Gisli Palsson

How an iconic bird’s final days exposed the reality of human-caused extinction

The great auk is one of the most tragic and documented examples of extinction. A flightless bird that bred primarily on the remote islands of the North Atlantic, the last of its kind were killed in Iceland in 1844. Gísli Pálsson draws on firsthand accounts from the Icelanders who hunted the last great auks to bring to life a bygone age of Victorian scientific exploration while offering vital insights into the extinction of species.

Pálsson vividly recounts how British ornithologists John Wolley and Alfred Newton set out for Iceland to collect specimens only to discover that the great auks were already gone. At the time, the Victorian world viewed extinction as an impossibility or trivialized it as a natural phenomenon. Pálsson chronicles how Wolley and Newton documented the fate of the last birds through interviews with the men who killed them, and how the naturalists’ Icelandic journey opened their eyes to the disappearance of species as a subject of scientific concern—and as something that could be caused by humans.

Blending a richly evocative narrative with rare, unpublished material as well as insights from ornithology, anthropology, and Pálsson’s own North Atlantic travels, The Last of Its Kind reveals how the saga of the great auk opens a window onto the human causes of mass extinction.

the search for the great auk and the discovery of extinction 

The last of its kind 

Bekki

For that reason, Darwin has less to say to us today than we might expect, as we foresee the extinction of many species, at the hands of humans, in the coming years. 

Darwin's concept of the world was static - as was remarked after his time - and not relevant to a world of rapid change generated by human activities.

Birds are relatively well-studied and monitored, and as a result, they are a useful barometer indicating the state of the planet. 

Among the many changes noted, bird populations around the world have dropped dramatically in the past half-century: in North America, their numbers have fallen by one third. 

The latest State of the World's Birds report (2022) shows that about half of the planet's bird species are in decline, and one in eight are threatened with extinction.

If we continue on this way, the voices of birds will fall silent before long, both the beautiful melodies of swans and songbirds and the harsh squawks of seabirds, like the living relatives of the extinct great auk.

Egg-collecting was one of the characteristic activities of the Victorian age, which commenced in 1837 when Queen Victoria ascended to the British throne. (..)

Never have so many eggs been collected, before or since. 

People visited nesting colonies in droves, took samples of eggs from nests, carefully blew out the contents (killing the animal-to-be), classified and registered the eggs, and gathered them into private collections or public museums. 

They would have liked to have a camera, the latest in new technology: 'Certainly a photograph would be the only thing to give an idea of the look of these places.", commented Newton.

The bird, she was told, did not like the camera, so they would "fly over it and shit on it", blocking the lense.

In Iceland the phrase "the last of the great auks" was once used to refer to any lost creature or obsolete object - not unlike the metaphorical use of the word "dinosaur" in English. 

The idea of "teddy bear patriarchy" has been proposed regarding natural history collections in the first half of the twentieth century - that is, that the selection of objects, aesthetic principles, and methods reflected the gender imbalance in society at the time.

Sadly, we have few such records of interactions between humans and great auks, with the exception of accounts of slaughtering the birds, which was quick work..

The bird was found swimming near the shore of Waterford harbour in Ireland. 

A fisher captured it, "supposing it to be some kind of goose" 

The man "kept it alive on milk and potatoes. Later it was fed on fish but at last returned to its diet of milk and potatoes, and died, like a good Irish auk, from the result of trying to swallow a too large potato."

But similar inquiries have yielded fruit. In 2013, for example, it proved possible to solve the mystery of two great auks caught off Iceland around 1833, by carefully trawling through the storage facilities of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich. 

A curator inadvertently discovered the auks in a storage box labeled "owls".

For example, Hawaiian crows are known to systematically avoid places where other crows have been killed. As van Dooren writes: 

But if the death of a single crow signals 'Here lies danger' - a danger significant enough to avoid a place for years, to alter flight ways and daily foraging routes - then what must the death of a whole species of crows , alongside a host of others at this time, communicate to any sentient and attentive observer? 

How could these extinctions not announce our need to find new flight ways, new modes of living in a fragile and changing world? 

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