When Last of the Curlews was written and first published in 1955, there had not been a report of an Eskimo curlew since the pair on Galveston Island, Texas, referred to in the story, which had been ten years before. It was assumed that the bird had become extinct sometime after 1945.
However, commencing in 1959, and for the following five years, one or two migrating Eskimo curlews were seen again each spring at Galveston. Then in September, 1963, a curlew flying at the head of a flock of shorebirds in Barbados was shot by a hunter. When the hunter saw that his bird was not the familiar whimbrel (the modern name for the Hudsonian curlew), he turned it over to a local rare bird collector, who recognized it as something different and put it in his deepfreeze. It remained there more than a year, and then a Christmas card from the collector to James Bond of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia alerted Bond to the possibility it might be an Eskimo curlew. (Yes, Ian Fleming′s 007 was named after the ornithologist James Bond.) A couple of months later, eighteen months after the bird was shot, Bond visited Barbados, examined the contents of the deepfreeze, and determined that it was an Eskimo curlew. The skin is now in the Academy′s collection and it is the last known specimen.
For a short time ornithologists wondered if the Barbados hunting victim was the same curlew that had been turning up on Galveston Island in recent springs, and the last individual of its species. But apparently it was not, for another was seen in Texas in the spring of 1964.
Since then other Eskimo curlews, usually only one or two at a time, have been reported somewhere between the Argentine wintering grounds and arctic Canada every couple of years. Eskimo Curlew: A Vanishing Species? by Canadian biologists Bernie Gollop and Tom Barry and Californian curlew historian Eve Iversen, published in 1986 (by the Saskatchewan Natural History Society, Box 1121, Regina, Saskatchewan S4P 3B4), lists twenty-five reports for the forty-one years between 1945 and 1986. And there have been a few more reports continuing into the nineties.
No nest has been found since the 1860s, and no birds showing any breeding behavior have been discovered during nesting season in arctic Canada, despite diligent searching by Canadian biologists.
Undoubtedly some of the Eskimo curlew reports are identification errors. Not only does the whimbrel resemble the Eskimo curlew, but there is also an Asian bird called the little curlew, an Old World version of the Eskimo curlew, that is an even more look-alike species. The little curlew has been identified in California and can be encountered along the North American Pacific Coast as a very rare straggler from Siberia, where it nests. But some of the reports are no doubt valid records of Eskimo curlews. In addition to the Barbados specimen, there are good photos of the Galveston birds of the early 1960s.
So a small population of Eskimo curlews, some guess as few as ten or twenty birds, still lives on, making their long and perilous migration each year. It is conceivable that one Atlantic storm, or one arctic mining development, could destroy them all. But up to now, apparently for about a century, this small dogged remnant has struggled on, still managing to find one another with at least enough regularity each arctic spring to keep their species′ gene pool flowing. May those last of the curlews prevail.
March 1995