mosquitoes rising in front of a walking man. Their nests and eggs were in every tussock of grass. At the end of the hatching moon there were so many of their young scurrying about it was as if the moss itself was moving. Truly, they were many! But when I was still a child, they were few. And one spring they did not come.”
It was in that same year, he told me, that his people first heard about the incomprehensible slaughter in which we, the Kablunait, had immured ourselves—the First World War. When the pi-pi-piuk failed to reappear in subsequent years, the Inuit speculated that perhaps they had been destroyed by us in one of our inexplicable outbursts of carnage.
“One need not look too far to find the cause which led to the destruction of the Eskimo Curlew. On its breeding grounds in the far north it was undisturbed. And I cannot believe that during its migrations it was overwhelmed by any great catastrophy at sea which could annihilate it... several other birds make similar, long ocean flights without disaster. There is no evidence of disease, or failure of food supply. No, there is only one cause: slaughter by human beings; slaughter in Labrador and New England in late summer and fall; slaughter in South America in winter and slaughter, worst of all, from Texas to Canada in spring.”
So wrote Dr. A.C. Bent, dean of American ornithologists in the 1920s. His was a verdict that must have taken some courage to express since the good doctor had himself killed tens of thousands of birds, including Eskimo curlews, both in pursuit of sport and in the name of science.
Curlews are of the sandpiper and plover kind, collectively known as wading birds or shorebirds because most of them haunt shorelines and shallows. However, the erect, long-legged, and long-necked curlews with their gracefully down-curving beaks are as much at home in upland meadows, pampas, prairies, and tundra plains as they are by the sea.
The Eskimo curlew, which I shall hereafter call by its Nascopie name, was the smallest of the three North American curlews. It stood only about a foot high and weighed no more than a pound, but it was by all odds the most successful of the three. Although it seems to have mated for life, it was nevertheless intensely social, living in close company with millions of its fellows in what was, in effect, a single close-knit nation.
Because no one region could feed its multitudes for long, it was a nomadic nation possessed of flying and navigational skills that enabled its members to avail themselves of the resources of two continents in the course of an annual migration of phenomenal length and complexity.
This journey began on the tundra breeding grounds where the perpetual daylight of the brief summer season resulted in an explosive reproduction of insect and other small forms of life. The eggs of the swiftwings were timed to hatch just as this outburst reached its peak so that the young birds, which were able to run about and forage for themselves within minutes of their hatching, had ample food available. Nevertheless, there was not enough to feed both them and their millions of parents. The adults mostly subsisted through the weeks of nest-building, egg-laying, and brooding on reserves of fat acquired during their northbound migration; but by the time the eggs hatched, these inner resources were running low and could not be replenished locally without endangering the survival of the young.
The swiftwings had evolved the answer to this problem. Before the young were even out of their natal down, the adults drew together in enormous flocks and flew away. To us this might seem heartless, even brutal, but it was not. Although flightless, the young were fully capable of caring for themselves—so long as food was plentiful. The departure of their parents helped ensure that this would be the case.
As early as mid-July, horizon-filling flights of hungry adults departed on their search for sustenance. Because of their enormous and concentrated numbers they needed equally immense and concentrated food supplies, not only to satisfy their urgent current needs, but also to build new reserves of body fat with which to fuel their ongoing odyssey.
The munificent larder they required did not lie close at hand. To reach it, they had to cross the continent from west to east, flying roughly 3,000 miles. Their objective was Labrador and Newfoundland, where extensive stretches of open heathland nurtured (and still does) a low-growing species of bush that quite literally carpeted hundreds of thousands of square miles—a bush with juicy, pea-sized berries that begin to ripen as early as the middle of July. This fecund plant is known to science as Empetrum nigram, but to the residents of Newfoundland and Labrador it was, and remains, the curlew berry. It was the principal support of the swiftwings in late summer. They fed upon it with such gusto that their bills, legs, heads, breasts—even their wing feathers—became royally stained with rich purple juice.
The arrival of the feeding flocks left an indelible impression on human observers. In 1833, Audubon witnessed their arrival on the south coast of Labrador. “They came... in such dense flocks as to remind me of the passenger pigeon... flock after flock passed close around our vessel and directed their course toward the mountainous tracts in the neighbourhood.” In 1864, a Dr. Packard watched the arrival of a single flock, “which may have been a mile long and as broad... [the cries of the birds] sounded at times like the wind whistling through the ropes of a thousand-ton vessel; at others like the jingling of a multitude of sleigh-bells.” And in 1884, Lucien Turner observed them in northern Labrador with an artist’s eye. “Each flock flew in a wedge shape, the sides of which were constantly swaying back and forth like a cloud of smoke... or in long dangling lines which rise or twist spirally... At other times the leader plunges downward followed by the remainder of the flock in graceful undulations, becoming a dense mass, then separating into a thin sheet spread wide again... reforming into such a variety of shapes that no description would suffice... [the flocks] alight on level tracts from Davis Inlet to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, each day adding to their number until the ground seems alive with them. They feed on the ripening berries, becoming wonderfully fat in a few days.”
“Wonderfully fat” expressed it perfectly. After only a week on the berry grounds the birds had become so plump that, if shot in flight, the corpses often split like over-ripe peaches when they struck the ground. And they were shot, everywhere that men lived along the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland.
In the 1770s, so Captain Cartwright noted in his journal, a hunter could count on killing 150 curlews in a single day with only the crude muzzle loader of those times. A century later, Labrador hunters with improved firearms were routinely killing thirty curlews at a shot. Most fishermen kept loaded guns in their boats and on their fishing stages, “and shot indiscriminately into the great flocks as they wheeled by.”
These “liveyers,” as the local people called themselves, were not the only curlew hunters. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, many foreigners visited Labrador to enjoy the curlew hunt. In 1874, ornithologist Dr. Eliot Coues described a typical entertainment of this sort. “Although six or eight gunners were stationed at the spot and kept up a continual round of firing upon the poor birds, they continued to fly distractedly about our heads, notwithstanding the numbers that every moment fell.”
If local residents found powder too expensive or in short supply, they stalked the swiftwings at night on th
eir roosting grounds, dazzling them into immobility with bull’s-eye lanterns, then striking them down “in enormous numbers” with clubs and flails. Hardly an outport family in Newfoundland and Labrador failed to begin the winter with several casks of curlews preserved in salt or in the birds’ own rendered fat.
There was commercial slaughter, too. Employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Sandwich Bay annually put up tens of thousands of curlews in hermetically sealed tins, which were shipped to London and Montreal to be consumed as a gourmet specialty. A government official who visited Sandwich Bay in the late 1800s reported seeing 2,000 curlews hung up like bunches of enormous grapes in the company warehouse—the result of one day’s shooting.
Meantime, what of the young that had been left behind? As soon as their flight feathers and wing muscles were sufficiently developed, they, too, took to the high skies and performed the seemingly miraculous feat of rejoining their parents on the berry barrens of Labrador and Newfoundland.
Toward the end of July, the united flocks began to leave the berry grounds, drifting restlessly southward, some pausing briefly on the Magdalen Islands where they were once reported in millions and on Prince Edward Island before moving down the Nova Scotia peninsula.
Gunners waited for them everywhere. In the 1760s, hunters on Lunenburg common frequently killed a bushel-basket-full with a single musket shot. They killed for the pot or for the market. A century later a new breed of gunner, the self-styled sportsman, joined in the fusillade. One English visitor to Prince Edward Island did not think curlews “offered a very high order of sport.” Nevertheless, they provided an opportunity to enjoy oneself: “The weather at this season is so charming, the labour so light, and the birds such delightful eating that the pursuit is worth it. And sometimes they do give very pretty sport as they wheel over the decoys. I once shot one on a marsh; its companion took a short flight then re-alighted beside the dead bird, quietly waiting there until I had reloaded my gun and was ready for him. This simple pair had probably just arrived from the remote north where that cruel, devouring monster, man, had never set foot. A short stay in Prince Edward Island teaches these birds a lesson.” There were many such lessons to be learned, and the cost of learning was appallingly high.