Portside

Reviewed:
The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction
by Gísli Pálsson
Princeton University Press, 291 pp., $27.95

The concept of species extinction is now so quotidian that it requires no explanation, but just two hundred years ago, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was an entirely alien concept. Back then, the word “extinction” was used almost exclusively in relation to Britain’s landed gentry—a lineage described as having become “extinct” when the family name died out and its associated properties passed into other hands. Some fairly clear-cut instances of species extinction were known by the middle of the nineteenth century (the dodo, for example), but habits of thought rooted in religion, along with a far more limited knowledge of the world than we have today, shielded people’s minds from the reality that species might vanish forever.

Perhaps the greatest philosophical obstacle to accepting the concept of species extinction was the biblical idea of the Creation, which reputedly delivered all of life’s diversity in a single perfect event: no new species had come into existence since then, and, it was widely assumed, none could disappear. It was not until the 1880s, a couple of decades after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, that the words “extinction” and “species” became paired, and that was largely as a result—as the Icelandic anthropologist Gísli Pálsson argues in his splendid new book, The Last of Its Kind—of a Cambridge University academic’s passion for the preservation of birds. In 1858 Alfred Newton had traveled to Iceland in search of the great auk. He subsequently realized that humans had played a large part in the species’ extinction. Deeply troubled by the devastation of bird populations for plumes and meat, he devoted the rest of his life to ensuring that other bird species did not follow the great auk into oblivion.

Standing around sixty centimeters (or two feet) tall and weighing around five kilograms, the great auk was a large and stately bird, often described by those who encountered it alive as a “proud” animal. It was flightless, the North Atlantic’s ecological equivalent of the penguins of the southern hemisphere. Distributed from the Atlantic coast of North America to Europe, its past abundance is testified to by many early voyagers. One striking example comes from the narrative of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 expedition to Newfoundland:

We had sight of an island named Penguin, of a fowl there breeding in abundance almost incredible, which cannot fly, their wings not able to carry their body, being very large (not much less than a goose) and exceeding fat.

This doubtless refers to Funk Island, Newfoundland, which was the main nesting site of the great auk in the Americas.

In prehistory the great auk was even more widespread and common: cave art in France and Italy seems to depict it, and in Newfoundland a human burial site was found containing two hundred great auk beaks, covering what may have been a cloak. Studies of the DNA of great auks preserved in the nineteenth century reveal considerable genetic diversity, suggesting that a healthy population existed until close to the time of the species’ extinction. When it came, however, the decline of the great auk was swift and relentless.

A skillful and fast swimmer, the great auk was difficult to hunt at sea, but when it came ashore to breed it was exquisitely vulnerable. The adults chose remote islands on which to lay their single, large eggs, but even so their fledglings were exposed to predators such as polar bears and humans. To limit this period of vulnerability great auks developed quickly, leaving the nest just three weeks after hatching. The parents had the endearing habit of carrying their fluffy young on their backs while at sea.

Great auks were not difficult to tame. In the seventeenth century the Danish savant Ole Worm kept one as a pet, which he led about on a leash. Another was kept at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles. Several highly endangered species have avoided extinction because herds were established in captivity, including the European wisent, Przewalski’s horse, and Père David’s deer. If great auks could survive in the challenging environments of Danish homes and royal palaces, it is not inconceivable that a captive population might have survived the persecution of the wild birds.

Anumber of books have been written about the great auk (not the least of which is Errol Fuller’s 1999 classic, The Great Auk), but what makes The Last of Its Kind special is that it was written by an Icelander, and Icelanders were the last people to live with, and hunt, great auks. Pálsson’s deep knowledge of the Icelandic language and culture allows us to see afresh the last eyewitness accounts of this extinct bird, as well as the consequences of its extinction. Almost all we know about the last days of the great auk is recorded in a series of notebooks known as the Gare-Fowl Books. Today they are kept at Cambridge University Library, where they are, according to Pálsson, extremely closely guarded and cannot be copied, making the study of them unnecessarily tedious.

The notebooks were written in 1858 during an expedition to Iceland undertaken by Newton and John Wolley, both Cambridge graduates. William Proctor, keeper of the bird collection at Durham University, had told Wolley that when he traveled to Iceland in 1833 and 1837, sightings of the great auk had become rare. Wolley’s fellow student William Milner had been in Iceland some years later, and was informed that none at all had been seen recently. Investigating whether the great auk lived or not was a splendid adventure for a pair of young zoologists.

Wolley was six years older than Newton and seems to have taken the lead in the expedition. He had previously completed extensive fieldwork among the Sami people of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, where he spent months collecting birds’ eggs and skins and observing bird behavior. His collection of bird eggs was one of the largest in Britain and in later years formed the foundation of the Cambridge Museum of Zoology’s oological collection.

The pair set sail for Iceland on April 21, 1858. As they neared Reykjavík they passed the rock formation known as Eldey, the last known breeding site of the great auk. It is in a dangerous stretch of ocean known as the Reykjanes Race, whose turbulence is caused by the meeting of powerful currents. Many Icelandic fishing crews have been lost to it, and the Race added significantly to the danger of expeditions in search of great auks.

In Reykjavík the pair met Vilhjálmur Hákonarson, an experienced fisherman who had caught great auks himself and who offered to take them out to Eldey. Unfortunately, the weather remained unsettled during the entire period of their visit, and the journey to Eldey could not be made. This forced the researchers to pivot, and they instead began collecting testimony from Icelanders who had known the great auk. The data that they collected has proved invaluable in understanding the last days of the species, and Pálsson’s fluency in Icelandic has brought new understanding, as well as new questions, to this unique trove.

Within Icelanders’ living memory great auks nested on two skerries off the Reykjanes Peninsula: Eldey and the nearby Geirfuglasker, otherwise known as the Great Auk Skerry. The Geirfuglasker offered extensive nesting grounds, but in 1830 volcanic activity resulted in the island disappearing under the sea. (The rock formation that stands in its place today emerged from the waves in more recent times.) The only suitable nesting site on Eldey is a small shelf of rock jutting from the otherwise vertical rock face, a pitiful remnant upon which to pin hopes for the species’ survival.

There is a puzzle as to why the Geirfuglasker remained a secure nesting ground for so long after every other island the species nested on had been pillaged by humans, and Pálsson offers a perceptive and convincing explanation: the island was believed to be haunted by elves. The story goes that

one summer in the fifteenth century, the son of a farmer at Sandgerði had been left behind on Great Auk Skerry. When men rowed out to the skerry the following summer, he was found there alive, though barely surviving.

His preservation was ascribed to the help of an elf-woman, who “extracted a horrible payment when he later repudiated her.” Although the Icelanders had been Christians for the better part of a thousand years by 1858, reports of elves on the Geirfuglasker were still taken very seriously indeed. One old man swore to Wolley that it had “never, never, never” crossed his mind to row out there.

Pálsson wonders whether stories of elves residing on the Geirfuglasker gave the great auks nesting there some sort of protection. I think that this is highly likely, as elsewhere taboos and beliefs about the presence of supernatural beings offer strong protection to species that are otherwise vulnerable to overhunting. One such species is the Tenkile tree kangaroo of Papua New Guinea, whose last colony, of around a hundred individuals, survived in a place called Sweipini, which was reputed to be the haunt of evil spirits. The village priest exorcised the demons, and within a year the tree kangaroos were almost entirely killed off.

Before the volcanic eruption that destroyed the Geirfuglasker, Icelanders never rowed to Eldey because it was considered impossible to land a boat there. But the following spring, a bird hunter and his crew found dozens of breeding pairs of great auks nesting on Eldey’s rock shelf. Two years later they made two expeditions to the skerry, and took eight birds on each occasion. The year after that, in 1833, they went out again and took twenty-four.

Pálsson points out that all of the testimonies about great auk encounters were given by Icelanders in the present tense: “it runs away from one to the left, like auks do,” for example. As he comments, “There is no past tense here; no sadness, no nostalgia.” For people who do not travel far, this is understandable. In my experience dealing with endangered species in Australasia, indigenous peoples invariably assume that the species in question has just moved away, and they often explain that it can be found on the other side of the farthest hill. The trouble is that, having been there, I know that the people living over the hill say exactly the same thing.

Back at the beginning of their expedition, Wolley and Newton knew none of this. They realized, however, that they could not cover all possible nesting sites themselves, so they contracted an Icelander named Eiríkur Magnússon to travel to the Great Auk Skerry off Iceland’s southeastern coast (a different island from the Geirfuglasker off Reykjanes Peninsula). Pálsson quotes at length the contract that Magnússon worked under, “if only one bird is found,” to collect it and preserve it whole. If a second was found it was to be skinned, as was each successive even-numbered bird, while each odd-numbered one was to be preserved whole, for up to eight birds. No more than half of all the birds encountered, however, should be taken. Pálsson makes much of this contract—possibly too much—as balancing the wish to collect specimens with the desire to protect the last great auks. But at the time the contract was written, all that Newton and Wolley knew was that the birds had become increasingly scarce.

There is also a broader moral dilemma here. Imagine being a biological collector who encounters what you definitively know to be an endling—the last individual of a species. You have a gun in your hand, and you line the animal up in your sights. Should you pull the trigger? The sheer horror of such an act obscures logic. As the last of its kind, an endling cannot breed. If you decide not to kill and sample the animal, it, and all knowledge derived from it, will be lost forever. If you do collect it, there will at least be a record of its existence and the possibility that DNA preserved in the sample might in future assist in the species’ de-extinction. Such are the dilemmas faced by museum curators and other collectors—and so contentious are they that they fuel discussion among those in the profession to this day.

After exhaustive questioning, Wolley and Newton established that the most recent record of the great auk dated to 1844. This “latest successful trip” was headed by none other than Vilhjálmur Hákonarson, their guide. In all, fourteen men had been on his boat on that trip, and Wolley and Newton interviewed as many as they could. The trip had been made on the initiative of a merchant who was keen to obtain skins of great auks.

The boat left around six o’clock in the evening, sometime between May 30 and June 5, 1844. The crew expected to row for twelve hours and to arrive at Eldey early the following morning. It was a fearful voyage. Howling supernatural beings had been heard not far away—“an uncanny thunderous roar,” so terrible that it made the men who heard it feel that “bones were scraping at their skin.” When the nervous men reached Eldey, Hákonarson saw two great auks on the rock ledge; a rower commented to Wolley and Newton that “their white breasts were turned out toward the ocean.” As they approached the cliffs, “the sea boiled at their foot, as if a volcanic eruption were in progress beneath the rock.”

Hákonarson asked four men to go ashore, but only three, Jón Brandsson, Ketill Ketilsson, and Sigurður Ísleifsson, dared make the leap onto the rocks. Ketilsson and Ísleifsson ran up the ledge after the birds. When they came to a cliff, Ketilsson’s “head failed him.” The auk “must have run faster than a man—it ran…upright, with its wings by its sides, and gave no sound or cry,” he later said.

Brandsson and Ísleifsson caught the two adult birds—a breeding pair. Ketilsson, after giving up the chase, went to the nest site, where he found a single egg. It had cracked on the underside, perhaps damaged when the brooding bird arose in haste. Inexplicably (as great auk eggs were worth a good deal of money), Ketilsson laid the egg down again where he found it. And that was the last time anyone ever touched a living great auk.

Wolley and Newton recorded a great deal of information about the great auk. But equally interesting are the perspectives on Icelandic life that Pálsson wrings from their accounts. He notes, for example, that there was no hint of secrecy around great auk hunts, nor a sense of shame. Icelanders relied on seabirds for food, and the only difference with the great auk was that outsiders were willing to pay considerable sums for their skins and eggshells. Another fascinating dimension concerns the Icelanders’ sense of time. Some did not know how old they were, nor in which year any given event occurred, forcing Wolley and Newton to cross-reference events with remembered dates, such as a visit by the crown prince of Denmark and Iceland in 1834.

There is a strange codicil to the story of Ketill Ketilsson, the last man to touch a living great auk. In 1929 Mads Nielsen, a naturalist living on Iceland’s south coast, published a story in a local newspaper about the man who killed the last great auk. Although he did not identify him by name, a couple of months later Ólafur Ketilsson, the son of Ketill Ketilsson, responded that the article expressed “bitter resentment and accusation,” which he assumed was aimed toward his father.

Indeed, Ketilsson had been accused of many things over the years: of dropping the egg or of smashing it with his boot. But all of that was pure speculation and contrary to the man’s own recollections and what was observed by others on that fateful day. Pálsson thinks that Ketilsson, who was only twenty-one at the time, may have been traumatized by the events on Eldey. Later he became a successful farmer and “had the ways of a great man.” Yet his name came to be associated, falsely, with the killing of the last great auks. I’m intrigued by the halt in his hunt, when his “head failed him.” Did he sense something that stayed his hand?

It’s likely that some great auks survived beyond 1844, for seemingly reliable sightings continued to be reported from Icelandic skerries, Greenland, Newfoundland, and Norway. Pálsson informs us that the current consensus among ornithologists is that the last living great auk was seen off Newfoundland in 1852. As Newton wrote in 1861 in his summary of the expedition:

Whether the Gare-fowl be already extirpated or still existing in some unknown spot, it is clear that its extinction, if not already accomplished, must speedily follow on its rediscovery.

The fates of Wolley and Newton were very different. Wolley was the more brilliant of the two, in his short life collecting over 10,000 birds’ eggs and leaving behind his invaluable field diaries (the Gare-Fowl Books, most of which he wrote). He died just eighteen months after returning from Iceland, aged thirty-six and engaged to be married. His mind had begun to break down—his writing deteriorating, his memory and concentration failing evermore until he passed away in November 1859.

Newton spent the rest of his life in Magdalene College, Cambridge, documenting Wolley’s egg collection. His Ootheca Wolleyana, an illustrated catalog of the collection, was published in parts between 1864 and 1907. Strangely, Newton never published the Gare-Fowl Books. He did, however, devote much time to bird conservation, promoting the idea of bird surveys in Britain and disseminating the thought that species could be driven into extinction by human actions.

Importantly, Newton saw the extinction of birds as a process, a critical part of which was “making them grow rare.” His hope for bird conservation lay in his belief that “if we go to work in the right way there is yet time to save many otherwise expiring species.” He helped draft legislation on bird protection, founded a society for the protection of birds, and wrote and lectured on the subject. Pálsson sees Newton’s contributions to the study of extinction by humans as so profound that he names it “Newtonian extinction.”

A section of the final chapter of The Last of Its Kind deals with the issue of de-extinction. Following the detailed and revelatory chapters on the Gare-Fowl Books and the broader history of great auks in Iceland, it feels like a letdown. Just three pages long, it is almost perfunctory and seems uninformed on important matters. The book would have been far stronger without it. Overall, however, Pálsson has crafted a fascinating work that will rewrite our understanding of the last days of the great auk. And in the age of the Sixth Extinction, that is an important contribution indeed.

Tim Flannery’s books include Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific, Europe: A Natural History, and, with Emma Flannery, Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator That Ever Lived, which was published this year. (December 2024)

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