COLUMBUS’ CURLEWS

Immense flocks of birds, far more than we have seen before, passed overhead all day long, coming always from the north and heading always towards the southwest. Which led the admiral to believe that they were going to sleep on land or were, perhaps, flying from the winter which was about to come to the lands from which they came. On this account the admiral decided to abandon the westward course and to steer west-south-west, with resolve to proceed in that direction for two days but after two days, more birds were sighted and all that night his men heard birds passing so for two days again they sailed west-south-west, whereupon the Pinta being the swifter ship went on ahead of the Santa Maria and was the first to sight land.

In 1961, the ornithologist James Tooke wrote: “Columbus’ Journal tells us the birds the sailors snared from these immense flocks were plainly field birds that could not possibly find rest on water… . Consequently, Columbus decided to change course and follow the birds in hope of finding land. Five days later, Columbus set foot on the island of San Salvador… . Although the mariners did not know what the non-stop birds were, the date and direction of flight – at that time and in that place – identify them as Eskimo curlews and golden plovers, making their oversea flight one of 2,500 miles.”

John James Audubon – 1833
Ornithological Biography , Labrador

During a thick fog, the Esquimaux Curlews made their appearance near the harbour of Bras d’Or. They evidently came from the north, and arrived in such dense flocks as to remind me of the Passenger Pigeons. They continued to arrive for several days, in flocks which seemed to me to increase in number. They flew in close masses, sometimes high, at other times low, but always with remarkable speed, and performing beautiful evolutions in the air. The appearance of man did not intimidate them, for they would alight so near us, or pass over our heads at so short a distance, that we easily shot them.

The legendary John James Audubon was America’s greatest pioneering ornithologist and artist. Born Jean-Jacques Fougère Audubon in Haiti, he was the illegitimate son of a French naval officer and privateer, and a Spanish Creole mistress from Louisiana. The Haiti 1788 slave rebellion forced Audubon’s father to return to France, where the boy was raised and educated. To avoid conscription in the Napoleonic Wars, the young Audubon travelled to America on a false passport where he became a frontiersman and merchant. Eventually he settled on his life’s passion as an ornithologist and wildlife artist. He was a trailblazer in his portrayal of life-size birds “drawn from life,” and in publishing Birds of America with its magnificent octavo colour plates, which was subscribed to by 1100 patrons and earned him $36,000.

The Eskimo Curlew was one of the champion long-distance migrants: flying from the shores of the Arctic Ocean and the Bering Sea to Labrador and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, then making a 4,000 kilometre non-stop ocean crossing to Guiana and Brazil, then overland to southern Argentina and Chile – and as far south as Tierra del Fuego. The return route was up the Pacific side of South and Central America before reaching Texas and Nebraska, and northward back to the High Arctic in an enormous elliptical loop over the entire North and South American continents. This was an overall migratory flight of over 30,000 km.

Dr. A. S. Packard – 1861
Ornithological Journals , Labrador

The Curlews appeared in great numbers. We saw a flock a mile long and nearly as broad; the sum total of their notes sounded at times like the wind whistling through the rigging of a thousand ton vessel; at others the sound seemed like the jingling of multitudes of sleigh-bells.

The noted Massachusetts ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush, author of Birds of New England, first observed vast flocks of Passenger Pigeons as a child in the 1860’s. When he wrote about them in 1916, he explained the manner of their demise: “When the Passenger Pigeon began to decrease in numbers, about 1880, the marksmen looked about for something to take its place in the market in the spring. They found a new supply in the great quantities of Plover and Curlews in the Mississippi valley that season… . They were shot largely for western markets at first; they began to come into the eastern markets in numbers about 1886… . These markets were: Halifax, Montreal, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Wichita, St. Louis, Chicago and Detroit. Boston shipments alone amounted to tens of thousands of birds every spring through 1887 to 1896.”

Myron H. Swenk – 1915
Procedures of the Nebraska Ornithologists Union

In the 1880’s, hunters would drive out from Omaha and shoot until the slaughtered birds literally filled wagonloads up with the sideboards on. Sometimes when the flight was unusually heavy and the hunters were 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.

The first president of the Nebraska Ornithologists Union, Dr. Lawrence Bruner, wrote about the Eskimo Curlew in 1896: “These flocks reminded the settlers of the flights of passenger pigeons and the curlews were given the name of ‘Prairie Pigeons’. They contained thousands of individuals and would often form dense masses of birds extending for a quarter to a half mile in length and a hundred yards or more in width. When the flock would alight the birds would cover 40 or 50 acres of ground.”

Myron Swenk also noted: “In the Midwest states the fields where they were known to gather were patrolled regularly and scanned with binoculars. Sometimes a gunner would put himself in a line of flight where he had only to shoot one bird from a flock to cause the remaining birds to circle again and again until most or all had been shot. He then waited for the next flock.”

The vast migratory flocks of Eskimo Curlew had virtually vanished everywhere by 1900. The last birds were sighted and shot in Nebraska in 1911. The last record of the appearance of Eskimo Curlews in the state of Massachusetts was on August 28, 1929 when they appeared on a dinner table at a hotel at Schoodic Point.

The birds last seen in South America were shot in 1925. Less than a dozen sightings of individuals were recorded over the next century, and many of these have proven to be similar curlew-like species. The last confirmed sighting was in 1963. The last “possible” sightings of more than a single bird were in Texas in 1981 and Kendall Island, Northwest Territories, in 1985.

CRY OF THE CURLEW

Eskimo Curlew – 1985

Knud Rasmussen among the Inuit

Claimed the word for poem

Was Anertsa, meaning “a breath”

Neither speech nor song

But fixed musical diction

A flow of beautiful smooth words

Recited in a low voice

Delivered at a moderate pace

A crystallized form of natural language

That must be worked and shaped

As smoothly and carefully as soapstone

Word images and word charms

Polished like walrus ivory

Old pieces are learned from the elders

They are passed round and admired

Like fine carvings or well-made weapons

But do not use them too often

Do not wear them out

These charms were made for protection

Against disease, against the evil effects

Of shooting stars, of cunning foes, of envy

When death occurs, strict mourning taboos

Are observed, but when the taboo is lifted

The bereaved ones use these charms

Murmuring them each to the other

And each to those now gone

Rasmussen also records another Inuit word

For poem: Taigdlia, meaning “to name”

There have been 40 common names

For the Eskimo Curlew

One Inuit name meant “Swiftwing”

A Cree meant “Sweetgrass”

An Abnaki name meant “Beaked One”

Many other names were made

In imitation of their various cries

Among the Inuit they were called

Pi-pi-pi-uk, Tura-Tura and Ak-ping-ak

To the Cree Wee-kee-me-nase-su,

Wee-kee-me-new, We-Ke-wa-ne-so

This recitation of their many names

Links them together like prayer beads on a rosary

Grants the passage of their many souls

Across that Other World’s continents

In the outports of Labrador

They were the Gallou Bird and the C’lew

Among the Québécois

They were Corbigeau des Esquimaux

While the farmers of Ontario

Called them Little Sicklebills

Market hunters named them Doughbirds

And Futes in New England and New York

And Prairie Pigeons in the American West

The Islanders of the Caribbean greeted them

As Wood Snipe, Chittering and Shivering Curlew

While to the Latinos of Venezuela and Columbia

They were known as Zarapito esquimal

In Uruguay as Chorlo polar

And Chorlo campino

In the pampas of the Argentine

So this poem is my word charm,

Smooth and polished as I can make it

Let us hear your names again:

Little Sicklebill, Sweetgrass, Swiftwing

And your voice carried

Like your wings on the north wind:

Pi-pi-pi-uk, Tura-Tura

Wee-kee-me-nase-su

Wee-kee-me-new

We-Ke-wa-ne-so