A small flock of Curlews, the subspecies is unknown to me, though I suspect Whimbrels. Note that one of them has a lighter beak, I’m thinking either a female or most probably a juvenile.
When I was watching the Curlews on the beach the other day, and taking pictures of their wonderful selves…. I remembered a show I saw as a kid, “The last of the Curlews”. And I kind of brushed off the memory. Mostly because I did not believe that I was remembering anything right, and because I did not think I was looking at real Curlews. I really did not think that I was looking at Curlews.
Well, tonight, I remembered the show again, so I typed the title that I remembered (which was exactly correct) into Google. I found that those birds on the beach are called Curlews. I also found that I remembered the detail of there being an After School Special, was correct. It was the very first after-school special ever and showed in October of 1972. I was all of ten years old when the show aired. The story was about a sub-species of Curlew called an Eskimo Curlew.
I thought about it some more after all remember a story from when you are ten years old. What was it that made the memory stick all these years. After some thought, I know why the memory stuck with me so long. The story caused me to cry…. I cried hard over those little birds and how they were going extinct. A little girls tender heart even at 10 years old showed some compassion for another being. If I were my daughter, I’d been proud that she was capable of such feeling.
The birds on the beach and the birds in the story are probably not the exact same subspecies of Curlews, but obviously, they looked close enough alike to jog my memory. I did not know until I looked it up tonight, that it was a work of fiction, based on what the author thought was happening in the world in his time. I might not have cried so hard had I known it was ‘just a story’. But, then…on the other hand, I cried when Dumbo was being rocked by his momma, and I cried over several of the Lassie shows, so maybe not. 🙂
Some sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_of_the_Curlews
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0305748/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm
https://web.archive.org/web/20051110023720/http://texasbirds.org/tbrc/eskimo2.html
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=biosciornithology
http://datazone.birdlife.org/species/factsheet/eskimo-curlew-numenius-borealis/text
