Sea of Slaughter (7 page)

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.

Although the elimination of the
E
skimo 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 abundant 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.”

By the 1920s, Dr. Bent had become apprehensive that the sicklebird might be doomed to follow the Eskimo curlew into extinction. His fears may yet be justified in our time for, although the great curlews still exist in parts of the western plains (where I used to marvel at them in my youth), their breeding range has been so reduced by our agricultural practices, and their numbers so thinned by illegal hunting, that the outlook for their continuing survival remains deeply shadowed.

The third of the curlews, the Hudsonian, or jack curlew as gunners called it (it is now known as the whimbrel), was similar to the slightly smaller Eskimo but had a much more diffuse distribution. It bred right across the Arctic and migrated along both Pacific and Atlantic coasts and through the interior as well. Consequently, it was somewhat less vulnerable to mass destruction than its cousins.

I first encountered it at Churchill, on the west coast of Hudson Bay, where it was so uncommon that only after days of squelching through sodden muskeg did I finally flush a female from her nest in a moss tussock. Later I met a veteran Hudson's Bay Company trader who had come out to Churchill from the Orkneys in 1870 as a teen-age apprentice. He recalled that, in his early years, Hudsonian curlews had been so numerous he and other apprentices had collected barrels of their eggs, which they preserved in isinglass for winter use. He told me that in early August he had seen the birds gathered in such multitudes on the mud flats that he and a Cree helper once killed more than a thousand in a morning shoot. He even showed me a daybook in which he had recorded his hunting scores while stationed at Moose Factory. His spidery handwriting listed daily curlew kills in 1873 of from 200 to 300. “Mostly for sport,” he told me. “Even the [sled] dogs couldna eat all they puir birds.”

The destruction wrought by white men in the Arctic, horrendous as it may have been, was as nothing to the slaughter that took place in the south. Much of what I have written about the butchery of the Eskimo curlew applies equally to the Hudsonian, but with the significant difference that the jack curlew was generally found in smaller, widely separated flocks scattered over a much greater range and so escaped the concentrated fury visited on its cousin. It suffered fearfully, but not mortally.

It is possible that the surviving population is now holding its own. In any event, the Hudsonian was a familiar visitor to Newfoundland when I lived there during the 1960s. Every autumn, the wild whistle of the birds would echo and re-echo from the berry barrens as small flocks—never more than forty or fifty—pitched in, to stuff themselves with curlew berries. They were a poignant reminder of earlier times when the skies of Newfoundland and Labrador were darkened by massed flights of swiftwings and jacks.

In Newfoundland, and in the Magdalens, I was occasionally lucky enough to see small flocks—never containing more than four or five—of another of the “big waders”—the Hudsonian godwit. Two species of godwits were found in eastern North America by early Europeans, who noted that they looked and acted very much like curlews, except that their bills curved down instead of up.

Not much smaller than the sicklebird, the largest of the two—the marbled godwit—occurred and may even have bred from the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence south to Florida; but it was so eagerly sought after for the pot and, later, as a game bird that by 1900 it had virtually disappeared from the eastern reaches of the continent. A remnant population still exists on the Great Plains.

The Hudsonian godwit is about the size of the swiftwing and its way of life is strikingly similar. Both bred in the High Arctic and both followed much the same elliptical migration route. Both, needless to say, were exposed to similar devastation: However, the Hudsonian godwit is a somewhat warier bird than the Eskimo curlew, flies in smaller flocks, and part of its population evidently winters in regions uninhabited by man. Although officially pronounced extinct in the mid-1920s (at about the same time that the Eskimo curlew was thought to have been exterminated), the godwit had, in fact, survived. It is now much esteemed as a rarity by birdwatchers anxious to add it to their life-lists. Unfortunately, it is still being shot by illegal gunners, particularly in the Mississippi Valley during spring migration. Furthermore, it is legally hunted on parts of its winter range in South America where sportsmen continue to take advantage of its habit of rallying to the aid of wounded comrades. “On more than one occasion several birds have dropped to my gun,” wrote a visiting Englishman in Argentina. “The flock would then sweep round and hover over the [wounded] individuals in the water, uttering loud cries of distress, regardless of my presence in the open, and renewed gunfire... the birds were so closely packed together that the shots went ‘into the brown' and caused innumerable cripples.”

Some ornithologists hold out hope that the species may yet stage a comeback. But the Hudsonian godwit remains perilously close to the point of no return, represented by no more than a few thousand surviving individuals.

One of the large waders that summered in the northeastern maritime region was the willet, a bird the size of an Eskimo curlew but with a flashy black-and-white wing pattern that gave it the name flagbird. As late as the 1830s, it summered regularly along most of the Atlantic seaboard from Newfoundland south, despite the fact that for at least 200 years settlers had systematically collected its eggs for food and had shot adults throughout the breeding season. Market and sport hunting in the nineteenth century finally tipped the scales against it and by 1900, thought Dr. Bent, “it seemed as if this large, showy wader was destined to disappear from at least the northern part of its range. It had entirely ceased to breed in many former haunts and was nearly extirpated in others.”

Fortunately for the flagbird, persecution stopped short of annihilation, and it is now returning from the brink. In recent years small breeding colonies have appeared as far north as Cape Breton Island and, while there is little likelihood it will ever again be abundant, it is at least no longer threatened with extinction.

Most spectacular of all the big waders is the oystercatcher. Almost as large as the sicklebird, of striking white and dark plumage, it appears to wear a black hood from which projects a long and heavy orange-coloured bill. Big, gaudy, and gifted with a piercing whistle that can be heard half a mile away, it once nested in large colonies on sandy beaches from Labrador to the Gulf of Mexico. The dominant shorebird wherever it was found, its meat was much prized, as were its hen-sized eggs, both by transient fishermen and by latter-day settlers. Sport hunters and casual gunners made a target of it simply because it was so conspicuous.

Audubon reported it on the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence as late as the 1830s but, because it is now so rare and restricted to the southern part of its one-time range, most modern ornithologists contend that he must have been mistaken. Not so. As early as the 1620s, Champlain casually noted the presence of the
pye de mer
(the name by which the similar European oystercatcher is still known in France) in the Gulf of St. Lawrence; in the 1770s, Cartwright listed the sea pie as resident in south Labrador, not far from where Audubon later reported it.

One of its major strongholds was Cobb Island in Virginia, from which it had been almost extirpated by 1900. H.H. Bailey tells how this came about. “This large, showy bird fell an easy mark to the spring gunners, breeding as it did during the height of the spring migration of [the other shorebirds]... Nesting amongst the dunes back from the ocean, over which the spring gunners tramped daily, these birds were right in their line of travel and were either killed or their nests broken up.”

As the oystercatcher became increasingly rare, scientific collectors moved in on the few remaining colonies and, not content with collecting eggs for their “cabinets,” collected the adults as well; and to such effect that, although the bird is now rare in life, it is very well represented in the collections of “study skins” in North American museums.

Isolated pairs and even a few small colonies survive and breed from Virginia south, but except in nature preserves they are having a hard time hanging on due to the ever-increasing encroachment of modern man on their ancestral beaches. Dune buggies, hovercraft, and other recreational vehicles, together with hordes of holiday makers, have usurped most of their former breeding grounds. Thus there is little prospect of their ever again becoming more than exotic rarities on the Atlantic coast of North America.

Prior to about 1800, the lesser shorebirds (“beach birds” as they were usually called) were not heavily persecuted. Their small size did not warrant the expenditure of shot and powder as long as their larger relatives could be killed in any desired quantity. By the end of the eighteenth century, this situation was changing fast. The large waders were already becoming scarce; the human population (and therefore the market for game birds) was growing apace; and the cost of guns, shot, and shell was falling.

As the new century got under way, still another element was added to the hell's brew that was about to engulf the beach birds. North Americans were growing increasingly wealthy; and wealth produces both the leisure and the means to indulge in sport. For many if not most Americans raised in the tradition of guns and gunning, sport translated into the killing of animals.

So began the “recreational” bloodletting that continues into our day; but it was applied to the beach birds in the nineteenth century on a scale never seen before, and which can never again be equalled simply because most of the targets have been blown away.

A settler at Cape Cod in the seventeenth century would, twice a year, have seen the phenomenon of the beach birds in its full magnitude. Beginning in early April, the sands of the Cape's seemingly endless beaches would begin to disappear under a feathered carpet growing and spreading in kaleidoscopic patterns with each passing day. Overhead, the pale skies would have been threaded, skeined, then shadowed by newly arriving flocks forming such enormous masses that one of the early Nantucket colonists described them as being like smoke rising from forest fires burning from horizon to horizon.

The beach birds were coming north, and they would continue to sweep the sands with an unbroken storm of wings for a month or more. Even in summer the beaches remained under the sway of those several species that stayed to nest. By comparison with those that had passed through, these stay-behinds were the few. Yet they were numerous enough to provide a staple supply of eggs and meat to human residents along the shores of Massachusetts Bay for generation after generation.

And in the autumn! Beginning in mid-August, the visitation would repeat itself, this time swollen by the addition of young-of-the-year and of adults of several species that did not pass that way in spring. As late as 1780, it was said that on a September day when the wind was easterly the sound of wings and the blended voices of those drifting millions could drown out the beat of the breaking seas themselves.

The enormity of this visitation was not confined to Cape Cod. Sandbars in the St. Lawrence River at Tadoussac are not now and never have been an important stop for beach birds. Nevertheless, the migrant flights were mightily impressive when Samuel de Champlain saw them there in the early 1600s.

“Here are such great numbers of plovers, curlews, snipes, woodcock and other kinds that there have been days when three or four sportsmen would kill more than three hundred dozen, all very fat and delicate to eat...
I and a few others passed the time... in hunting... principally of snipes, plovers, curlews and sandpipers, of which more than twenty thousand were killed.” To which the Jesuit, Father Sagard, added, “One kills a great number by a single harquebus shot; for when it is fired at the level of the ground the sand kills more than the powder and shot; this is vouched for by a man who with a single shot killed three hundred and more.”