Curlews and Columbus

I'd thought the quincentennial of Columbus' first voyage to the Western Hemisphere could pass without comment in this column. Other media were covering the anniversary thoroughly. Besides, the Caribbean landfall of the little Spanish flotilla happened both long ago and far away from here.

But how could I forget the north is inevitably the true center of action? Thanks to the October issue of Natural History magazine, I've discovered that the real reason Columbus made it to the Americas in October of 1492 was the weather in Alaska, the Yukon, and Labrador.

Author Edwin O. Willis doesn't put it quite that way. He begins with a famous anecdote: Columbus and the birds.

Thirty-one days out from Spain, the expedition's sailors were near mutiny and the officers near despair. Columbus and his captains disputed which tack to take, and per- haps even whether to turn back. Then, on October 7, the vessels sailed into a sky-blackening flow of birds. By the tens of thousands, birds passed over and around the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria; some even landed on decks or in rigging, but none on the ocean itself. They were not seabirds. Columbus rallied his seamen around this belief: birds that belonged on land meant land must be near. The covey of ships turned southwesterly to follow the migrating birds, and within a few days encountered what Europeans called the New World.

The gigantic migrating horde consisted largely of shorebirds, and many of the shorebirds were Eskimo curlews. Willis makes this claim not because Columbus left accurate descriptions of the birds that led him landward---he didn't---but because other voyagers over the centuries encountered the great flocks migrating south in autumn over the Atlantic Ocean flyway. Knowledgeable sailors once could identify Eskimo curlews as a dominant species among the flying throngs, but no longer. These curlews, which look like big sandpipers with long, downcurved bills, are now extremely rare at best, extinct at worst; experts still debate some sightings and photographs.

But, because they were intensively hunted, much is known about Eskimo curlews. They bred in grassy tundra of what is now Alaska and the Yukon. At summer's end, they migrated southeast across Canada to the Labrador barrens and the rocky plains near the St. Lawrence River. Fattening prodigiously on crowberries there, the birds might nearly double their half-pound weight before they launched themselves out over the ocean toward their South American wintering grounds.

That launch date usually fell between late August and very early October. For Columbus to encounter them on October 7 meant the curlews had left late from the north.

The birds' late departure doesn't mean that 1492 had an unusually long summer, but it does say something about northern weather that year. Migrating birds fly with weather fronts. In effect, they ride the wings of the storm, thereby saving both energy and time. Important work confirming this idea was done in Alaska by Bob Jones when he was manager of the Aleutian Island National Wildlife Refuge. He convinced Cold Bay air force personnel to use what was then one of the world's most powerful radars to track geese leaving Izembek Lagoon, predicting the timing of the birds' departure by weather observations. As a massive front arrived, the birds winged away. The radar showed the geese rocketing south over the Pacific on the edge of the front, speeding toward wintering grounds in Baja California. (The geese made the trip in well under two days, a pace hard for Cold Bay humans to match with commercial jetliners.)

So, if Willis is right, we can suspect that fall storms were a little late in the north during 1492. Because of the weather, the birds were delayed. And because of their delay, the curlews crossed Columbus' path just in time to save his voyage and lead him to safety--- perhaps.