Word: curlews
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Alas, the Eskimo Curlew. Most extreme of the Neo-Malthusian scare books is Vogt's Road to Survival. Vogt is an ornithologist, once editor of Bird Lore, who (to quote the book's jacket) "became interested in the relationship of man to his environment through his studies of bird behavior." Now chief of the Conservation Section of the Pan American Union, he still seems to care as much for "wildlife" (especially birds but including bighorn sheep) as he does for the .human species...
Again & again he yearns for the "lost song" of the extinct Eskimo curlew, "a Mozart of the prairies," and all through the book he develops the idea that men cannot live happily and permanently on the planet except in "ecological" balance with "the wildlife." In many cases, he thinks, this balance can be restored only by drastic reduction of human population (100 million Americans would be about right). According to Vogt, medical men who keep people from dying, upset nature's balance; if more people died there would be more room for mountain lions...
...there, the brains are there. If he uses his head he can eat hearty-indefinitely. He might even produce enough to help out Dr. Vogt's friends, the woodland caribou, the Florida manatee, the wolverine and the bighorn sheep. Unfortunately nothing can be done for the extinct Eskimo curlew...
Pursuing further your footnote relative to the bristle-thighed curlew [TIME, June 28], it might be well to note . . . that the red-eyed crosspatch is merely my husband the morning after the night before...
...Arthur A. Allen finds an extra nest of the curlew bird, perhaps he would be willing to move it to Denver and rent it to this discouraged family of homing pigeons...