Eskimo Curlew

Early morning air brot with it intermittent folds of fog. The light wind was south and I could lay nearly a southeast course close hauled on the port tack. The tide was ebbing and the sharpie made good time along the creek. As I eased the sheet at a bend, a confused murmur caused me to lean and look under the boom. There, on a sandbar, within fifty feet, was a flock of about forty ESKIMO CURLEW! Too close to shoot so I decided to run past and try after a sufficient distance had opened. The birds permitted my passage along their front and when the range was about right they disappeared into the mist at the rattle of the sharpie's sail as I threw her into the wind.

The bay side of the beach literally was teeming with shore birds, bewildered or resting while the fog held, and among them were many flocks of Eskimo Curlews, from six to twenty in number. That was forty-four years ago. Now they are with the Passenger Pigeons — all gone!

A glance at the evidence and you will find only truth in the dictum that "man is the most cruel of animals." The red tide of murder by humans is responsible for the birds' extinction. Not for food — simply to see them fall. Load the wagons, dump them in heaps, let 'em rot, then load up again!

That is what happened to these friendly gregarious birds and I hope when they cross the Styx, their ghosts will meet and turn the tables on all who engaged in ruthless killing.

Their call had the same plaintive inflection as the Hudsonian Curlews' but was shorter and flocks passed me with intimate interchange of notes. Memory says they were the most friendly, unsuspicious and lovable of our large shore birds and, as such, doomed. . . . .