by Farley Mowat
Early in August the southward trickle swelled to a mighty torrent and now there was no hesitation. Except for brief interruptions due to bad weather, the winged river maintained an almost unbroken flow until early September saw the last of the young birds leave Newfoundland and Labrador.
The massed millions of swiftwings did not usually follow the New England coast southward but streamed off the coasts of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia heading over the open Atlantic directly for that portion of South America lying between the mouths of the Amazon and the Orinoco Rivers—a sea passage of nearly 3,000 miles. Superb fliers that they were, they appear to have made this journey non-stop; but supposing they did encounter heavy weather, it would have been no tragedy, for they were able to land on water and take off again when conditions improved. Severe easterly gales sometimes deflected part of the high-flying stream over the New England coast, with the result that hundreds of thousands of swiftwings unexpectedly alighted on shores, marshes, even on farmers’ meadows.
New Englanders looked upon such visitations as manna from the skies. They called the visitors dough-birds because they were so plump. According to a nineteenth-century account, “their arrival was the signal for every sportsman and market hunter to get to work, and nearly all that reached our shores were shot.” Such enormous numbers landed on Nantucket Island one autumn in the 1840s that the supply of shot and powder was exhausted and, to the disappointment of the residents, the butchery had to be “interrupted.” A Cape Cod sportsman, irritated by the activities of the market hunters, complained: “Those birds which may come, can not, if they would, remain any longer than is absolutely necessary for they are so harrassed immediately after landing that the moment there occurs a change in weather favourable to migration they at once depart.” Dr. Bent remembered “hearing my father tell of the great shooting they used to have when I was a small boy, about 1870. As he has now gone to the happy hunting ground I cannot give the exact figures, but he once saw a wagon loaded full of ‘dough birds’ shot in one day.”
Sportsmen of those times differed little from those of today except that they had more living targets available to them. They believed, as they still do, that hunting for sport was not only beyond reproach, but was almost a duty if one was to qualify as a proper man.
A number of them published books describing their successes and extolling the virtues of those who dedicated themselves to “this natural and healthy outdoor pursuit.” Nevertheless, they wrote with some equivocation. The verb “to kill” was almost never used. Instead, their prey was “captured,” “collected,” or even “brought to hand.” Blood did not flow upon the pages of these books. The emphasis was on the skill, sense of fair play, and gentlemanly conduct of the author, and on his honest affection for and admiration of the God-given beauties of nature, which were the real reasons he enjoyed the sport.
Sportsmen of those days kept careful account of their shooting scores, either in their own “game books” or in the record books of the sporting clubs to which many of them belonged. Most such clubs owned or leased their own hunting hotels and controlled great stretches of beach and marshland exclusively reserved for the guns of their members. One such was the Chatham Hotel on Long Island, patronized by New York sportsmen. It provided almost unlimited opportunities to practise gunners’ skills and sportsmanship on the vast flocks of shorebirds, including curlews, that frequented the eastern seaboard beaches during migrations. The Chatham prided itself on enabling its well-heeled members to establish and maintain reputations as “number one, first class, sportsmen.” One such member was a Mr. James Symington, who chalked up the following score in the Club’s record book in just three autumnal days in 1897.
Not all sportsmen shot wading birds for the same lofty reasons. Some did so—if one can credit this—as practice for shooting at clay pigeons. According to one of them: “It was my habit to indulge myself in a few hours gunning on the beaches before engaging in friendly competition at the [trap shooting] Club. Nothing so exercises one’s abilities in this regard as to meet the challenges of those swift, elusive birds, particularly those of the plover family.”
When the mighty river of southbound swiftwings eventually reached the South American coast, it vanished. Nothing is known about its subsequent movements until it reappeared over Paraguay and Uruguay, winging steadfastly southward toward its wintering grounds on the rolling pampas stretching from central Argentina south to Patagonia. Here the swiftwings at last came to rest after a journey from their Arctic breeding grounds of nearly 10,000 miles.
By the nineteenth century it had become a broken rest. From the Falkland Islands north to Buenos Aires, the great flocks were harried from place to place by ranchers, settlers, and sportsmen who slaughtered them not alone for food and fun, but even to provide cheap food for pigs.
With the coming of the northern spring, the survivors reformed and the shimmering pampas air again filled with the flash of wings. We know little about the northward journey after the departure from Argentina in late February until the flocks darkened the dawn skies of the Gulf coast of Texas a few weeks later. I suspect that both spring and autumn migrations flew through the centre of the southern continent, taking advantage of the food to be found on the vast plateau prairies of the interior such as the campos of Brazil, where they would have encountered few people of European origin, and few guns.
After their return to our continent the flocks drifted slowly northward, pacing the march of spring across the greening immensity of the Great Plains. Here was food in plenty to restore them after the long flight from the Argentine and to build the reserves that would be vital to a successful breeding season on the High Arctic nesting grounds. The preferred food at this season was insects, especially grasshoppers. The curlews were remarkably adept at harvesting these, as a report written in 1915 attests.
“The Eskimo Curlew was a bird of such food habits that it is a distinct loss to our agriculture that it should have disappeared. During the invasion of the Rocky Mountain grasshopper [in the 1870s] it did splendid work in the destruction of grasshoppers and their eggs. Mr. Wheeler states that in the later seventies these birds would congregate on land which had not yet been plowed and where the grasshoppers’ eggs were laid, reach down into the soil with their long bills and drag out the egg capsules which they would then devour with their contents of eggs and young hoppers, until the land had been cleared of the pests... A specimen examined in 1874 had 31 grasshoppers in its stomach... the bird also often alighted on plowed ground to feed on the white grubs and cutworms.”
Some idea of the effect the curlews’ appetites must have had on insect pests is suggested by Professor Lawrence Bruner’s description of the size of the flights that visited Nebraska during the late 1860s. “Usually the heaviest flights occurred coincident with the beginning of the corn-planting time, and enormous flocks would settle on the newly plowed fields and on the prairies where they searched industriously for insects. The flocks reminded the settlers of the flights of passenger pigeons [which they had seen in the East] and thus the curlews were given the name of ‘prairie pigeons’. The flocks contained thousands of individuals and would form dense masses of birds extending for a quarter to half a mile in length and a hundred yards or more in width. When such a flock would alight the birds would cover 40 or 50 acres of ground.”
The vital service rendered by the curlews to settlers trying to farm the plains, particularly in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, was, to say the least, ill-requited. Along with Texas, these three states became one enormous slaughterhouse for the swiftwings. Here, where they had been and would have continued to be of enormous assistance to the agricultural efforts of the human invaders, their race was ultimately destroyed.
Professor Myron Swenk described how their annihilation was brought about: “During the [spring] flights the slaughter of these poor birds was appalling and almost unbelievable. Hunters would drive out from Omaha and shoot the
birds without mercy until they had literally slaughtered a wagonload of them, the wagon being actually filled, and with the sideboards on at that. Sometimes when the flights were unusually heavy and the hunters well supplied with ammunition, their wagons were too quickly and easily filled, so whole loads of the birds would be dumped on the prairie, their bodies forming piles as large as a couple of tons of coal, where they would be allowed to rot while the hunters proceeded to refill their wagons with fresh victims and thus further gratify their lust for killing. The compact flocks and tameness of the birds made this slaughter possible, and at each shot usually dozens of the birds would fall. In one specific instance a single shot from an old muzzle-loader into a flock of these curlews brought down 28 birds while for the next half mile every now and then a fatally wounded bird would drop to the ground... So dense were the flocks when the birds were turning in their flight one could scarcely throw a brick or missile into it without hitting a bird.
“There was no difficulty getting close to the sitting birds, perhaps within 25 or 35 yards, and at this distance the hunters would wait for them to rise on their feet, which was the signal for the first volley of shots. The startled birds would rise and circle a few times, affording ample opportunity for further murderous discharges of the guns, and sometimes would re-alight in the same field, when the attack would be repeated. Mr. Wheeler has killed as many as 37 birds with a pump gun at one rise. Sometimes the bunch would be seen alighting on a field 2 or 3 miles away, when the hunters would at once drive to that field with a horse and buggy, relocate the birds, and resume the fusillade and slaughter.”
This kind of butchery, be it noted, was done solely in the name of sport! However, by the 1870s, commercial gunners in the East had so savaged the passenger pigeon (which had been the staple of the wild bird market, and whose numbers had been thought to be infinite) that the public appetite for edible wild birds could no longer be sated by it.
The penetration of the railroads through the prairie states at about this same time stimulated “some smart fellows” in Wichita, Kansas, into filling the gap with the corpses of “prairie pigeons.” The first carload-lots of spring-killed curlews, preserved on ice, reached New York in 1872 and were snapped up at such high prices that the fate of the remaining swiftwings was sealed forthwith.
During the spring of 1873, the butchery of curlews on the Great Plains mushroomed to a massacre of such proportions that, by 1875, no large curlew flocks were to be seen crossing Texas. In the spring of 1879, the last great flights were seen in Kansas; and by 1886, puzzled gunners in Labrador, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New England were wondering where the great flocks had gone.
One of the most widely accepted explanations for the rapid disappearance of what had been one of North America’s most abundant birds was that it had been exterminated by western farmers using poisoned bait to protect their seed corn from “the depredations of these insatiable pests.” As an exculpation, this one was typical of our attempts to vindicate the mass destruction visited by us on other forms of life. And in this case, as in most, it was a blatant lie. Far from eating the farmers’ seed, the curlews had been of great assistance in helping the crop to grow at all.
The annihilation of the swiftwings for short-term gain, together with the reduction to relict levels of the millions of associated insect-eating birds that once checked insect plagues on the western plains of Canada and the United States, has cost grain farmers an estimated $10–$15 billion since 1920 in losses suffered directly from such insect infestations and as the price paid in attempts to curb such visitations through the use of chemical poisons and other means.
That cost is ongoing. It must continue to be paid, presumably in perpetuity, not just by Great Plains farmers and those of the campos and pampas of South America, but by all of us. The wanton destruction of the Eskimo curlew provides a classic example, not only of the ruthlessness of modern man, but also of his imperishable stupidity.
During the final years of the nineteenth century, only a very few flocks remained to run the gamut of the guns as they made their way north through the Dakotas and the Canadian prairies to the relative security of the Mackenzie Valley corridor. Along the Arctic coast the Inuit waited, and they, too, wondered what had happened to the pi-pi-piuk that had once come spiralling down upon the tundra as thick as falling snow.
At the turn of the century, Nascopie Indians walking across the caribou barrens, ankle-deep in a carpet of ripe curlew berries, wondered what had happened to the multitudes of swiftwings that had once gorged themselves on those high plains.
The last curlews to be seen in the Halifax market were sold there in the fall of 1897; by 1900, Newfoundland and Labrador fishermen were complaining that “you can’t get a taste of a curlew anywhere.” In 1905, a sportsman named Green, who for decades past had shot over Miscou Island in Bay Chaleur, expressed “a pang of regret shared by all naturalists, sportsmen and epicures, for the curlew is rapidly disappearing.”
On the pampas of Patagonia, gauchos hefted their bolas as they searched in vain for the flocks that did not come—flocks that had once descended in such masses that a single throw of the leaden balls might kill a dozen birds.
The swiftwings were failing fast but, as Dr. Bent noted, “No one lifted a finger to protect them until it was too late.” In fact, Dr. Bent’s ornithological peers did just the opposite. As the curlews became rare in life, so did their “specimen” value soar. Scientists began to compete fiercely with each other to acquire the skins of those few that still remained. According to the well-known American naturalist, Dr. Charles Townsend, a flock of eight swiftwings appeared at Sandwich Bay in the fall of 1912. Seven were promptly killed and the skins of five were gratefully received in the name of science at Harvard by yet another famous American ornithologist, William Brewster, who added them to the enormous collection of “study skins” in the university’s collection. To quote again from Dr. Bent: “The last kills in Nebraska were made in 1911 and 1915. On March 11, 1911... two birds were shot by Mr. Fred Gieger... they are at present in the collection of Mr. August Eiche... No Eskimo Curlews were noted in 1914 but a single bird was killed south of Norfolk, Nebraska on the morning of April 17, 1915. It came into the possession of Mr. Hoagland, who had it mounted.”
By 1919, the skin of a swiftwing was worth $300, and with such a price on their heads the few remaining survivors had little chance. In 1924 and 1925, the last two individuals ever to be seen in the province of Buenos Aires were both collected for Argentina’s Museo Naçional de Historia Natural.
By then, Dr. Bent had already epitomized the “natural history” of the swiftwings. “The story of the Eskimo Curlew is just one more pitiful tale of the slaughter of the innocents. It is a sad fact that the countless swarms of this fine bird... which once swept across our land are gone forever, sacrificed to the insatiable greed of man.”
Gone forever? Not quite... not yet. In 1932, a single bird was killed at Battle Harbour on the Labrador coast for the University of Michigan’s collection. Another was collected on Barbados in 1963. In addition, there have been several sight records, mostly in the Northwest Territories and in Texas, where one was photographed in 1962.
There remains at least the possibility that a handful still survive—some authorities think as many as twenty—but they are little more than spectral beings, no more able to fill the wind with their swift wings than the dead can rise again.
4. The Sporting Life
Although the elimination of the Eskimo curlew was perhaps the most spectacular and barbaric tragedy to strike the great family of shorebirds and waders, it does not stand alone. Some forty species, ranging from the minute least sandpiper to the imposing long-billed curlew, frequented the eastern seaboard at the time of first European contact, either as birds of passage or as breeding summer residents. All, without exception, were shot, netted, or otherwise slaughtered on a fearful scale.
Most ab
undant of the three curlews found in eastern North America was the Eskimo, but the most individually impressive was the sicklebird, now known as the long-billed curlew. Although its major breeding grounds were on the western prairies, it migrated along the Atlantic coastal flyway in considerable numbers.
Standing two feet tall on pipe-stem legs, it swung a curving bill six inches in length. Its great size and piercing cries gave it pride of place among the shorebird kind. Unfortunately, these very characteristics, plus the fact that it was excellent eating, made it a prime target as a pot bird. Although in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it seems still to have been an abundant migrant from the Gulf of St. Lawrence region south along the coast to Florida, by the eighteenth century it had become scarce and by the latter part of the nineteenth century it had been virtually eliminated from eastern North America.
Those that survived into the heyday of the sport hunter were eagerly sought as spectacular trophies. “The sickle-bird was a fine game bird,” wrote Dr. A.C. Bent. “Its large size made it a tempting target. It decoyed readily and could be easily whistled down by imitating its notes. And the cries of a wounded bird would attract others which would circle again and again until they too were killed.”
This instinctive rallying to a stricken comrade is characteristic of the shorebird family. It served them well before our coming since the confusing, noisy flight of an aroused flock tended to distract predators, affording the intended victim a chance to escape. When used as a defence against a man with a gun, however, it simply invited mayhem. As a Toronto sportsman wrote in 1906, “The strong desire of shorebirds to succour any one of their kind which has been wounded is a fortunate thing indeed since it enables even a tyro hunter to kill as big a bag as he might wish.”