The Great Auk by Errol Fuller, 拢45, ISBN 0953355306
Evolution played a cruel trick on the great auk. As it became a brilliant swimmer, it lost its ability to fly. So in the auk, we have the penguin of the north. Antarctica and Australia can still boast penguins, so whatever happened to the great auk? Why aren鈥檛 we queueing up to see auk feeding time at the zoo, begging for a chance to fling a fish at a gaping beak? Buying a T-shirt with a great auk theme?
Errol Fuller has the answer: sadly, the flightless bird鈥檚 survival 鈥渨as incompatible with the coming of technological man, and from the moment that humans took to the sea in boats the species was doomed鈥�. Those southerners the penguins were safe from all but a rare visit from a whaler (dried penguins made good lamps, the oily flesh burning steadily). The northern hemisphere, home to the great auk was full of humans. And, like the passenger pigeon, the great auk was highly gregarious, and could breed successfully only in large colonies.
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The great auk has the unenviable distinction of being the only European bird to have become extinct during the present millennium. Great auks swam in British waters until a mere 160 years ago: the last record was of one caught on Stac-an-Armin, St Kilda, in 1840. Its captors kept it alive for a few days, before they beat it to death because they thought it was a witch. Four years later, the last of the great auks ever to be seen alive were clubbed to death on the island of Eldey.
A little tragedy
In this handsome and profusely illustrated volume, The Great Auk, Fuller examines and reports on every aspect, every memento of the great auk. His chapter on the living bird is short: 鈥渕an slaughtered these birds in their thousands, yet the scraps of information left behind by those who actually encountered them are few鈥�.
So deprived of detail about auk biology, Fuller takes another tack. He fills much of this large-format, 500-page volume with detailed accounts and photographs of the 80 surviving specimens, pages of eggs. Does this sound dull? Surprisingly, it鈥檚 not. As Fuller points out 鈥渆ach of these preserved auks represents a little tragedy鈥�. It鈥檚 the carefully chronicled histories of the defunct birds that makes fascinating reading.