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Eskimo Curlew (cont'd)

Whimbrels (Courtesy Ron Reznick, www.digital-images.net)

Life History
We have little information about the Eskimo Curlew’s life history and breeding biology. There are reports of four-egg clutch size (four eggs in one brood), but others have observed broods of two or three eggs.

No information is available about nest construction, pair formation, courtship, and incubation.

The curlew’s young are precocial (highly independent).  They’re thought to depart the nest within hours after hatching and are assumed to forage (search for food) independently from adults.

There is no information about the longevity of the Eskimo Curlew, but most other species like this are very long-lived, surviving from10 to 29 years.

Conservation and Management
Scientists believe that the rapid downfall of the Eskimo Curlew was brought about by three human-caused factors, that took place mainly in the Great Plains.

First, fire was suppressed and wide areas of  grassland were converted to agriculture.

Second, at the same time prairie fires ceased and agriculture was expanding, the Rocky Mountain grasshopper became extinct.

Third, there was intense pressure from unregulated market hunting (hunting birds and animals to sell).  There were no limits on the number of birds a hunter could kill.

Perhaps a thousand curlews survived and yet the population continued to dwindle.

Certain life history characteristics of the curlew kept it from increasing its population.  It has a low reproductive rate.  It’s a long-lived species. And it evolved with one of the longest and most demanding migrations while relying on few traditional stopover sites.

In the prairie biome (a geographical area of distinctive climate, plant life, and animal life), the curlew lost its entire series of northward migration stopover sites, as the prairies vanished from Nebraska and other states.  These rapid changes took place over such a short period of time there was very little chance for this shorebird to adapt.

Coordinated searches for the curlew’s wintering, migratory, and breeding grounds are still being conducted today.

Population Status
Best estimates for historic population size suggest the Eskimo Curlew once numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

Historic population numbers are often over-exaggerated because of the tendency of the species to concentrate in migration areas in spring.  The numbers were also overestimated because curlews are highly gregarious – they like to hang out in large flocks together – and they tend to return to the same sites in autumn.

One person described their occurrence in Nebraska as a “dense mass of birds extending for a quarter to half a mile in length and a hundred yards or more in width” and said that “upon landing (the birds) would cover 40 to 50 acres of ground.”

There are also accounts of many birds being shot in Nebraska – so many that one observer said they would “fill wagons to the sideboards with curlews shot during northward migration.” As you might expect, the Eskimo Curlew population declined rapidly between 1870 and 1890.

By 1890, large numbers of curlews were still being killed in Nebraska and shipped to Boston markets, by the “barrels full” according one account.

The Eskimo Curlew was placed on the U.S. list of threatened and endangered species in 1967 and is listed as a state endangered species in Nebraska. Today, the Eskimo Curlew is presumed to be extinct.