Last of the Curlews by Fred Bodsworth (illustrated by T.M. Shortt).
Title: Last of the Curlews.
Author: Fred Bodsworth (illustrated by T.M. Shortt).
Genre: Literature, fiction, ecology.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1954.
Summary: One of the swiftest and most graceful of all shorebirds, the Eskimo curlew once made its 9,000-mile migration from Patagonia to the Arctic in flocks so dense that they darkened the sky. This novel is the author's elegy on the curlew, which has been brought to the verge of extinction by the game-hunter's wanton slaughter. The story follows the doomed search of a solitary curlew for a female of his kind. The novel remains a passionate and haunting indictment of man's destructive interference with the natural world.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ By June the Arctic night has dwindled to a brief interval of grey dusk and throughout the long days mosquitoes swarm up like clouds of smoke from the potholes of the thawing tundra. It was then that the Eskimos once waited for the soft, tremulous, far-carrying chatter of the Eskimo Curlew flocks and the promise of tender flesh that chatter brought to the Arctic land. But the great flocks no longer come, even the memory of them is gone and only the legends remain, for the Eskimo Curlew, originally one of the continent's most abundant game birds, flew a gantlet of shot each spring and fall, and, flying it, learned too slowly the fear of the hunter's gun that was the essential of survival. Now the species lingers on precariously at extinction's lip.
The odd survivor still flies the long and perilous migration from the wintering grounds of Argentine's Patagonia, to seek a mate of its kind on the sodden tundra plains which slope to the Arctic sea. But the Arctic is vast. Usually they seek in vain. The last of a dying race, they now fly alone.
♥ In the ecstasy of home-coming, the curlew now hardly remembered that for three summers past he had been mysteriously alone and the mating drive within him had burned itself out unquenched each time as the lonely weeks passed and, inexplicably, no female had come.
The curlew's instinct-dominated brain didn't know or didn't ask why.
♥
♥ The curlew flew to a rocky ridge that rose about three feet above the surrounding tundra, alighted and looked about him. It was a harsh, bare land to have flown nine thousand miles to reach. Its harshness lay in its emptiness, for above all else it was an empty land. The trees which survived the gales and cold of the long winters were creeping deformities of birch and willow which, after decades of snail-paced growth, had struggled no more than a foot or two high. The timberline where the trees of the sub-arctic spruce forests petered out and the tundra Barren Grounds began was five hundred miles south. It was mostly a flat and undrained land laced with muskeg ponds so close-packed that now, with the spring, it was half hidden by water. The low gravel humps and rock ridges which kept the potholes of water from merging into a vast, shallow sea were covered with dense mats of grey reindeer moss and lichen, now rapidly turning to green. A few inches below lay frost as rigid as battleship steel, the land's foundation that never melted.
The curlew took off, climbed slowly, and methodically circled and re-circled the two-acre patchwork of water and moss that he intended to claim as his exclusive territory. Occasionally, sailing slowly on set, motionless wings, he would utter the soft, rolling whistle of his mating song.
♥ New species. Scolopax Borealis. Eskimaux Curlew. This species of Curlew, is not yet known to the ornithologists; the first mention made of it is in the Faunula Americau Septentrionalis, or Catalogue of North American Animals. It is called Wee-Kee-Me-Nase-Su, by the Natives; feeds on swamps, worms, grubs, &c., visits Albany to the northward, returns in August, and goes away southward again the latter end of September in enormous flocks.
♥ It was late July. The tundra potholes and their muddy edges were teeming with the water insects and crustaceans on which the shorebirds fed. Food was at its peak of abundance and winter was still a couple of months away, but the Arctic had served its purpose and now the distant southland was calling the shorebirds flocks, many weeks before there was any real need for them to leave. The curlew who had fought savagely all summer to be alone, now felt a pressing desire foo companionship.
The was no reasoning or intelligence involved. The curlew was merely responding in the ages-old pattern of his race to the changing cycle of physiological controls within him. As days shortened the decreasing sunlight reduced the activity of the bird's pituitary gland. The pituitary secretion was the trigger that kept the reproductive glands pouring sex hormones into the blood stream, and as the production of sex hormones decreased, the bird's aggressive mating urge disappeared and the migratory urge replaced it. It was entirely a physiological process. The curlew didn't know that winter was coming again to the Arctic and that insect eaters must starve if they remained. He knew only that once again an irresistible inner force was pressing him to move.
But somewhere in his tiny, rudimentary brain the simple beginnings of a reasoning process were starting. Why was he always alone? When the rabid fire of the mating time burned fiercely in every cell, where were the females of his species which the curlew's instinct promised springtime after springtime? And now with the time for the flocking come, why in the myriads of shorebirds and other curlews were there none of the smaller and lighter-brown curlews he could recognize as his own kind?
♥
The Eskimo curlew ran towards them, then stopped abruptly after a few strides and nonchalantly resumed his feeding. They were Hudsonian curlews with the shorter bills and buffy underparts which marked them as birds of this nesting.
The Eskimo curlew didn't know that this other species, almost identical outwardly, was a slower flying bird unsuited as a migration companion. He didn't know that young shorebirds of the year develop their full wing strength later and are left behind by the adults to follow by instinct the perilous 8,000-mile southward route they have never seen before. His instinctive behavior code, planted deep in his brain by the genes of countless generations, told him only what to do, without telling him why. His behavior was controlled not by mental decisions but by instinctive responses to the stimuli around him. He desired the association of a flock, but the Hudsonians had failed to release the flocking response in his inner brain and now he ignored them in his feeding. When they flew again a short time later, the Eskimo curlew hardly noted their departure. In a land pulsing with the wingbeats of migrating shorebirds, the curlew was alone again.
♥ He turned into the breeze, held his wings extended outward and adjusted the angle-leading edge up and trailing edge down-until he could feel the lifting pressure of the wind beneath them. Of all the shorebirds' wings, the Eskimo curlew's-long, narrow and gracefully pointed-were best adapted for easy, high-speed flight. Even standing motionless with wings extended in the faint, night breeze, the bird was weightless and almost airborne. He pushed off gently with his legs, took a few rapid wing-beats with the flight feathers twisted so that they bit solidly into the air, and rose effortlessly. He climbed sharply for more than a minute until the tundra almost vanished in the grey dark below, then he leveled off and picked up speed with a slower, easier wing-beat. The air rushed past him, pressing his body feathers tightly against the skin. The migration had begun. Even the curlew's simple brain sensed vaguely that the unmarked flyway ahead reaching down the length of two continents was a long, grim gantlet of storm, foe and death.
♥ Each delicate adjustment of feathers was a reflex too rapid to be consciously controlled, for the curlew completed three or four wingbeats a second to give him a flight speed of fifty miles an hour.
♥ The curlew called out softly. Golden plovers answered.
It was a large group of forty or fifty, and the curlew moved in to a rearguard spot at the trailing end of one of the arms of the flock. He slackened flight speed and announced his presence with a rapid, twittering series of notes. The plovers answered again, the whole flock chattering sharply in unison. The curlew's flocking urge was satisfied. There was a vague, remote feeling of loneliness deep within him still, but the curlew was no longer alone.
♥
Of the thirty-odd shorebirds which fly south out of the Canadian Arctic every fall, only the golden plover is suited as a migration companion for the Eskimo curlew. Their flight speeds and food preferences are similar, but there is another more important reason. With their tireless endurance as flyers, the golden plover and Eskimo curlew spurn the east land route down the continent that all other migrating birds follow. Instead they work eastward to the rocky coasts of Labrador, Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, then strike out straight south over the Atlantic for a grueling, non-stop flight of 2,500 or more miles which doesn't bring therm to land again until they reach the northern shores of South America 48 hours later. Often a big Hudsonian godwit or, occasionally, a shorebird of some other species will join a golden plover flock and follow the plovers down the Atlantic on this long oversea short-cut south. But only the Eskimo curlew and golden plover do it regularly every fall, for only they, of all the Arctic's strong-winged shorebirds and waterfowl, possess the speed and power of flight to breast or escape the mid-ocean storms often encountered. Thee route enables them to take advantage of the rich crowberry crop that purples the hillsides and plateaus of the Labrador Peninsula each fall, a luxuriant store of food missed by the hosts of mid-continental migrants. But in spring the plovers and curlew must follow the usual migratory route up the western plains. For then the crowberries are dead and hard beneath snows of the Labrador winter which linger for weeks after the mid-continent's Arctic is greening with spring.
♥ With the darkness they flew again. The flock clung together loosely as they climbed for height, then as they leveled off the birds formed smoothly into a straggling V formation which permitted the inner wing of each bird to gain support from the whirling air produced by the outer wing of the bird ahead. The curlew took the lead position at the point of the V and the plovers fell in behind with a grace and ease as though the manoeuvre had been long practiced. No conscious selection of flock leader had take place. The bird at the point position had to work harder to create lift and forward speed out of the unbroken air barrier ahead of it, and the curlew was the strongest flyer, so the remainder of the flock formed automatically behind in a movement as involuntary and spontaneous as each bird's breathing.
♥ The take-off, the climb for height, the automatic V-ing with the curlew at the point were accomplished with the same casual unthinking precision as on numerous dusks before. The curlew and many of the plovers had made the ocean flight in previous autumns and they had a shadowy, remote memory of it. Most of them sensed obscurely that when dawn came there would be only the vacant sea below their wings, that they would fly on and on and another night and another dawn would come and the same vacant sea would still be there. And they knew that the sea was an alien and hostile element, for hey were strictly creatures of the land and of the air. During periods of unusually smooth water they might alight briefly on the ocean's surface to snatch a few moments of rest, but they were clumsy swimmers at best, their feathers lacked oil and water-logged quickly, and rarely did the sea provide the calm conditions that would permit even a monetary landing. Usually the long flight, once begun, had to be completed non-stop without food for their stomachs or respite for their wings.
Behind them now the Arctic's aurora borealis was flashing vividly above the Labrador skyline, but when they came to earth again, with flight feathers frayed and their breast muscles numbed by fatigue, it would be in a dank jungle river-bottom of the Guianas or Venezuela. Yet there was no fear or hesitation now with the take-off, no recognition of the drama of the moment. There was only a vague relief to be off. For it was a blessing of their rudimentary brains that they couldn't see themselves in the stark perspective of reality-minute specks of earthbound flesh challenging an eternity of sea and sky.
♥
Behind them, but cut off probably by several flight-hours of impenetrable snow, were the coastlines of Nova Scotia and New England. Ahead, perhaps only minutes, was the storm front with warmer undisturbed air before it. But even if the storm front were overtaken and passed there was only a limitless Atlantic beyond into which they would have to keep flying to stay ahead of the snow clouds now pressing them implacably towards the wavecrests below. All this the curlew knew, not from any process of reasoning but via the same nebulous channels of instinct which told him too that somewhere a mate of his own species was waiting for another breeding time to green the tundra lichens again.
Even the curlew's thick breast muscles and wing tendons, stronger by far than those of the smaller plovers he led, were aching and burning now from the abnormal energy output demanded to overcome the effect of the crusting snow on their wings. Their downward flight course took them into the lower layers of turbulent, bumpy air once more. The flock was thrown out of formation again. They clung together by calling sharply and constantly to each other. Each bird was alone in a gusty white world of its own, unseen and unseeing, but the quavering chatter of flight notes was a nexus that held them together.
♥
Behind him, the great wave lunged into the plover flock. Three of the lower birds fought for height but could do no more than hover helplessly. There was no cry. The wave arched upward momentarily and the birds disappeared from sight. The wave passed and the three plovers didn't re-appear.
Nature, highly selective in all things, is most selective with death. The weak neither ask nor obtain mercy.
♥ ...And sometimes, during Northeast storms, tremendous numbers of the curlews would be carried in from the Atlantic ocean to the beaches of New England, where at times they would land in a state of great exhaustion, and they could be chased and easily knocked down with clubs when they attempted to fly. Often they alighted on Nantucket in such numbers that the shot supply of the island would become exhausted and the slaughter would have to stop until more shot could be secured from the mainland.
The gunner's name for them was "Dough-Bird," for it was so fat when it reached us in the fall that its breast would often burst open when it fell to the ground, and the thick layer of fat was so soft that it felt like a ball of dough. It is no wonder that it was so popular as a game bird, for it must have made a delicious morsel for the table. It was so tame and unsuspicious and it flew in such dense flocks that it was easily killed in large numbers... Two Massachusetts market gunners sold $300 worth from one flight... Boys offered the birds for sale at 6 cents apiece... In 1882 two hunters on Nantucket shot 87 Eskimo curlew in one morning... By 1894 there was only one dough-bird offered for sale on the Boston market.
♥ Phalaropes which had nested on the Arctic tundra with their shorebird kin had returned now to the sea which would lure them until another nesting time came. Occasionally a bigger shear-water soared past on black, motionless wings that skillfully utilized the updrafts created atop each wavecrest by the upward deflection of surface wind. But these were true birds of the sea. The sea gave them food, and when their wings tired the sea also gave them rest, for they swam as skillfully as they flew.
The curlew and plovers could only keep flying, waiving food and rest until the landfall came.
♥ The curlew led the flock upward and throughout the night they flew steadily at a height of a half mile or so, the birds calling intermittently to each other. When the curlew was leading the flock his sense had to be kept sharply tuned to the vagaries of wind and the cosmic impulses which his brain interpreted into a sense of direction. When he dropped back for rest, he could fly in a half-sleep, his wings beating automatically, his eyes half shut, following subconsciously the trailing air vortex of the bird ahead of him.
That night the North Star and the familiar constellations of the Arctic sky dropped almost to the northern horizon. New star groups rose to the south. And shortly before dawn the wind freshened, a warm, firm wind that blew with monotonous constancy out of the northeast. They had entered the region of the trade winds. It was a quartering tail wind that gave them almost another ten miles an hour of speed.
♥ They had flown without rest or food for almost sixty hours. From a land of snow and the northern lights, they had come non-stop to a land that was steaming with the rank growth of the tropics. Below them were hundreds of miles of mudflats and grassy prairie that teemed with the abundance of aquatic insect food that only the months of tropical rain could produce.
With the first misty light of the dawn, the curlew arched his stiffened wings and plunged downward in an almost vertical dive. He had spanned the length of a continent since his wings had last been still. The plovers followed. The flock touched down.
But not a bird rested, for feeding had to come first. Their stomachs had been empty fifty-five hours and they had flown close to three thousand miles on the fuel stored in Labrador as body fat. Now the fat was gone and in less than three days each bird had lost ten to fifteen per cent of its weight. Only the fact that they were the most economical fuel users in the animal world had made the flight possible. Each bird had burned about two ounces of fat over the ocean-at the same rate of fuel consumption, a half ton plane would fly one hundred and sixty miles on a gallon of fuel instead of the usual twenty miles.
They fed rapidly until mid-morning, and only then did they rest. On the broad savannahs abutting the Orinoco, food was abundant. They fed again for several hours before the first tropic night brought darkness.
♥ This is the eighth in a series of bulletins of the United States National Museum on the life histories of North American birds by Arthur Cleveland Bent. Order Limicolae. Family Scolopacidae. Numenius Borealis, Eskimo curlew... Excessive shooting on its migrations and in its winter home in South America was doubtless one of the chief causes of its destruction... I cannot believe that it was overtaken by any great catastrophe at sea which could annihilate it; it was strong of wing and could escape from or avoid severe storms; and its migration period was so extended that no one storm could wipe it out. There is no evidence of disease or failure of food supply. No, there was only one cause, slaughter by human beings, slaughter in Labrador and New England in summer and fall, slaughter in South America in winter and slaughter, worst of all, from Texas to Canada in the spring. They were so confiding, so full of sympathy for their fallen companions, that in closely packed ranks they fell, easy victims of the carnage. The gentle birds ran the gantlet all along the line and no one lifted a finger to protect them until it was too late...
♥ In this manner they straggled slowly southward. By the time the hot December sun had burned the giant thistles, and the pampas-grass was silver with its nodding panicles of flowers, they were deep down into the stony undulating plains of Patagonia, within a single night's flight of the Antarctic Sea. The herculean thrust of the migratory impulse had carried them from the very northernmost to the southernmost reaches of the mainland of the Americas. Yet even here there were still great flocks of shorebirds. The days were long and hot, the brief nights cool. Of all the world's living creatures, none but the similarly far-flying Arctic tern sees as much sunlight as the shorebirds which spend each year chasing, almost pole to pole, the lands of the midnight sun.
♥ But within the curlew, as fast as the pressure of the migratory urge relaxed a new tormenting pressure replaced it. It was the old vague hunger and loneliness. Suddenly the curlew remembered again that he lived alone in a world to which other members of his own species never came. A restlessness of a different sort beset him. He tried to lead the plovers farther afield but they would not follow. Finally the restlessness became irresistible. The curlew spiraled high, circled and re-circled the lagoon where the plovers were feeding. He called loudly and repeatedly, but the plovers gave no sign of hearing. Then the curlew turned eastward toward the coastal tide flats that he knew were there, many hours of flight away. He was flying alone again.
♥ It was January, and the tundra nine thousand miles to the north would remain for months yet a sleeping, lifeless land of blizzard and unending night, but the curlew began to feel the Arctic's first faint call. It was a feeble stirring deep within, a signal that dormant sex glands were awakening again to another year's breeding cycle. It was barely perceptible at first. It strengthened slowly. And it was a sensation vastly different from the autumn migratory urge. The call to migrate south had been a vague, restless yearning for movement in which the goal wads only dimly defined, but in this new call the goal was everything and the migration itself would be incidental. The essence of what the curlew felt now was a nostalgic yearning for home. And the goal was explicit-not merely the Arctic, not the tundra, but that same tiny ridge of cobblestone by the S-twist of the river where the female would come and the nest would be.
The curlew started home.
♥ The Eskimo Curlew and Its Disappearance
(Reprinted in this Annual Report after revision by the author, Myron H. Swenk, from the proceeding of the Nebraska Ornithologists' Union, Feb. 27. 1915.)
It is now the consensus of opinion of all informed ornithologists that the Eskimo curlew (Numenius borealis) is at the verge of extinction, and by many the belief is entertained that the few scattered birds which may still exist will never enable the species to recoup its numbers, but that it is even now practically a bird of the past. And, judging from all analogous cases, it must be confessed that this hopeless belief would seem to be justified, and the history of the Eskimo curlew, like that of the passenger pigeon, may simply be another of those ornithological tragedies enacted during the last half of the nineteenth century, when because of a wholly unreasonable and uncontrolled slaughter of our North American bird life several species passed from an abundance manifested by flocks of enormous size to a state of practical or complete annihilation...
♥ The arrival of the female was a strangely drab and undramatic climax to a lifetime of waiting.
♥
He had never seen a member of his own species before. Probably the female had not either. Both had searched two continents without consciously knowing what to look for. Yet when chance at last threw them together, the instinct of generations past when the Eskimo curlew was one of the Americas' most abundant birds made the recognition sure and immediate.
For a minute they stood almost motionless, eyeing each other, bobbing occasionally. The male seethed with the sudden release of a mating urge that had waxed and waned without fulfillment for a lifetime. A small sea snail crept through a shallow film of tidewater at his feet and the curlew snapped it up quickly, crushing the shell with his bill. But he didn't eat it himself. With his neck extended, throat feathers jutting out jaggedly and legs stiff, the male strutted in an awkward sideways movement to the female's side and handed her the snail with his bill. The female hunched forward, her wings partly extended and quivering vigorously. She took the snail, swallowing it quickly.
In this simple demonstration of courtship feeding, the male had offered himself as a mate and been accepted. The love-making had begun. There had been no outward show of excitement, no glad display, simply a snail proffered and accepted, and the mating was sealed.
♥
They flew close together, the male always leading, the female a foot or two behind and slightly aside riding the air vortex of one of his wingtips. They talked constantly in the darkness, soft lisping notes that rose faintly above the whistle of air past their wings, and the male began to forget that he had ever known the torture of being alone. They encountered numerous plovers but their own companionship was so complete and satisfying that they made no attempt to join and stay with a larger flock. Usually they flew alone.
♥
They broke free of the swirling cloud mass finally and came out into a calm, clear sky. It was a weird, bizarre world of intense cold and dazzling light which seemed disconnected from all things of earth. The cloud layer just below them stretched from horizon to horizon in a great white rolling plain that looked firm enough to alight upon. The sun flared off it with the brilliance of a mirror. A mile away a mountain peak lifted its cap of perpetual snow through the cloud, its rock-ribbed summit not far above. In the distance were other peaks rising like rocky islands out of a white sea.
♥ Fifty miles away there were orchids and cacti blooming vividly in the late South American summer, but here on the rooftop of the Americas four miles above the level of the sea was winter that never ended. Not far below their resting place was an eerie zone of billowing white in which it was difficult to distinguish where the snow of the mountainside ended and the clouds began. Yet even here where no living thing could long endure, life had left its mark, for the very rock of the mountain itself was composed largely of the fossilized skeletons of sea animals that had lived millions of years ago, in a lost aeon when continents were unborn and even mountain peaks were the ooze of the ocean floors.
The pain drained from their bodies and the curlews flew westward again past the wind-sculptured snow ridges and out into the strangely unattached and empty world of dazzling sunlight and cloud beyond.
♥ The male, partially breaking air for the female, was suffering greater fatigue. The sharp, periodic pains of the his breast muscles had changed to a dull, pressing, unabating ache in which he could feel his heart thumping strenuously. He could have obtained some rest by moving back and letting the female lead, but the realization that she was close behind, drawing on the energy of the air that his strength produced, her flight a dependent part of his own, was a warm and exhilerating thrill that made him cling staunchly to the lead position.
The sun went low in the west and his strength dropped to the point where no amount of stubborn mental drive could keep his wings working at the old harrowing pace. But still he clung to the lead. His wingbeat slackened and the flight speed dropped. As soon as she noticed it, the female, who had been silent for almost twenty-four hours, began a low, throaty, courtship quirking, and it gave him strength as no food or rest could do. She repeated it at frequent intervals, and the sun dropped close to the horizon sparkling the sea with a million golden jewels of light, and their wings drove them endlessly on.
The sun was setting when the hard blue of the sea at the horizon ahead of them became edged with a narrow, hazy strip of grey-blue. For several minutes it looked like a cloud, then its texture hardened, and behind it higher in the sky emerged the serrated line of the Guatemalan and Honduran mountain ranges. The outline of the distant volcanic peaks sharpened. The lowland close to the sea changed from blue to green, and a white strip of foaming surf took form at its lower edge. There was still a half hour of daylight when the curlews reached the palm-fringed beach. They commenced eating immediately. When darkness came the pain of hunger and fatigue was already diminishing.
♥ These flocks reminded prairie settlers of the flights of passenger pigeons and the curlews were given the name of "Prairie Pigeons." They contained thousands of individuals and would often form dense masses of birds extending half a mile in length and a hundred yards or more in width. When the flock would alight the birds would cover 40 or 50 acres of ground. During such flights the slaughter was almost unbelievable.
♥ Many hummingbirds, hardy midgets weighing no more than a tenth of an ounce, had started with the others. But now they were far ahead, outdistancing them all, their tiny wings churning the air with seventy beats a second. Most of the birds would fly twenty hours before they reached the American mainland. The curlews would take ten hours. The hummingbirds would do it in eight.
♥ At nightfall the two Eskimo curlews flew on alone and in brilliant moonlight two hours later they landed on prairie a hundred miles inland.
Now the migratory restlessness eased again and the curlews were content to wait while the spring moved on ahead of them. Instinct, not reasoning, told them that all the obstacles of the migration were behind and now for three thousand miles to the Arctic there were only the great flatlands of the American and Canadian plains, teeming with food, lacking mountains, lacking even a range of hills large enough to interfere with the home-coming flight. It was the home stretch and they could span it in a week if need be. But the migratory urge was temporarily dead. The curlews didn't know that the tundra would not be ready for the nesting for more than two months yet. They only knew that the Texas prairies were rich with the insect life of awakening spring. And they felt an urge to stay.
♥ But the Eskimo curlews had little fear. Far back in the species' evolutionary history they had learned that, for them, a highly developed fear was unnecessary. Their wings were strong and their flight so rapid that they could ignore danger until the last moment, escaping fox or hawk easily in a last-second flight. So their fear sense had disappeared, as all unused faculties must, and while other shorebirds relied on wariness and timidity for survival, the Eskimo curlew relied entirely on its strength of wing.
♥ As the physical development came close to the zenith of its cycle, there was an intensification of emotional development too. With high body temperatures and rapid metabolism, every process of living is faster and more intense in birds than any other creature. When the breeding time approaches they court and love with a fervor and passion that matches the intensity of all their other life processes.
Panting with emotion, singing in loud bursts, his throat and breast inflated with air and the feathers thrust outward, he would hold his wings extended gracefully over his back until the female invited the climactic approach. She would bob quickly with quivering wings and call with the harsh, food-begging notes of a fledgling bird. Then he would dash toward her, his wings beating vigorously again so that he was almost waking on air. Their swollen breasts would touch. The male's neck would reach past her own and he would tenderly preen her brown wing feathers with his long bill.
It would last only a few seconds, and the male would dash away again. He would pick up the largest grub he could find and return quickly to the female. Then he would place it gently into her bill. She would swallow it, her throat feathers would suddenly flatten, her wings stop quivering, and the love-making abruptly end. For as yet the courtship feeding was the love climax; their bodies were not yet ready for the final act of the mating.
For a couple of hours after each courtship demonstration the passion and tenseness of the approaching mating time would relax, for the love display was a stopgap that satisfied them emotionally while they awaited the time for the physical consummation.
♥
