EskimoCurlew_AVanishedHarmony_Rowlett_RoseAnn_PortalAZ_16November2020_Reel4039.mp3

Rose Ann Rowlett [00:00:00] It was March. Let's see. It was March. What was it? March 28, 25th, 1962, and it was the the fourth year in a row that the Eskimo curlew had been found on Galveston Island. Ben Feltner had found the first one with Dudley Deaver back in '59. And, and people had seen them in the intervening years, each spring on Galveston.

Rose Ann Rowlett [00:00:37] And the one we saw was the first one that had turned up in 1962. It was found by Jerry and Nancy Strickling on March 24th. And our friend Victor Emanuel gave us a call when he had heard about it. And Frank and John and I jumped at the opportunity to rush to Galveston the next day and drove down early and met Victor and and started looking for the bird. And it was about nine miles west of Galveston and in some fields that were cattle fields with short grass. And we started birding and we found it about 11 o'clock. We were the first people there that day to find it. And it was with, it was in a field with long-billed curlews and some whimbrels. And we got fantastic looks at it.

Rose Ann Rowlett [00:01:42] And the thing is, in the, in background to all this, I had read, we had all read, Fred Bodsworth's wonderful little book, "The Last of the Curlews", and that book had had a major impression on me. I mean, I cried at the end of it and all. And Fred Bodsworth was a naturalist who had a real gift for writing too. He, it was a story. You probably know the book. Yeah, it's wonderful.

Rose Ann Rowlett [00:02:22] Wonderfully written story of the last surviving male Eskimo curlew that migrated with equally fast-flying golden plovers in migration south. But he wasn't finding a female on his breeding grounds in Arctic Canada, and year after year he would make his migration. And this followed a year in the life, in his life. And, you know, it would fly way to the east, to Labrador in the fall where it would stock up on crowberries, fatten up, and then fly across the Atlantic Ocean to South America all the way to the pampas of Argentina, to winter in the grasslands there.

Rose Ann Rowlett [00:03:20] And then in, and in the fictionalized story that Bodsworth related, he actually meets a female curlew there and they start migrating back north together. They cross the Andes. They, they go up across Yucatan and come to the Texas coast and up through the Great Plains.

Rose Ann Rowlett [00:03:54] But when they stop in one of the grassy prairies of the Great Plains, they're following a plow and, and, and the farmer shoots the female, well he shoots at them and shot them and and the female dies eventually.

Rose Ann Rowlett [00:04:18] And, and so the, the male, eventually, he hangs around for a while, he gets shot at again and stuff. Eventually he, he flies on to his, to his spring breeding grounds, you know, always in hopes of finding another female. But, but then the story kind of ends and it's just, you know, has that even now it has a major effect on me. Sorry about that.

Rose Ann Rowlett [00:05:02] Anyway, it has just, it brought back that William Beebe quote, you know, "the beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconcieved, though its first material expression be destroyed, and a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer. But when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before it can be again."

Rose Ann Rowlett [00:05:34] Sorry.