Free Sea of Slaughter by Farley Mowat Page A

native peoples knew it by a variety of names, none more appropriate than the one given it by aboriginal Patagonians. They called it by a word best translated as cloud of wonder because of its autumnal appearance in flocks of such overwhelming magnitude that they darkened the Patagonian skies.
    Poles distant from Patagonia, the Inuit of the tundra plains bordering the Arctic Ocean from Bathurst Inlet west to Alaska’s Kotzebue Sound knew it, too. They called it pi-pi-piuk in imitation of its soft and vibrant whistle, which was their certain harbinger of spring. As late as 1966, an old Inuk living on the shores of Franklin Bay could still tell me what it had been like when pi-pi-piuk returned from whatever distant and unknown world had claimed it during the long winter months.
    â€œThey came suddenly, and fell upon us like a heavy snow. In my father’s time it was told they were so many on the tundra it was like clouds of mosquitoes rising in front of a walking man. Their nests and eggs were in every tussock of grass. At the end of the hatching moon there were so many of their young scurrying about it was as if the moss itself was moving. Truly, they were many! But when I was still a child, they were few. And one spring they did not come.”
    It was in that same year, he told me, that his people first heard about the incomprehensible slaughter in which we, the Kablunait, had immured ourselves—the First World War. When the pi-pi-piuk failed to reappear in subsequent years, the Inuit speculated that perhaps they had been destroyed by us in one of our inexplicable outbursts of carnage.
    â€œOne need not look too far to find the cause which led to the destruction of the Eskimo Curlew. On its breeding grounds in the far north it was undisturbed. And I cannot believe that during its migrations it was overwhelmed by any great catastrophy at sea which could annihilate it... several other birds make similar, long ocean flights without disaster. There is no evidence of disease, or failure of food supply. No, there is only one cause: slaughter by human beings; slaughter in Labrador and New England in late summer and fall; slaughter in South America in winter and slaughter, worst of all, from Texas to Canada in spring.”
    So wrote Dr. A.C. Bent, dean of American ornithologists in the 1920s. His was a verdict that must have taken some courage to express since the good doctor had himself killed tens of thousands of birds, including Eskimo curlews, both in pursuit of sport and in the name of science.
    Curlews are of the sandpiper and plover kind, collectively known as wading birds or shorebirds because most of them haunt shorelines and shallows. However, the erect, long-legged, and long-necked curlews with their gracefully down-curving beaks are as much at home in upland meadows, pampas, prairies, and tundra plains as they are by the sea.
    The Eskimo curlew, which I shall hereafter call by its Nascopie name, was the smallest of the three North American curlews. It stood only about a foot high and weighed no more than a pound, but it was by all odds the most successful of the three. Although it seems to have mated for life, it was nevertheless intensely social, living in close company with millions of its fellows in what was, in effect, a single close-knit nation.
    Because no one region could feed its multitudes for long, it was a nomadic nation possessed of flying and navigational skills that enabled its members to avail themselves of the resources of two continents in the course of an annual migration of phenomenal length and complexity.
    This journey began on the tundra breeding grounds where the perpetual daylight of the brief summer season resulted in an explosive reproduction of insect and other small forms of life. The eggs of the swiftwings were timed to hatch just as this outburst reached its peak so that the young birds, which were able to run about and forage for themselves within minutes of their hatching,