Last Call

For millennia, Eskimo Curlews traced one of the longest avian migrations, an immense arc each year from their Arctic breeding grounds to southern South America and back again in spring. These epic movements stitched together tundra, grassland, coastline, and pampas into a single annual cycle.

Each spring enormous flocks poured through the Great Plains, their bubbling calls accompanying the renewal of the grasslands.

Like many long-distance migrants, Eskimo Curlews depended on a chain of reliable stopover sites where birds could rest and rapidly refuel. When any critical stopover failed, entire migrations could unravel.

Migratory shorebirds as a group have proven especially vulnerable to such disruptions.

The loss of the Eskimo Curlew is a warning. Other migratory species now face the same risk, bound to journeys that will endure only if every critical link in their route remains intact.

The Eskimo Curlew’s migration is thought to have been timed to exploit the seasonal pulse of the now-extinct Rocky Mountain locust, a keystone insect of buffalo-maintained grasslands. Regular grazing by vast herds of bison sustained a dynamic prairie mosaic that allowed locusts to breed in extraordinary numbers, sometimes forming swarms that darkened the sky. The curlews fed heavily on these insects, converting that abundance into fuel for the final leg of migration and for reproduction—a strategy known as capital breeding. As bison were hunted nearly to extinction and farms replaced native grasslands, locust habitat vanished. By the early twentieth century, the Rocky Mountain locust was extinct. The Northern Curlew soon followed.

In the late nineteenth century, commercial market hunting further hastened the decline, especially along coastal stopovers.

The last-known Eskimo Curlew was a migrating bird shot by a hunter in 1963.