03-03-2025
The beautiful bird made extinct by human greed
In June 1844, farmers Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson, along with 12 others, made the perilous journey by boat from Iceland to the island of Eldey. They were searching for great auks: black and white sea birds about the size of geese which had nested on Eldey, once, in large numbers, but whose rarity meant that they were now in demand as stuffed specimens. Later, Ísleifsson would describe how, on arriving, he and Brandsson found only a single pair, which they chased until they caught one each: 'I took him by the neck and he flapped his wings. He made no cry. I strangled him.' In the process the birds' single egg was trampled – the last known of the great auks.
It's the events leading up to this final obliteration on Eldey that Tim Birkhead deals with in the first half of The Great Auk, a book that's both a homage to the extinct bird and an account of its queasy afterlife as a collector's item. These birds, he argues, had always been vulnerable to predation. They were flightless, and easy to catch. They were also, apparently, delicious. By the 17th century, when European seafarers began using a colony of auks off Newfoundland as a kind of transatlantic larder, the great auk had already been forced to retreat to inaccessible breeding sites multiple times.
Over the next 200 years, with astonishing brutality, the great auk would be hunted in droves, first for food, then for feathers, and then, once its near-extinction made it valuable, for nothing other than its skin, which would be stuffed and sold onto collectors or museums whose acquisitive desires were clothed in scientific respectability. This was the fate of the bird that Ísleifsson killed, whose preserved heart ended up in a museum in Copenhagen. It is this – the market in, and collection of, great auk remains – which Birkhead tackles in the second half of his book.
There's something endlessly pleasurable in listening to a person talk about a subject on which they're both an enthusiast and an authority, and Birkhead has both qualities in abundance. Taking us from southern Europe cave art to collection mania to the modern-day study of great auks' remains, he wears his erudition lightly, neither lecturing nor unnecessarily glossing. He's at his best when writing about his own research, which includes how great auks might have incubated their eggs, and the age at which their chicks fledged. These chapters become fascinating in Birkhead's hands, both in their own right and as a glimpse into the processes of developing a scientific argument. ('In the absence of the chick itself, one way of assessing the great auk's likely chick-rearing strategy is by drawing comparisons with its relatives,' he tells us in one chapter.) I would have been perfectly happy if he'd gone into twice the detail, and at twice the length.
This focus is slightly lost in the book's second half, particularly in the sections on the American collector Vivian Hewitt, where glimpses of a deeper argument are obscured behind unconnected biographical detail. Discussing Hewitt's mania for oology (egg collection), Birkhead writes that in the 20th century, its social disgrace 'could be offset by science'. The ambiguity in distinguishing between a collector and a scientific ornithologist, together with the possibility that science itself may be thought culpable in the great auk's extinction, is a complexity alluded to throughout the book.
