Plate 208 – Esquimaux Curlew

While exploring Labrador in the summer of 1833, John James Audubon learned that the Esquimaux Curlew had been spotted in the vicinity of Brador Bay (see Plate 200). On the afternoon of August 3, 1833, John James Audubon made his way up onto the tablelands surrounding the bay and found the Esquimaux Curlew flying “in compact bodies, with beautiful evolutions, overlooking a great extent of country ere they make choice of a spot on which to alight; this is done wherever a certain berry, called here ‘curlew berry [Empetrum nigrum],’ proves to be abundant.” The birds formed “such dense flocks as to remind me of the Passenger Pigeons.” Like the Passenger pigeon (Plate 62), adhering to dense flocks allowed hunters to bring down so many Esquimaux Curlews in one shot that they wiped the bird off the planet. The official common name for the bird is now the Eskimo curlew. There has been no sign of the Eskimo curlew since the photographs that were taken of the bird in 1962.