Free Sea of Slaughter by Farley Mowat Page B

had ample food available. Nevertheless, there was not enough to feed both them and their millions of parents. The adults mostly subsisted through the weeks of nest-building, egg-laying, and brooding on reserves of fat acquired during their northbound migration; but by the time the eggs hatched, these inner resources were running low and could not be replenished locally without endangering the survival of the young.
    The swiftwings had evolved the answer to this problem. Before the young were even out of their natal down, the adults drew together in enormous flocks and flew away. To us this might seem heartless, even brutal, but it was not. Although flightless, the young were fully capable of caring for themselves—so long as food was plentiful. The departure of their parents helped ensure that this would be the case.
    As early as mid-July, horizon-filling flights of hungry adults departed on their search for sustenance. Because of their enormous and concentrated numbers they needed equally immense and concentrated food supplies, not only to satisfy their urgent current needs, but also to build new reserves of body fat with which to fuel their ongoing odyssey.
    The munificent larder they required did not lie close at hand. To reach it, they had to cross the continent from west to east, flying roughly 3,000 miles. Their objective was Labrador and Newfoundland, where extensive stretches of open heathland nurtured (and still does) a low-growing species of bush that quite literally carpeted hundreds of thousands of square miles—a bush with juicy, pea-sized berries that begin to ripen as early as the middle of July. This fecund plant is known to science as Empetrum nigram, but to the residents of Newfoundland and Labrador it was, and remains, the curlew berry. It was the principal support of the swiftwings in late summer. They fed upon it with such gusto that their bills, legs, heads, breasts—even their wing feathers—became royally stained with rich purple juice.
    The arrival of the feeding flocks left an indelible impression on human observers. In 1833, Audubon witnessed their arrival on the south coast of Labrador. “They came... in such dense flocks as to remind me of the passenger pigeon... flock after flock passed close around our vessel and directed their course toward the mountainous tracts in the neighbourhood.” In 1864, a Dr. Packard watched the arrival of a single flock, “which may have been a mile long and as broad... [the cries of the birds] sounded at times like the wind whistling through the ropes of a thousand-ton vessel; at others like the jingling of a multitude of sleigh-bells.” And in 1884, Lucien Turner observed them in northern Labrador with an artist’s eye. “Each flock flew in a wedge shape, the sides of which were constantly swaying back and forth like a cloud of smoke... or in long dangling lines which rise or twist spirally... At other times the leader plunges downward followed by the remainder of the flock in graceful undulations, becoming a dense mass, then separating into a thin sheet spread wide again... reforming into such a variety of shapes that no description would suffice... [the flocks] alight on level tracts from Davis Inlet to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, each day adding to their number until the ground seems alive with them. They feed on the ripening berries, becoming wonderfully fat in a few days.”
    â€œWonderfully fat” expressed it perfectly. After only a week on the berry grounds the birds had become so plump that, if shot in flight, the corpses often split like over-ripe peaches when they struck the ground. And they were shot, everywhere that men lived along the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland.
    In the 1770s, so Captain Cartwright noted in his journal, a hunter could count on killing 150 curlews in a single day with only the crude muzzle loader of those times. A century later, Labrador hunters with improved firearms were routinely