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The great auk has the dubious privilege of being the only species whose
extinction is known precisely. On 2 June 1844, three men clambered onto
the rocky skerry of Eldey, a few kilometres off the southwest tip of Iceland.
The next day ‘Jon with outstretched arms drove one into a corner, where
he soon had it fast. Sigurdr and Ketil pursued the second, and the former
seized it . . . The birds were strangled and cast into the boat . . . ‘
wrote Alfred Newton, first prof-essor of zoology at Cambridge and a great
auk enthusiast. Newton had interviewed the men who had taken part in the
raid in 1858 on a visit to Iceland. He had hoped to see the bird for himself.
But Jon, Sigurdr and Ketil were the last human beings ever to see a great
auk alive.

By the early 19th century, it was common knowledge that the birds, also
known as gare-fowls, were scarce and the price on their heads was high.
The last known breeding sites, mostly on remote and inaccessible rocky islands,
were visited by locals, hopeful of making a fast krona or two by collecting
skins or eggs. The final pair of birds on Eldey were killed for their skins,
which the three Icelanders sold to a dealer. The present whereabouts of
these are unknown but the internal organs, preserved in spirit, lie in the
University of Copenhagen Zoological Museum. The single large egg, damaged
in the chase, was left to rot.

Penguin of the north

In prehistoric times, great auks (Pinguinus impennis) were abundant
throughout much of the North Atlantic, from Florida to Labrador and from
the Mediterranean to northern Norway, with a population possibly in the
millions. The great auk was the northern hemisphere’s penguin; indeed, it
was the first species to bear this name. Large and flightless, the great
auk weighed about 5 kilograms and stood some 60 centimetres tall. Its wings
were small for its size, but perfect for underwater ‘flight’: several contemporary
observers commented on its tremendous diving and swimming ability.

Unfortunately, the bird must always have been vulnerable to seafaring
humans. Breeding in large groups at the same site year after year, and being
slow-footed and probably not particularly bright, the bird was easy to outrun.
As a result, the great auk sustained generations of transatlantic travellers.

By the early 16th century, fishermen from several European countries
were fishing in Newfoundland’s rich waters and, desperate for fresh meat,
routinely stopped off at the numerous seabird breeding colonies. Funk Island,
which lies 60 kilometres off the northeast coast of Newfoundland, once held
the largest known colony of great auks. Jacques Cartier, the French explorer
who had landed on Funk Island in 1534 during his search for the Northwest
Passage, described the island as being ‘so exceedingly full of birds that
one would think that they had been stowed there . . . In less than halfe
an houre we filled two boats full of them . . . so that besides them which
we did eat fresh, every ship did powder and salt five or sixe barrels full
of them’. Not only were the great auks abundant and easy game, they were
obviously tasty, being pronounced ‘good and nourishing meat’.

As well as being a source of sustenance, great auks were later killed
for their feathers – for stuffing mattresses. Aaron Thomas, a rating on
board HMS Boston, writing in 1794, describes their colony and the callous
manner in which great auks were treated. ‘Funk Island is a barren spot inhabited
only by Penguins (great auks) and other Birds. If you come for their feathers,
you do not give yourself the trouble of killing them, but lay hold of one
and pluck the best Feathers. You then turn the poor Penguin adrift, with
his Skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leasure.’

Undoubtedly, the birds were mistreated, but subsequent historians have
dismissed Thomas’s account as distorted and exaggerated. It would have been
a brave and robust man that tried to pluck a living great auk. The razorbill
is the closest surviving relative of the great auk and, as anyone who has
caught one will know, its bite is considerably worse than its bark. Even
at one-eighth the weight of its extinct cousin, the razorbill can inflict
a memorable wound with its beak. It is easy to imagine the damage the great
auk could inflict.

Plucking feathers

Most contemporary accounts suggest that after driving the birds into
stone corrals, remains of which are still standing, the seamen clubbed the
birds to death. They were then plucked directly or tossed into cauldrons
of boiling water to loosen the feathers. The carcasses of the auks themselves
were used to fuel the fires. As Thomas noted: ‘Their Bodys being oily soon
produce a flame: there is no wood on the island.’

The demand for feathers during the 18th century was such that teams
of men spent the entire breeding season on Funk island. I cannot think of
anywhere less inviting (unless you happened to be a seabird biologist)
to spend a summer. This tiny island, only 0.2 square kilometres in size,
is a desolate, wave-washed and wind-swept slab of bare granite. Its most
numerous occupants were probably not the great auks, or the other seabirds,
but the millions of bean-sized ticks in the rocky gravel. Despite their
cruel trade, the seamen that spent the summer there deserve some sympathy.

Like razorbills, guillemots and other members of the auk family, great
auks were foolishly faithful to their breeding colony, returning year after
year regardless of the slaughter. It has been estimated that there were
100 000 pairs of great auks breeding on Funk Island. Whatever the number,
their abundance must have been truly remarkable since the slaughter continued
unabated for more than two centuries. Captain George Cartwright, who was
among the first colonists in Labrador, had the foresight to see where all
this was going.

In July 1785, he watched boats coming ashore in Newfoundland laden with
great auk carcasses from Funk Island and wrote: ‘If a stop is not soon put
to that practice, the whole breed will be diminished to almost nothing,
particularly the penguins: for this is now the only island they have left
to breed upon.’ His words went unheeded, as greed fuelled greed, precisely
as it continues to do now with rhinos, tigers and whales. By 1800, Funk
Island’s great auks were no more.

The piles of abandoned bodies, however, form the basis of what is now
a small patch of soil on Funk Island, where another of the great auk’s cousins,
the puffin, digs its own breeding burrow each year. Paradoxically, as the
puffins excavate, they expose the bones in what Frederick Lucas described
in 1887 as a vast auk cemetery. Lucas was one of the many scientists who
organised expeditions to Funk Island to collect the bones for which museums
and collectors had been clamouring ever since they had realised that the
auk was a rarity.

But as the robbers of this vast grave discovered, not all the corpses
decomposed. A few, protected under ice and soil, were effectively embalmed.
And it was a ‘dried, flattened, featherless and mummified’ corpse delivered
in 1863 to Richard Owen, the British anatomist and adversary of Darwin,
that enabled him to provide the first detailed description of a great auk
skeleton.

The mayhem associated with the inexorable exploitation of great auks
on Funk Island was such that for years before their extinction no birds
hatched an egg. In fact, despite numerous written accounts, there is not
one single authenticated report of a great auk chick anywhere in the world.

Few extinct birds (other than Archaeopteryx perhaps) have excited as
much attention as the great auk, and the accounts of its life, both scientific
and fanciful, are numerous. One of the most fascinating came from Otto Fabricius,
a Danish naturalist who was living on the west coast of Greenland in the
late 18th century. He described in his journal what he maintained were great
auk chicks on the sea during August. He even shot and dissected some to
see what they had been eating.

Fabricius, however, did not bring back a dead specimen to support his
claims. Symington Grieve, the author of the definitive great auk monograph
published in 1885, was convinced that Fabricius had wrongly identified his
auk chicks. August, he argued, seemed rather late for such young chicks
and west Greenland was much farther north than the known breeding locations.

Grey and downy

It now seems likely, however, that Fabricius was not mistaken: temperatures
in Greenland were warmer then, and his other natural history observations
were so accurate that it seems churlish to suggest that he was wrong about
great auks. Unfortunately, Fabricius left no drawings and all we know is
that the chicks were large, grey and downy.

Homo sapiens certainly dealt the final blow to the great auk, but was
the desire for meat and feathers entirely responsible for the bird’s extinction?

Writing in the late 19th century, Owen suggested that, unlike the Dodo,
the great auk had not been hunted to extinction, but ‘by degrees has become
more scarce’ – an idea that infuriated Newton who believed exploitation
was to blame. Almost a century later, Sven Axel Bengston, a zoologist at
the University of Lund in Sweden, takes the same tack as Owen.

Bengston suggests that the great auk’s flightlessness rendered it always
scarce, and hence vulnerable to extinction. Flightlessness, he says, would
have restricted the number of localities at which the great auk could hop
ashore and find a suitable breeding site. The number of low-lying islands
free of ground-dwelling predators such as foxes and within reach of rich
fishing grounds must have been restricted, setting an upper limit on the
total population size.

The Little Ice Age, he continues, marked the beginning of the end. Starting
around 1200, the reduction in sea temperatures probably had a dramatic effect
on the distribution of the great auk’s fish prey, and in some localities
sea ice must have blocked access to its breeding sites. Modern exploitation
of the great auk, starting around 1500, was merely the final, rapid chapter
in a long, slow journey to biological oblivion.

However, a quick look at the great auk’s southern hemisphere counterparts,
the true penguins, indicates that flightlessness and ice are unlikely to
have been conspirators in extinction. Penguins are flightless and many breed
in ice-bound colonies and in much the same sort of locations as great auks
were known to, yet have populations numbering millions. There is, however,
one big difference between the areas occupied by penguins and great auks:
the southern hemisphere has no terrestrial mammals – no bears, no foxes
and no people.

During their breeding season, great auks must have been especially vulnerable
to ground-dwelling predators. And it was not necessary for Homo sapiens
to possess large sailing craft to reach these offshore islands. Great auk
bones have been excavated from the kitchen middens of the Indians who lived
in Newfoundland, the Beothuks, around 13 000 years ago. The Beothuks regularly
made the 60-kilometre journey out to Funk Island by canoe to harvest great
auks.

Extinction inevitable

A likely scenario is that people exploited great auks whenever and wherever
they could, but for years the relative numbers meant that the impact was
limited. The closest inshore breeding colonies would have been the first
to be wiped out, gradually forcing the great auk into fewer, remote colonies.
Climatological changes might not have helped but once exploitation started
on a grand scale, extinction was inevitable.

Ironically, the end came, not as a result of commercial exploitation
but from science. When it was realised that great auks were becoming scarce,
museums and private individuals became increasingly keen to add specimens
to their collections before it was too late. The financial rewards for those
prepared to take the risks were considerable. And risky it was: the great
auk’s last known stronghold on Eldey was renowned for its difficult access.
The problem of landing on this small rocky island is beautifully illustrated
by Newton’s efforts.

A founder member of the British Ornithologists’ Union and a champion
of the first seabird protection act, Newton and a colleague, the oologist
John Wolley, set off in 1858 for Iceland and Eldey in particular. Their
goal was to examine this last known breeding spot and, optimistically, to
determine whether there were any survivors. In two months, however, the
sea was never calm enough for them to set foot on Eldey, and so ‘we have
come back knowing no more than when we started whether the great auk is
living or dead’.

In the 14 years leading up to the final extermination, no fewer than
60 great auks were taken for their skins from the colonies off southwest
Iceland. From this time onwards the prices people were prepared to pay for
great auk eggs and skins increased exponentially, and to some extent followed
the same pattern as the current trade in ivory. The scarcer the commodity,
the greater the gain, and the greater the risks the men on the ground were
prepared to take. In the great auk’s case though, there was virtually no
one trying to protect it, at least not in Iceland. Earlier, on the western
seaboard there had been attempts at conservation, and a few individuals
were flogged for flouting the rules, but to no avail.

The total yield of the entire collection frenzy in the 18th and 19th
centuries is 75 eggs, 81 mounted skins, 24 complete skeletons and two sets
of innards (the last two). Initially, most of these were in the hands of
private collectors, although over the years more and more have been transferred
to museums. It is ironic that had these events taken place a hundred years
later, a mere blink of an eye in the great auk’s history, those same scientist-cum-collectors
that hastened the great auk’s demise, would have been working hard to nurture
and protect the few individuals that remained.

Tim Birkhead, professor of animal and plant sciences at the University
of Sheffield, is author of Great Auk Islands published by Poyser at a price
of £22 (1993).

* * *

Ancestral cave auks

In 1985, Henri Cosquer discovered the entrance to a cave on a rocky
stretch of coastline not far from Marseilles. The cave’s entrance lies
deep beneath the sea, and it was another six years before the Palaeolithic
paintings on the walls were found. Richly decorated with the images of ibex,
bison, chamois and horses, the Cosquer cave is unique in that it also contains
paintings of the great auk, painted some 20 000 years ago when the sea level
was lower and provided easy access for artists.

As with caves elsewhere, archaeologists have been keen to interpret
the auk paintings at Cosquer. One interpretation, by an Italian archaeologist,
is that it represents a female mating with another male while her jealous
partner looks on. If correct, this must be the earliest recording of a type
of behaviour, referred to as extra-pair copulation, which recent detailed
studies have revealed to be widespread among birds.

The Cosquer great auks could have been engaged in a bit of illicit
sex, or a multitude of other activities, or indeed nothing at all. However,
their very presence on the walls of this cave provides convincing evidence
that this extinct bird was a common and important feature in the lives of
our ancestors 20 000 years ago.

* * *

Pinnacles of desire

The remains of great auks have always been extremely collectable, and
private individuals have been known to pay exorbitant prices for these bits
of biological memorabilia. The changing market value of mounted skins and
eggs, however, reflects an interesting change in attitudes to such relics.

Whereas the value of both mounted skins and eggs increased the moment
the great auk became extinct, only skins have continued to increase in
value – from a few pounds in 1844 to about £9000 in the 1970s, when
the last ones changed hands. In contrast, eggs were most valued (about £250
each) in around 1900, which was the heyday of egg collecting, although in
absolute terms, of course, the price paid for an egg continued to increase,
reaching £400 in the 1930s.

Each of the surviving 75 eggs has had a chequered history, passing from
hand to hand and saleroom to collector’s cabinet and back. The present whereabouts
of most eggs are now known, although where they came from originally is
not – limiting their scientific value. The value of the eggs was such that
collectors did not dare put the real thing on display; instead they exhibited
skilfully made plaster casts.