The Augury Of The Great Auk: The Discovery Of Man-Made Extinction

This August I spent two days on Vestmannaeyjar documenting the annual puffling toss, where teenagers, mostly, seek out wayward pufflings wandering the streets, having been drawn out by the bright lights of the harbour to leap from their cliff dwelling in search of the moonlit sea.

The locals collect them in cardboard boxes, and the following day, lovingly toss them off nearby cliffs into the ocean, thus ensuring their survival.

I only later learned that when the pufflings return to the island as grown puffins a year or two later, they are likely to be caught and eaten by the same saviours, now savouring a tasty feathered dish.

Dramatic disappearance

Atlantic puffins are a relative of the great auk, or geirfugl, that went extinct in Iceland more than one hundred and fifty years ago. Great auks were large, flightless seabirds who spent most of their lives in and about the ocean. The last nesting pair of great auks were caught and killed in 1844 on Eldey island off the west coast of the Reykjanes peninsula. The population of great auks had moved to Eldey when their little island nearby, Geirfuglasker, or “great auk rock”, sank in a volcanic eruption in 1830.

Yet the dramatic disappearance of the great auk seems to have had little lasting impact on our collective thinking, as we cascade relentlessly into a sixth mass extinction. Following the path of the great auk, Atlantic puffins today are critically endangered, their population having declined 70% in the past three decades.

Have we learned nothing then from the well-documented demise of the great auk?

Human-caused extinction

I asked that question of Gísli Pálsson, who has been working to recenter our understanding of humanity’s relationship with the natural world and our impact upon it. Gísli recently wrote The Last of its Kind (subtitle: “The search for the great auk and the discovery of extinction”), which is shortlisted for this year’s Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

“There has been a kind of collective guilt, the world thinks that we killed them.”

Gísli grew up surrounded by nature on the Westman Islands, and became an anthropologist. “Anthropologists for a long time thought about animals — birds in particular — as symbols, in terms of their place in human reasoning or symbolism,” he says.

Gísli happened upon the manuscripts of Alfred Newton and John Wolley at Cambridge University detailing a journey they made in 1858 in search of the bird, and got hooked. The last known pair of great auks had been killed in 1844. Fourteen years later, John Wolley and Alfred Newton went to Iceland in search of the great auk.

Their documentation that the larger than life sea bird was really gone was the first time human caused extinction came into focus. “These strange guys from Cambridge came on their own, riding horses in the countryside and interviewing peasants,” says Gisli. “It reminded me of anthropology — this is what we do. But I realised it was far more powerful than another curious journey. It signified the discovery of extinction. No one believed in human caused extinction at this time. Newton put it on the agenda. When he returned to England, he realised the bird was gone, and he became active in bird protection agencies.”

Collective guilt

Gísli says there was, and still are, a lot of misgivings in Iceland over the extinction of the great auk. “There has been a kind of collective guilt, the world thinks that we killed them.” The story of the local fishermen-turned-bird-hunters has become almost mythic, with details like the wringing of the necks of the last auk couple, and the crushing of the last egg under a boot added in recent retellings.

“We need to keep in mind that the three men who went to the island for the last hunting trip shouldn’t be flagged as terrorists,” says Gísli. “It was the economic system that supported these hunting expeditions. This was the Victorian age — museums became fads. Every major power had to have collections of curiosities — or “wunderkammer” — demonstrating their relevance in the contemporary world by bringing samples of every possible species.”

The web of blame

Perhaps in an effort to assuage Iceland’s collective guilt, the country raised money in 1971 to buy a stuffed great auk that had gone on the auction block. It would be the most expensive stuffed bird ever sold at the time, going for 21.600 USD.

“It was a genocide, plus the extinction of a species.”

But Iceland isn’t alone in taking the blame. The hunting expedition in Iceland that killed the last pair of great auks was Danmark-financed — and ironically, the last two birds were killed to put into a collection. Also, in the 16th and 17th centuries during the height of colonialism, the birds were gathered by the thousands from Funk Island in Newfoundland, and gang-planked onto waiting ships where they were killed for food. “Iceland is often framed as the place of the last killings, but that was the real slaughterhouse,” says Gísli. “The species suffered a huge shock.”

An indigenous tribe in Newfoundland, the Beothuk, who canoed to the island to collect great auk eggs, suffered the same fate as the great auk. “It was a genocide, plus the extinction of a species,” says Gísli. “It’s a sad indictment of European colonialism.”

Gísli also points a finger at the entire system of cataloguing animals that began with Carl Linnaeus in Sweden in the 18th century, which contributed to speciesism. “The discourse has been heavily species-oriented,” he says. “It’s part of the museum tradition. You need fancy pieces in your boxes. But extinction is much more — it involves not just the great auk, but the whole ecosystem. The animals are part of a community, so with disappearing sea birds, the web of ocean life is bound to change.”

If we are to augur anything for the disappearance of the great auk it’s that we ourselves need to change, and quickly, or we — humans and animals alike — might suffer a similar fate.