Of Locusts and Doe-Birds: The Extinction of the Eskimo Curlew

The end of the 19th century was a devastating period for America’s birds. Market hunting at an industrial scale, combined with the leveling of forests, draining of swamps, and plowing under of grasslands threatened one species after another with complete destruction. While some species stepped back from the brink with the help of increasingly strict state and federal protection, these interventions came too late for the Eskimo Curlew. In 1916, Myron Swenk reported to the Smithsonian Institution that the curlew “may simply be another of those ornithological tragedies enacted during the last half of the nineteenth century, when because of a wholly unreasonable and uncontrolled slaughter of our North American bird life several species passed from an abundance manifested by flocks of enormous size to a state of practical or complete annihilation.”[1] Though the species straggled on for a few decades past Swenk’s words, the last living Eskimo Curlew was seen in 1962.

A Marathon Migrant

The Eskimo Curlew was a medium-sized shorebird – about as long and heavy as a loaf of bread – with mottled brown feathers and spindly legs, perfect for wading in shallow water. Like all curlews, this bird had a long, narrow, downward-curving bill. And like other long-distance migrants, they lived in perpetual summer, taking advantage of the explosion of insect life packed into the short breeding seasons near the extremes of the northern and southern hemispheres. From May to August, these birds raised their chicks high in the Alaskan and Canadian arctic before fleeing the oncoming winter. The birds, young and old, flew across Canada to fatten up along the North Atlantic shore, where they would roost in the millions and prepare for their upcoming marathon. After a few weeks of rest, they then flung themselves out into the Atlantic Ocean, making what was probably a non-stop journey of seven or eight thousand miles to the Pampas of South America. After spending several months recovering and gaining weight in Argentina’s vast grasslands, they returned Northward at a more leisurely pace, passing through the center of the United States in April and May, where they took their time feasting on the abundant insect life that inhabited the Great Plains.

Feasting on Doe-Birds

Predators were relatively scarce at the polar extremes of the curlew’s range. When the birds came in contact with humans during their biannual commutes, however, they faced a tremendous slaughter. Eskimo Curlews, according to some, were “excellent table birds.”[2] John James Audubon found the birds to be “extremely fat and juicy, especially the young birds.”[3] Hunters in the North Atlantic called them “dough-birds” because of their “superlative fatness” when killed in the fall, after they had spent weeks feasting in preparation for their migration south. They were reportedly so fat that “if shot when flying they burst open when they struck the ground.” They landed in great flocks along the Massachusetts coast in this plump state, exhausted from their flight from Labrador or the Arctic. Locals in Cape Cod found that on the curlews’ arrival it was “as difficult for them to fly as it is for seals to run,” and men easily clubbed them and brought their bodies to market in large numbers. [4]

While only a portion of the curlew passed over New England on their voyage south, the entire curlew population traveled through the heart of America as they journeyed north in the spring, and it was here that the true size of their population was observed – and exposed to market hunters. Gunners in the great plains called them Prairie Pigeons for their resemblance to the enormous flocks of Passenger Pigeons in the east.[5] Hunters from Texas to Nebraska shot birds by the wagonfull for pleasure or profit, sometimes killing more than they could carry and leaving the excess in “piles as large as a couple tons of coal, where they would be allowed to rot.”[6]

The Rocky Mountain Locust

Yet in spite of the unimaginable scale at which the birds were hunted, this was probably not the decisive factor that led to their sudden disappearance at the end of the 19th century. The prairie grassland that the curlew relied on for habitat and food during their spring migration was being rapidly dismantled by the elimination of the bison, the decline of prairie fires, and the fragmentation of the tallgrass prairie.[7] A similar transformation happened in their wintering grounds in Argentina, where wheat production increased by a factor of 50 between 1872 and 1892.[8] The curlew also saw the disappearance of the Rocky Mountain locust, a source of food they depended on to carry them across the great plains and replenish fat stores in preparation for raising the next generation of birds. Curlew feasted on these grasshoppers and the egg pods they would lay in the undisturbed tallgrass prairie and in the sandy soils bordering streams and rivers. 

The Rocky Mountain locust was the passenger pigeon of the insect world, assembling in massive swarms throughout the American West, blocking out the sun wherever it flew and scouring the land of any grass, crops, or even even cotton and leather that it found in its path. One swarm that ravaged Nebraska in 1874 covered 198,000 square miles and contained as many as 12 trillion grasshoppers. Farmers tried to destroy the locusts with increasingly innovative and desperate measures – gunpowder, fires, even inventing horse-drawn “hopperdozers” to sweep up the bugs from fields.

None of these methods left the slightest dent in the swarms of bugs. The total conversion of prairie grasslands to cropland and pasture, however, completely eliminated the species. Grasshoppers would not lay eggs on cultivated land, and the tilling of soil and trampling of cattle destroyed eggs once they were in the ground. The end came quickly for the locust once they were unable to successfully reproduce. The last living Rocky Mountain locust was seen in 1902.[9]

Last of the Curlews

Just like the locust, curlew populations collapsed so rapidly that the most prominent naturalists and ornithologists of the day continued describing their abundance even as they had become exceedingly rare. In 1896 Elliot Coues asserted that curlew were “extraordinarily abundant in some places during migration, as in Labrador where it fairly swarms in August.”[10] This statement might have been true ten years earlier, when curlew were slaughtered by the thousands. But by the end of the 19th century each sighting of an Eskimo Curlew was considered noteworthy. By 1916 it was “the consensus of opinion of all informed ornithologists that the Eskimo Curlew is at the verge of extinction.”[11]

Individual birds were periodically spotted for a few more decades, each time raising hopes that the birds had not yet gone extinct. In 1962, a living Eskimo Curlew was seen for the last time, outside of Galveston, Texas, where it was photographed by Don Bleitz. It is fitting that the few pictures of these birds that exist are in a grainy black and white, appearing like bigfoot, passing into myth and memory. 

---

[1] Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. United States: Smithsonian Institution, (1916), p. 334.
[2] Huntington, Dwight Williams. Our Feathered Game: A Handbook of the North American Game Birds. United Kingdom: C. Scribner’s Sons, (1903), p. 305
[3] Audubon
[4] Forbush and Job. A History of the Game Birds, Wild-fowl and Shore Birds of Massachusetts and Adjacent States. (1912). p. 418-419.
[5] Forbush and Job, p. 423
[6] Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. United States: Smithsonian Institution, (1916), p. 334.
[7] Faanes, Craig A., and Stanley E. Senner. “Status and Conservation of the Eskimo Curlew.” American Birds 45.2, (1991): 237-239.
[8] “A Disappearing Bird.” Forest and Stream, Vol. 73, December 25, (1909), p. 1012.
[9] Lockwood, Jeffrey (February 3, 2003). “The death of the Super Hopper”. HighCountryNews.
[10] Graves, Gary R. “Late 19th Century abundance trends of the Eskimo curlew on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.” Waterbirds 33.2 (2010): 236-241.
[11] Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. United States: Smithsonian Institution, (1916), p. 334.

---