Rich Stallcup died December 15, 2012.
He was a kind, wonderful guy and a brilliant naturalist. Once he told me a
story about a bristle-thighed curlew, and the people who
admired it. Before the story I want to say what a freakily great bird
the bristle-thighed curlew is.
First, the bristle thighed curlew
(Numenius tahitiensis) spends the summer in Alaska and the
winter in Hawaii. Or Tahiti or other tropical Pacific islands. Nice
work if you can get it. Maybe not that easy to get, since there are
only about 7,000 bristle-thighed curlews in the world.
That might be tundra with dwarf willow, so I'm guessing this bird is in Alaska
They're hard to see. The Hawaiian
birds aren't hanging around Oahu, they're out on uninhabited islands.
And the Alaskan birds are off in low-lying, mosquito-infested tundra.
If you do see one, you might mistake it for the very similar whimbrel. Hearing its distinctive call might be your
best bet for identifying it. Birdwatchers, especially birders who are
trying to see every breeding bird species in the US, or in
North America, long for sightings of these rare curlews, but most have
never seen one.
Bristle-thighed Curlews on a Pacific island beach. Not Waikiki, Midway.
This curlew is a large brown
moth-patterned shorebird with a long sickle bill. From a distance
they just look brown. You can't see the complicated plumage patterns
or the bristled thighs. I don't know why they have bristled thighs. I
haven't run across any speculations. If you held a gun to my head and
made me guess (part of a really sick scenario), I'd say it might have
something to do with courtship, and showing another bristle-thighed
curlew of the appealing sex that you too are a bristle-thighed curlew
and you'd like to get to know them better. (Please put the gun down
now.)
They eat almost anything. Flowers,
bugs, berries, land crabs, invertebrates, and the eggs of other
birds. Here's a startling thing: they use tools to break open large
eggs. The long sickle bills aren't the best tool for smashing things,
so they grab rocks or pieces of coral and slam them down on the egg.
They're the only shorebirds known to
use tools, a habit that has been beautifully documented in a paper by
Jeffrey S. Marks and C. Scott Hall, published in the 1992 Condor.
Marks and Hall observed
bristle-thigheds on Tern Island and Laysan Island, in the far
northwestern part of the Hawaiian Archipelago. When the curlews get a
food item too big to swallow, like a largish ghost crab, they slam it
against the ground or a rock until it breaks into delightful
bite-sized morsels. Adults haven't been seen doing this in Alaska,
but baby curlews there will slam bits of moss, lichen, or plastic
flagging (presumably put up by curlew biologists trying to get their
bearings).
When the young curlews arrive in the
islands for the first time, having traveled 2,500 miles from their
birthplace, they are in a slammin' mood, and will slam feathers,
shells, or bits of seaweed. I presume they soon learn to focus on more edible
things to slam.
From "Tool Use by Bristle-Thighed Curlews Feeding on Albatross Eggs," Marks, Jeffrey S. & Hall, C. Scott. Condor 94: 1032-1034. 1992. Used with kind permission of the Cooper Ornithological Society. Is this not the greatest bird? Note bristled thighs.
But sometimes a curlew comes across an
abandoned albatross egg. It's too big to
pick up and slam, and the shell is too thick for a curlew to puncture
with its bill. That's when the tool use happens. Marks and Hall say
it's probably an extension of slamming behavior, and I agree. But I
still think it's clever.
So: smart rare mysterious long-distance
travelers. A bird I'd love to see.
*
At one time Rich Stallcup led 30-day
Alaskan birding tours for the company Wings, tours for the fanatical
and obsessed. On his fifth tour his group – 20 devoted birders –
was exhausted from days of camping. They flew to St. Paul Island
in the Pribilofs, arriving at 9 p.m. There were three hours of
daylight left in the long Alaskan summer day, but word on the birder
grapevine was that no notable rare birds were about. No vagrant
Siberian birds had been spotted. The seabird nesting colonies – the
two species of kittiwakes, three auklets, two murres, two puffins –
would still be there in the morning.
Rich assembled the weary group in the
lobby of the King Eider Hotel, the island's only hostelry, run by
Aleuts. He went over the next day's plan. Since there were no
rarities around, he said they could all go to bed early, and sleep
in.
After five hours sleep, Rich found
himself wide awake. He wandered down to the beach. “I'm just
admiring the Kittlitz's Murrelets,” he told me, when he heard a
bird call he'd never heard before. (He whistled this for me –
Sibley gives the flight call as “teeoip.”) “I go, 'Ho, shit.
What's that?'” Teeoip!
“Straight in from Hawaii, here comes
the Bristle-thighed Curlew, one of the most wanted and rare birds in
America. It flies right in front of me – teeoip! – real low. I'm
just quivering because it's so great.” The curlew flies away, low
and to the west, whistling teeoip “as if it wanted to land,”
leaving Rich on the beach, in awe and dread, wondering “What am I
gonna say at breakfast?”
The trip leader is not supposed to
sneak off and see the good birds himself after telling everyone to
sleep in. And the Bristle-thighed Curlew is an unspeakably good bird.
Rich spent the day trying to atone. If only they could find the curlew again! He dragged the group all over the island,
even when they whimpered about missing lunch. (They must have
despaired of seeing the curlew by then, to complain about such a
petty thing. And maybe they had been too agitated to eat their
breakfasts. Still.)
Late in the afternoon, at Stony Point
Lake, the curlew sprang up. It landed where everyone could see it and
drink in its exotic beauty, marvel at its thighs. They returned to
the King Eider in triumph, rejoicing mightily.
“That evening we went over in a bus.
We brought most of the Aleuts, the seal-killers and the mechanics.
Everybody wanted to see this wonderful thing.” That's not something
that usually happens on birding trips. That Rich's excitement was so
infectious, and that he was so intent on sharing the experience,
tells you a lot about him.
This photo of Rich Stallcup appears in a lobby display at the headquarters of PRBO Conservation Science (www.prbo.org). The building is dedicated to Rich, who co-founded PRBO in the 1960s and served as Naturalist and Bird-A-Thon Committee chairperson until his death in December 2012. Photo by Janet Wessel.
At the lake the curlew was bathing in
company with a Eurasian Whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus phaeopus),
a bird ordinarily notable in itself. Eventually the Whimbrel wanted
to leave. “The Whimbrel jumps out of the water and starts
screaming. Quiquiquiquiqui! The curlew gets out. Quiquiquiquiqui! The
whimbrel's so anxious, it jumps up into flight, and finally the
curlew jumps up too, and they tower up to a thousand feet – with
oldsquaws chittering, and Black-legged Kittiwakes – kitti-weeik!
Kitti-weeik! – and they fly off. People were on the ground
weeping.”
Teeoip!
Teeoip, Rich.