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| Sunday, 11 December 2005 |
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Different Outlook Great Auk by Arefa Tehsin Day: Fourth day of March 1971. Event: Sotheby's auction for a mounted specimen of Great Auk. Buyer: Director of Iceland's Natural History Museum. Significance: Highest price (œ9,000) ever paid for a stuffed bird...
Clumsy walker Cute and cuddly, an elegant diver and swimmer but a clumsy walker, this lovely creature met with the most tragic end. The flightless bird Great Auk (Alca impennis), the first extinction from North America in historical times, was considered the 'original' penguin. Tens of millions of Great Auks flocked merrily and nested in the low lying islands, which were mostly barren, dotting North Atlantic off the coast of Greenland, Newfoundland, Iceland and Scotland. The natives of Newfoundland - Beothuks - who are now as extinct as the bird itself consumed the birds and their eggs. In that age, and in those people gluttony and greed had not set in as a way of life. Strange as it may seem, they hunted only what they needed which didn't influence the bird's population. Again, it was the discovery by the Europeans of Great Auk in the late 1400s that ultimately brought its doom. Extensive killing started when European ships passing by identified these birds and their eggs as food for their onward journeys. One Captain Mood has been recorded of collecting 100,000 eggs in one day! Auks with their tiny legs could not outrun humans with much longer laps and still longer desires and their desperate attempts to escape to their only refuge - ocean - would go in vain. Their struggle would end with human hands tightening over their necks or with a thud of a heavy stick. Even this scale of hunting did not daunt their numbers. But alas...the evil eye of the feather industry turned its scorching stare on it. Around 1760, destruction of breeding grounds and over-hunting of ducks led to paucity of feathers for beds and pillows for the ever-increasing human demands. What next, bases were set on the islands by the moneyed merchants. Thousands of shocked silent birds herded into pens with spikes and blows, barely able to move as they were so intensely stuffed would await their turn before the boiling cauldrons. "Men followed lifting the birds and throwing them over the enclosure walls into limp piles near the fires. There, another gang took the dead and wounded birds and either dropped them into the boiling cauldrons or threw them directly into the fire pits... Men with rakes scooped the feathers from the surface. Men with hooked poles gaffed the naked birds and dragged them down the embankment and onto the rocky seashore where thousands of rotting corpses in piles awaited the next high tide that would wash them away...", wrote David Day. The attention towards colossal decline in the Great Auk's population did not lead to any great conservation measures; rather it led to museums, ornithologists and 'nature collectors' rummaging the lonely lands to hunt down the left over birds for their collection of stuffed specimens. What more, on Hebrides Islands off Scotland, a poor lone Auk in its frantic and distressed search for a tiny place to survive was caught and blamed for causing a storm. A jury found it guilty of witchcraft and stoned it to death. Met its end The pitiable solitary Auk met its end hysterically outstretching its little wings, toddling on its tiny feet and pleading with its tiny eyes... The last known Auk pair was slaughtered on the third day of June Eighteen Forty Four on Eldey Island. Three Icelandic fishermen perused and killed the pair and crushed their egg with their boots. So ended the natural - and unnatural - tale of the Great Auks and such was the end of the last of them who didn't even get a burial ground but whose dead bodies stand erect behind polished glasses of our grand museums. "When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me: Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree: Be the green grass above me With showers and dewdrops wet: And if thou wilt, remember And if thou wilt, forget."
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This lifeless bird standing stiff with sad listless eyes gazing endlessly
at humans peering at its stuffed specimen was once full of verve - flying in
water and waddling on land. 
