This is a heavily revised and expanded English translation of a book published in Icelandic in 2020. The translator, Anna Yates, is to be thanked, along with the author and publisher, for making such an interesting book accessible to English readers.
I’m interested in extinction and the Great Auk is a famous extinction. Of course, while a species is being driven to extinction by us (because that is overwhelmingly the cause these days) it is difficult to know whether it is gone or simply declining locally. Maybe there are lots of Great Auks on a rarely visited Icelandic island still, or off Greenland, or Canada? By now we can be sure that they are all long gone (but read the excellent Fergus the Silent by Michael McCarthy (reviewed here) for a gripping tale of what might happen if they ever are rediscovered) and when Alfred Newton and John Wolley set off for Iceland in 1858 they were hoping to study this bird. When they arrived, but not immediately, they realised that the Great Auk had been lost to Iceland (and perhaps to the world) in 1844. That’s quite a wasted journey!
This book delves into the two British scientists’ accounts and thoughts about the Great Auk’s extinction through examination of their notes and accounts of interviews with local folk (which are held in the Newton Library in the Cambridge Zoology Department where I used to study and daydream as an undergraduate). The author of this book, as an anthropologist, is interested and writes interestingly about the process of interviewing locals on what they have done and the reliability or otherwise of those accounts.
This book provides insights into Iceland (a wonderful country), Icelanders (a wonderful people in my experience), Victorian scientists and the issues surrounding extinction.
The cover? Difficult to get a good photo of this species so the options are limited – this is good. I’d give it 8/10.
The Last of Its kind: the search for the Great Auk and the discovery of extinction by Gisli Palsson is published by Princeton University Press.
Signed copies of my most recent book book, Reflections, are available from me.
Contact me at [email protected]
Softback – £20 (incl UK P&P)
Hardback £26 (incl UK P&P)
[registration_form]
This is a book I’ll definitely get! There’s a stuffed Great Auk in the wonderful Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow which wrenches my heart every time I see it. Here’s something from page 126 of ‘Last Places’ by Lawrence Millman (my favourite travel book) which is relevant –
‘An old Westfjords man once told me that one day in the 1940s he was fishing here when he noticed a colony of quite unusual looking birds perched on a grassy cliff ledge. Through his binoculars he saw that these birds were nearly three feet tall and had an erect stance, huge beaks, and very tiny wings. At first he took them for penguins, but he’d never heard of penguins in Iceland before, so he wondered whether they might not be some sort of mutant puffin grown to an uncharacteristic size. Back in Isafjordur he called on an ornithologist who showed him a book of Icelandic birds.
The book didn’t have a photograph of his bird, so the ornithologist brought out another book and the man browsed through it until he found a drawing of the geirfugla, or great auk. Ja, ja, the man exclaimed excitedly, that was the bird he’d seen. Impossible, said the ornithologist. The last pair of great auks – the last pair in existence, probably – had been clubbed to death in Eldey rock just south of the Reykjanes peninsula. There hadn’t been a single authenticated sighting since then. But the man kept pointing to the picture and exclaiming “Ja, ja that’s the bird I saw.” A few days later the two of them went to the cliff where he’d observed the colony, but the only birds their binoculars could make out were the usual puffins, murres and razorbills….’
The quoted height of the birds is a bit off, but an intriguing wee story none the less and although people invent and repeat tall tales by the same token personal accounts shouldn’t be automatically dismissed either. It’s a wonderful thought that against all the odds great auks might have actually survived about a hundred years later than believed and by extension are somehow holding out in one of the many lonely islets in the North Atlantic till today. The odds against it are terrible, but the thought takes a wee bit out of the sense of loss and guilt. I wonder how many British people realise we used to have our very own (sort of) penguin?