Polar Problems Are Ours

People living in the lower 48 states may be inclined to brush off news of dramatic climate shifts in the Arctic. After all, we’re not Santa Claus. We don’t live on the North Pole. So, what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that our lives are connected to the Arctic climate in ways that we don’t realize. Consider, as an example of this kind of connection, Numenius borealis, the esquimaux curlew.

Esquimaux curlew is a rather outdated sort of name. It sounds as if the bird’s name should be updated, to be called the inuit curlew, or the arctic curlew, or at least the eskimo curlew. There’s not much call to update the esquimaux curlew’s common name, however, because no one has made a reliable sighting of any of the birds in almost 30 years.

As the name esquimaux curlew suggests it was a borealis bird – found in the far northern reaches of the northern hemisphere. That’s not the only area the place it was found, though. It was a migratory bird, flying far down south to the pampas of South America, and stopping along on the Great Plains of the United States on the way.

Trouble for this species of curlew began with excessive hunting, but it was habitat loss that did it in. The bird relied upon areas of prairie that had burned, finding insect prey in such areas. But, over the last hundred years, prairie fires were suppressed and prairie habitat was developed for agricultural and human residential use. Esquimaux curlews couldn’t make the flight from Argentina to the Arctic without much food in their stomachs, so the populations that had shrunk from hunting never could recover.

The esquimaux curlew is missing from the Arctic because of things that never happened thousands of miles from the Arctic. Arctic, temperate and tropical ecosystems are far apart geographically, but interdependent nonetheless. As the Arctic’s climate changes, we will feel the consequences, even though we never got close to seeing the ice cap that’s melting.