Last Call

The Great Auk was a flightless seabird of the North Atlantic that straddled two worlds. On land, it was famously awkward, standing at nearly 3 feet tall, shuffling upright, and unable to escape predators quickly. In water, it was powerful and agile, using its short wings to “fly” underwater while pursuing its fish prey.

The very features that defined Great Auks–their flightlessness, tameness on land, and predictable breeding colonies–made them extraordinarily easy to kill.

Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries with the European colonization of the North Atlantic, Great Auks were slaughtered in vast numbers for meat, feathers, oil, and fishing bait. As populations dwindled, surviving birds were pushed onto fewer and more remote islands. By the early 19th century, the Great Auk was already becoming a whisper of a memory.

Great Auks were gregarious and bred in enormous colonies. They formed long-term pair bonds and laid one large, beautifully patterned egg directly on bare rock each year.

Female Great Auks would lay a single egg and the mated pair then took turns incubating it. It is believed that the variation in egg shell patterns enabled the parents to recognize their egg among all the others in the large colony.

After hatching, the parents took turns feeding their chick. Two or three weeks later it would be mature enough to take to the water, where adults were reportedly then seen swimming with their young perched on their backs.

The last confirmed breeding pair was killed in 1844 on Eldey Island, Iceland, when fishermen strangled the adults and crushed their egg.

On the southwest coast of Iceland there now stands a lone bronze Great Auk statue looking longingly to Eldey Island. It evokes the loss of the Great Auk, one of the clearest and earliest examples of human-caused extinction in the modern era, and serves as a warning about how quickly even an abundant species can vanish forever.