Great auk

Name and taxonomy

Carl Linnaeus described the bird in the eighteenth century and called it Alca impennis. The genus Pinguinus was raised for it in 1791. The Latin word pinguis means plump, and impennis points to the missing flight feathers. The great auk was the only species of its genus to reach modern times.

The Norse called it geirfugl, the spear bird, and English took that as garefowl. The Basque name arponaz meant spear bill, and the Irish name meant big auk. An Inuit name for the bird, isarukitsok, meant little wing. In the sixteenth century, English writers applied the name penguin to the great auk. Sailors later gave the same word to the southern birds that look like it.

Evolution and relatives

Studies of mitochondrial DNA make the razorbill the nearest living relative. The little auk sits close to both, though it took a very different path. The oldest fossils of the modern species are about 400,000 years old. They come from a site in England and from a rock formation in Bermuda.

A sister species, Pinguinus alfrednewtoni, lived in the western Atlantic in the Early Pliocene. It was larger and also flightless, and it is known from bones found in North Carolina. After it died out, the great auk spread into the water it had held. Other flightless auks such as Mancalla were not close kin. Some writers kept the bird in the genus Alca because it looked so like a razorbill.

Appearance

An adult stood about 75 centimetres tall and weighed about 5 kilograms. That made it the largest auk to live into modern times. The back was glossy black and the breast and belly were white. The bill was heavy, hooked and about 11 centimetres long, with deep grooves. Inside the mouth the gape was bright yellow.

In summer a broad white patch sat in front of each eye. In winter that patch went, and a white band crossed between the eyes. The wings reached only 15 centimetres, far too short to lift the bird. The legs sat well back on the body, which gave power in water. Chicks were grey and downy, and no skin of a chick survives.

Habitat and range

The great auk lived in cold coastal water across the North Atlantic. Records run from Canada and Greenland to Iceland, Norway, Britain and Ireland. Birds sometimes reached northern Spain in the months away from the colonies. Ice age fossils show the species once ranged into Italy and the Mediterranean. In the west, bones have turned up as far south as Florida.

In winter the birds rarely went south of Massachusetts Bay. They came ashore only to breed, and rested on the sea the rest of the year. A colony needed a rocky island with a sloping shore the birds could climb. It also had to lie far enough out to keep bears and people away. Only seven colony sites are known by name, and Funk Island was the largest. Bones and specimens of the species are recorded in 21 countries on GBIF.

Diet and feeding

Adults ate fish and took them under water. Most prey ran 12 to 20 centimetres long and weighed 40 to 50 grams. Bones at the colonies point to menhaden and capelin as the usual catch. Cod, sand lance, sculpins, sticklebacks and crustaceans also appear in the remains. A big bird could swallow a fish half its own length.

The species fed over shallower water than the other auks of the region. Some studies place much of the feeding within 2 kilometres of the shore. Away from the colonies, birds were seen 500 kilometres out from land. Flocks are thought to have worked together to drive fish. Chicks probably ate plankton and food that the parents brought up.

Behaviour and social life

On land the great auk walked with short steps in a straight line. It used its wings to steady itself over rough rock. In water it was fast, and it could bank and turn while chasing fish. It dived to 75 metres, and sailors claimed far deeper dives. Most dives were shallow, which saved energy.

One account gives a held breath of 15 minutes, longer than a seal manages. A bird could drive upward and land on a ledge above the sea. Colonies were packed, and birds used the bill against neighbours and against people. The birds noticed sound but showed little fear of anything they saw. In winter they moved south in pairs or in small parties, never as a whole colony.

Communication and senses

Written accounts give the great auk a low croak and a hoarse scream. One captive bird made a gurgling sound when it was uneasy. The rest of its voice is lost, because no naturalist studied the species alive. Its calls probably resembled those of the razorbill, but deeper and louder. No recording exists, and no naturalist wrote down a full description of the sound.

A pair had a display in which both birds bobbed their heads. The display showed off the white eye patch, the grooved bill and the yellow gape. Observers also recorded head shaking and bowing between birds. The iris was hazel or chestnut, set in a white ring in young birds. Like other diving auks, it probably hunted by sight in clear water.

Reproduction and life cycle

Pairs formed in the first half of May. The birds are thought to have kept the same mate from year to year. They nested at the foot of cliffs in crowded groups. One estimate puts a sitting bird on every square metre of ground. Where other auks shared the site, the great auk took the best ground.

A female laid one egg a year, on bare rock, in late May or early June. She could lay again if that egg was lost. In years when fish were scarce the birds did not breed at all. The egg averaged 12.4 centimetres long and 7.6 centimetres across. It was pale with black or brown streaks, heaviest at the blunt end. Each pattern was different, which probably let a parent find its own egg.

Both parents sat upright over the egg for 39 to 44 days. The chick left the rock for the sea after two or three weeks. Its parents went on feeding it, and carried it on their backs while swimming. Young birds first bred at four to seven years old. A wild bird is estimated to have lived 20 to 25 years.

Predators and threats

The great auk had few enemies at sea. Orcas and white-tailed eagles took some birds. Polar bears reached some colonies and killed sitting birds. Ships put rats ashore on the nesting islands, and the rats ate eggs.

The Little Ice Age may have opened more colonies to bears. Recent work puts the weight of the loss on hunting by people. The down trade was the worst of it, because pillow makers paid well. Egg collectors learned that a colony could be robbed again and again. They kept the clean eggs and threw away the ones with a chick inside.

Population and conservation

At its peak the species is estimated to have numbered in the millions. Hunting on a large scale runs back to at least the eighth century. By the middle of the sixteenth century the European colonies were nearly all gone. The bird got its first official protection in 1553. A law of 1775 in St John's had feather hunters flogged in public. Great Britain banned killing the bird for feathers in 1794.

Funk Island, the largest colony, was empty by about 1800. A volcanic eruption sank the Icelandic stack Geirfuglasker in 1830. The survivors shifted to Eldey, an island with one shore that a boat could reach. Nearly fifty birds were counted there in 1835, and collectors began to buy skins. The last pair died on Eldey on 3 June 1844, with an egg under them. The IUCN lists the great auk as Extinct.

What is left is 78 skins, about 75 eggs and 24 whole skeletons. Thousands of loose bones came out of the soil of Funk Island. The eyes and organs of the last two birds are held in Copenhagen. DNA from those organs matched two museum skins, one in Brussels and one in Cincinnati. Some researchers argue about bringing the species back from that DNA. The debate probably turns on cost, on ethics and on where such a bird would live.

Relationship with humans

Neanderthals ate great auks more than 100,000 years ago. Cleaned bones lay around their fires, and cave art in Spain and France shows the bird. Coastal middens across Europe hold great auk bones over thousands of years. The Beothuk of Newfoundland made a pudding from the eggs. The Dorset hunted the bird, and the Saqqaq of Greenland cut back a local population.

European crews used colonies as a food store and as a source of bait. Some ships ran planks ashore and drove birds aboard in numbers. An egg was worth taking because it held three times the yolk of a murre egg. Sailors also read a sighting as a sign that the Grand Banks lay ahead.

Once the bird was gone, its remains became expensive. An Icelandic museum paid 9000 pounds for a mounted bird in 1971. Britain now holds 15 specimens, more than any other country. Two mounted birds were destroyed in the twentieth century, one by war and one by fire.

In culture and myth

In July 1840 three men on St Kilda caught the last great auk seen in Britain. They kept it alive for three days, and then a storm blew up. They decided the bird was a witch raising the weather and beat it to death. The story is the best known piece of folklore about the species.

The bird mattered to Maritime Archaic people on the Newfoundland coast. One grave at Port au Choix held a body under more than 200 auk beaks. The beaks are read as the trim of a cloak made from the skins. Nearly half the bird bones in that burial ground came from the great auk.

Charles Kingsley gave the last gairfowl a speech in The Water-Babies in 1863. Anatole France built a satirical history around the bird in Penguin Island in 1908. James Joyce mentions it in Ulysses as a character falls asleep. The journal of American ornithology carried the name The Auk until 2021. Today the bird stands as an emblem of extinction caused by people.