The Great Auk

The life, death and afterlife of one of the true icons of extinction, the Great Auk

The great auk was a flightless, goose-sized bird superbly adapted for life at sea. This ‘penguin of the north’ once ranged across the North Atlantic, diving deep to exploit vast shoals of herring and mackerel. The summer months saw great auks massing together in large breeding colonies; fat, fleshy, flush with feathers and easy to capture, the birds were desirable commodities for mariners from antiquity. The rate of destruction increased when European sailors began to visit their once-remote breeding colonies. Places like Funk Island, off north-east Newfoundland, would soon become scenes of unimaginable slaughter, with birds killed in their millions. The auks were boiled alive to remove their feathers for stuffing mattresses, or killed and salted for consumption at sea. No bird could withstand such sustained ferocity, and by 1800 the auks of Funk Island were gone.

A few hundred hung on in Iceland, but not for long; no sooner had the Icelandic birds become known than a scramble by private collectors for specimens began, a bloody, unthinking destruction of one of the world’s most extraordinary birds. The last pair was killed in June 1844, with their single egg smashed in the process.

But this wasn’t the end of the great auk story, as the bird went on to have a most extraordinary afterlife; skins, eggs and skeletons became the focus for dozens of collectors in a story of pathological craving and unscrupulous dealings that goes on to this day, almost two hundred years after the bird became extinct.

Rich with insight and packed with tales of birds and of people, this book reveals the great auk’s life before humanity, its death on the killing shores of the North Atlantic, and the unrelenting subsequent quest for its remains. Tim Birkhead’s research has revealed previously unimagined aspects of the bird’s life and also, unexpectedly, its afterlife; in a curious twist, Birkhead found himself the recipient of the archive of the man who accumulated more great auk skins and eggs than anyone else.

The great auk remains a symbol of human folly and the necessity of conservation. This book tells its story.