by Farley Mowat
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-in
creasing 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.”
The feathered cape woven by the beach birds rippled over all the beaches of eastern North America until the European invaders tore it to bloody shreds. What follows is a mere synoptic record, restricted to only a few of the species involved in one of the great atrocities of our times. Much is quoted directly from Dr. Bent’s monumental record, Life Histories of North American Shorebirds.
We begin with the starling-size red-backed sandpiper (now called dunlin), an Arctic nesting species which, like so many shorebirds, winters in South America.
“These birds, in conjunction with several others sometimes collect in such flocks as to seem, at a distance, a large cloud of thick smoke... it forms a very grand and interesting appearance. At such times, the gunners make prodigious slaughter among them; while, as the showers of their companions fall, the whole body [of the flocks] often alight, or descend to the surface with them, till the sportsman is completely satiated with destruction.
“During their aerial excursions, while whirling about, they crowd so close together that many are killed at a single shot... Mr. Brasher informed me that he killed 52 by discharging both barrels... and I have known one instance where an officer of the Army bagged 96 birds from one discharge.
“In former years extensive flights took place [on the south shore of Lake Erie] upon which bushels of them are said to have fallen to a single gun... On October 29, 1897, I killed 53 of these birds out of two flocks... and this is the nearest approach to a flight that has occurred of late years.”
Most sportsmen refused to believe that the disappearance of the beach birds had anything to do with shooting them. In typical fashion, Toronto sportsmen explained the disappearance of the former enormous flocks as a result of their having “been scared away by the greater numbers of railroad engines.”
The knot, called beach robin or red-breast by hunters, was a very abundant migrant all along the Atlantic coast of North America during the nineteenth century. Before 1850, wrote George Mackay, “at Chatham, Nauset, Wellfleet, Cape Cod... Tuckernuck, Muskeget Islands they would collect in exceedingly large numbers, estimates of which were useless. Often when riding on the stage coach on Cape Cod, immense numbers of these birds could be seen as they rose up in clouds. It was at this time that the vicious practice of ‘fire-lighting’ then prevailed and a very great number were thus killed on the flats at night... The procedure was for two men to start after dark at half tide, one carrying a lighted lantern [to dazzle them], the other to seize the birds, bite their necks, and put them in a bag... they approached the birds on their hands and knees... I have it from an excellent authority that he has seen, in the spring, six barrels of these birds taken in this manner, at one time on the deck of the Cape Cod packet for Boston. He has also seen barrels of them which had spoiled during the voyage, thrown overboard in Boston harbour. The price of the birds at that time was 10 cents per dozen. Mixed with them were turnstones and plover. Not one of these birds had been shot, all having been taken by ‘fire-light’.”
The dowitcher, a snipe-like bird called brown-back by market hunters and the sporting fraternity, was equally persecuted, as described by Dr. Bent: “Immense numbers were shot in the past... They are the least shy of shorebirds... easily decoyed... and keep close together. They alight in a compact bunch and many are killed by a first discharge, and those that remain fly a short distance away when hearing what they think to be the call of a deserted comrade [a decoy call] they wheel about and come skimming bravely back to the murderous spot... again and again they are shot at... the remainder loath to leave their dead and dying companions [until only] one or two may escape.
“They have decreased very fast... and we now see them [only] singly or in bunches not exceeding 10 or 12.”
Wilson’s snipe, or jack snipe, is one of the few shorebirds still listed as a “game bird” and so it can be legally shot: “Exceedingly abundant [in the latter half of the 1800s] as the oft-quoted achievement of James A. Pringle will illustrate. He was not a market hunter but a gentleman sportsman who shot for the fun of it and gave the birds away to his friends. His excuses for excessive slaughter and his apologies for not killing more are interesting; he writes: The birds being only in the country for a short time I had no mercy on them and killed all I could, for a snipe once missed might never be seen again. Be
tween 1867 and 1887 he shot, on his favourite hunting grounds in Louisiana, 69,087 snipe but his scores fell off during the next ten years for he increased his grand total of snipe only to 78,602. His best day, undoubtedly a world record, was December 11, 1877 when he shot in six hours 366 snipe.”
The lesser yellowlegs is a rather small, long-legged wader that Dr. Bent felt should not “be in the gamebird class, though I must confess it has some gamey qualities. It is, at times, absurdly tame; it decoys very easily, returns again and again to the slaughter and its little body is so small that many lives must be sacrificed to make a decent bag. However it is interesting sport to sit in a well-made blind on a marsh, with decoys skilfully arranged, and show one’s skill in whistling up these lively and responsive little birds. After all, [sport] gunning is not so much a means of filling up the larder as an excuse for getting out to enjoy the beauties of nature and the ways of its wild creatures.” He adds that one noted sportsman “killed 106 yellow-shanks by discharging both barrels of his gun into a flock while they were sitting along the beach.”
The destruction of the yellowlegs did not take place in the North alone. As late as 1925, Stuart Danforth observed them migrating through Puerto Rico, where they were “surprisingly tame, and it is slaughter, not sport to shoot them... hunters kill as many as twenty with one shot.” And Dr. Alexander Wetmore, visiting Argentina in 1926, noted “migrant flocks, many of whose members offered sad evidence of inhospitable treatment at the hands of Argentine gunners, in the shape of broken or missing legs.”
