The Great Auk

The Great Auk was a goose-sized seabird superbly adapted for underwater flight. Unable to fly, it was effectively the penguin of the north, diving deep to exploit vast shoals of herring and mackerel. The summer months saw Great Auks massed together in vast, bustling colonies. Prior to the appearance of humans, their lives were idyllic: three months ashore to breed, the rest of the time riding the ocean waves.

The Europeans who first found the Great Auks’ New World breeding colonies in the 1600s couldn’t believe their luck. Seabird colonies like Funk Island, off north-east Newfoundland, became fast food restaurants for hungry sailors. After eight weeks at sea on a diet of salt pork and hardtack, mariners gorged themselves on the liver-flavoured flesh of Great Auks. Unafraid of humans, Great Auks were easily captured and killed. It was as if God has made the innocency [innocence] of so poor a creature, to become such an admirable instrument for the sustenance of man, wrote Captain Richard Whitbourne. Fat, fleshy, and flush with feathers, Great Auks soon became desirable commodities for mariners in the fifteenth century and beyond.

For more than two centuries mariners continued to plunder Great Auk islands, killing birds and crushing their eggs underfoot. As Margaret Atwood has said: We’re ankle-deep in blood, and all because we ate the birds, we ate them a long time ago, when we still had the power to say no. Almost no one said ‘no’. One who did was Captain George Cartwright who, on seeing boatloads of Great Auk bodies brought ashore from Funk Island in the 1780s, wrote: If a stop is not soon put to that practice, the whole breed will be diminished to almost nothing, particularly the penguins [great auks]: for this is now the only island they have left to breed upon.

Twenty years later, the Great Auk had disappeared from Funk Island. A few hundred birds hung on in Iceland. But not for long. A boom in bird studies in the early 1800s saw both private individuals and museums desperately seeking specimens. No sooner had the Icelandic birds become known, a scramble for their skins and eggs began. It was a ruthless, bloody, unthinking destruction of one of the world’s most extraordinary birds. The last two Great Auks ever seen were killed in early June 1844.

But it wasn’t the end, for the Great Auk has had the most extraordinary afterlife. Scarcity breeds obsession and Great Auk skins, eggs, and skeletons became the focus for dozens of collectors. This becomes a story of pathological craving and dodgy dealings involving vast sums of money. Almost two hundred years after the bird became extinct this passion is undiminished, and just two weeks ago (as I write) a Great Auk egg sold at Sotheby’s for more than £100,000.

This book is the story of the Great Auk’s life before man, its death in Iceland on that fateful day in June 1844, and the unrelenting subsequent quest for its remains. The author, Tim Birkhead, has studied guillemots and razorbills, the Great Auk’s closest living relatives, for more than fifty years. His research on the Great Auk itself has revealed previously unimagined aspects of its life and also, unexpectedly, its afterlife; in a curious twist of fate, Birkhead found himself the recipient of the archive of a man who accumulated more Great Auk skins and eggs than anyone else. The correspondence of this man — the eccentric millionaire Vivian Hewitt — casts an astonishing and exciting light on the often-shady business of Great Auk remains.

Since 1950 over seventy percent of the world’s seabirds have been lost through human activity. The Great Auk was the first – an all-powerful symbol of human folly and the necessity of conservation.