Word: curlew
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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distilling of emerald When the curlew trawled in seadnsk
...fluty call of a curlew heralds the first light of dawn. A faraway widgeon whistles to its companions. A rid off in the dark shallows, a flock of shelduck guffaw at one another like wee-hour carousers wending their way home. MacKenzie Thorpe is in his natural habitat. He is guiding three "guns" across the desolate marshlands of Lincolnshire on England's east coast. Bowlegged and bearded, he creeps through the high grass like some hungry predator, his burly hulk seemingly impervious to the chill wind knifing off the North Sea. Climbing a creek bank, one of the hunters...
...compared with the yearly bag records he keeps in a blue notebook. In 1942, his best year, he took 48 pheasant, 72 partridge, 68 hare, 1 woodcock, 106 geese, 146 mallard, 231 widgeon, 193 shelduck, 2 shoveler, 1 tufted duck, 61 plover, 18 pigeon, 79 redshank, 50 knot, 40 curlew, 1 reeve, 1 gadwall, 1 pintail, 1 black-tailed godwit, 2 whimbrel and 6 rabbit. In the early 1960s, the invasion of the marshes by wildfowling clubs convinced Thorpe that the bountiful days were forever gone. Complaining that "the marsh is a regular shooting gallery," he went straight...
...hundreds of southbound warblers, birds are easily the fleetest, most accurate and far-ranging of migrants. Even the smallest feathered creature in North America, the .09-oz. calliope hummingbird, buzzes 6,000 miles each year from British Columbia to Mexico City and back. The ruddy turnstone and bristle-thighed curlew fly more than 2,000 miles nonstop from Alaska to the Hawaiian islands on their way to the South Pacific. The long-distance champion of them all is the Arctic tern, which makes an annual round trip of 22,000 miles...
Just over the mountains from here, seven horned larks, two Brewer's blackbirds, two meadow larks and one curlew-an increase of eleven. However, the curlew has been fading out for years-even before pesticides. As a boy, I heard the curlew's call almost daily-a song of wild and ethereal beauty; a song embodying the loneliness of a loon's call and the mystery of the divine -to hear it was to be stirred to the depths of one's soul...