In Patrick O’Brian’s novel The Surgeon’s Mate, set in the early 19th century, Dr Stephen Maturin – naval physician, secret agent and ever-curious naturalist – has, throughout his life, wanted to see a garefowl or great auk or garefowl. A sailor tells him about killing these ‘penguins’ in the Grand Banks, Newfoundland, where they breed in such prodigious numbers that he and his uncle Blue-Nose ‘knocked them on the head by the score. It would have made you laugh, to see them standing there like ninepins, to be bowled over. We cut them up for bait, and ate the eggs.’
‘Blue-nosed hell-hound,’ Maturin thinks. ‘Goth, vandal, Hun.’ [1]
When O’Brian wrote this passage, he would have been very aware that the real great auks who once bred on the edges of the cold North Atlantic were long dead: extinct, and never to return. It is thought that the last breeding pair of Alca (Pinguinus) impennis was killed on Eldey Island, Iceland, in June 1844 [2]. Following a request from a merchant who wanted specimens, Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson visited the island, where there had once been a colony of the birds, and caught and strangled the two that remained. A third Icelander, Ketill Ketilsson, either by accident or intent, stepped on the egg that the birds had been incubating. So ended the life of probably the last great auk on Earth. The details may or may not be exactly true, but what a way to be remembered, whenever the topic of great auks is raised. Goths, vandals and hell-hounds!
O’Brian also wrote a biography of Sir Joseph Banks, the much-travelled botanist and enthusiast for the international nature of science, who was the President of the Royal Society from 1778 to[1] 1819. Fans of the novels have suggested that Maturin was partly modelled on Banks; Maturin too was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and meets and refers to Banks on several occasions throughout the novels. In 1766 the real-life Banks went on a voyage to Newfoundland and Labrador, and noted the large number of penguins – subsequently identified as great auks – swimming around the ship off the Grand Bank. He collected a specimen.
Intriguingly, this might be the origin of the great auk skeleton in the Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum [3]. The description in the online catalogue suggests that Banks may have presented the specimen to the surgeon and anatomist John Hunter when he returned from his Labrador voyage in 1766, or perhaps when he disposed of his own collection in 1792. Whether it was Banks or Hunter who reduced the specimen to a skeleton is unclear (did they keep the skin?), but it seems it might not have been treated with the respect it was due, for quite a few bones were missing. Decades later, it was reassembled after a serendipitous find. In 1865 Sir William Flower, Conservator of the Museum, stated in the Museum’s Annual Report: ‘Some of the bones of this valuable Hunterian specimen were already catalogued in the Collection, but without any reference to the remainder being in possession of the College; the examination of the boxes in the store-room during the present year brought to light all the others required to complete the skeleton with a few unimportant exceptions.’ The not-entirely complete skeleton of Alca impennis is now mounted on a circular wooden base.
Imagine the thrill of unexpectedly finding a long-forgotten specimen of an extinct bird! (What other treasures are hidden uncatalogued, in store-rooms and cupboards?) Julie Staines, who lives on Rathlin Island off the north coast of County Antrim, Northern Ireland, wrote to me that, ‘In my former career as a zoo-keeper, I once found a Victorian egg collection, buried in an old storage area. Nestled safely in one of the drawers, was a great auk egg. I took it out gently and held it in my hand. It was “a hair standing up on the back of the neck” experience!’ [4].
When I headed to Rathlin across the stretch of water where the currents of the Atlantic Ocean collide with the Irish Sea, the little ferry was surrounded by rafts of small black and white auks – guillemots and razorbills – bobbing on the water. At the ferry’s approach, some rose up and scrabbled along the surface with their webbed feet, their wings whirring a rapid escape. Great auks, too, were once found along the rugged western cliffs of Rathlin, and they too would have bobbed around the boat – but, as non-flying birds, could not have escaped into the air. Their heavy bodies and behaviour confined them to the edges of the land, to the cliffs and rocky shores. In Rathlin’s Heritage Centre are two full-sized, glossy and very realistic resin models of the birds. They are standing on a rock, and one is bending forward, carefully repositioning its egg between its feet. The shape of the egg – like that of the smaller extant auks – is distinctive: asymmetrical, pointed at one end, and its pale surface is scribbled with dark markings.
I should have realised that great auks had lived on Rathlin and was delighted to find they were celebrated here. When I asked who might know more about their history I was subsequently put in touch with Julie; she had lived on the island for many years and had at one time been a warden for the bird reserve. By the time we made contact I had left Northern Ireland, but we were able to correspond about the auks. She told me that several years ago the local primary school children had gone to the Zoological Museum at Trinity College, Dublin, to see a taxidermied specimen and learn more about the birds who had once inhabited their shore. Julie’s partner, James McFaul, had told the children abouta story of the auks in connection to his family. Here, with his permission, are a few extracts:
James recalls tales of how his father and his siblings[2] [A3] [A4] would ‘use ropes to climb the cliffs, off the west coast of the island, in the late spring and early summer, to collect seabird eggs. They also collected eggs from lower cliff ledges from the sea using their boat, when the weather was calm. These eggs were collected for sale. As it was during wartime, food was rationed, so the eggs, which were usually dried, were a valuable contribution to the war effort.’ Auks, like guillemots and razorbills, were known locallyto the Rathlin Islanders as foorins, and ‘the people of the lower part of the island would have referred to the Upper-Enders as ‘Foorins’ because seabirds and their eggs, both fresh and preserved, would have formed a large part of their diet, just as on St Kilda and other remote islands.’
James’ great-grandfather Neil Dan would have been a teenager in the mid-1800seighteen hundreds, at the time the great auks became extinct on the island., so m Memories of the birds would still have been vivid and passed down within the family. ‘One bright day in early June, my father and his brother, Neil, and his sister, Rosie, were heading off to the boat with their egg baskets, when their father called to them, “Wait there before you go. Be careful.” “We will,” they answered. “No, no, wait; be careful when you are gathering the eggs. If you happen to see a very big egg, twice the size of the other eggs, leave it alone, don’t touch it. That’s if you intend to land on Deargan Stack or Stac na fear Liath.”’ Those sea-stacks were the last place the King of the Foorins was seen.
Visitors to the bird reserve at the West Lighthouse can look across to these bird-loud stacks, glistening like iced wedding-cakes with their coating of guano. Their gently-sloping bases, washed by the waves, would have allowed the flightless great auk to come ashore to reach the nesting ledges.
James’ story ends in a way likely to cause delighted giggles and shivers in the children: ‘Perhaps on a misty summer’s morning, it would be easy to imagine, just at the water’s edge of Stac na Fear Liath, a strange, upright figure, could it be the Grey Man, whoever he was? Or maybe even the King of the Guillemots? Who knows?!’
Unlike guillemots and razorbills the great auk could not fly. Impennis, it lacked flight feathers, and its wings appeared stunted, held politely at its sides. Instead, the birds were adapted for underwater swimming – they were apparently very fast and agile when diving and chasing fish. The day that I crossed to Rathlin Island, gannets were patrolling; their bodies and beating wings were cruciform glimmers of white against the grey sky. Peering down, spying the silver gleam of fish, each folded its wings and plummeted deep into the water like a javelin. Not so great auks: if only I could have seen them, they would have lacked that impetus, instead diving from the surface, like leaping a hurdle from a standing start.
So what was it about their bodies that made their sub-surface swimming so efficient? Seawater is about 800 times denser than air. In water, the downward pull of gravity is offset by buoyancy, even more so where the water contains dissolved salts (it’s easier to bob around in the sea than in your bath). But in contrast, drag – the resistance of the surrounding fluid to movement – is much greater in water than in air.
The bodies of these non-volant auks, then, needed some modifications for their lifestyle. Small wings and reduced flight feathers – that is, a smaller surface area and increased streamlining – meant that drag was reduced. And since the wings were less flexible, that increased their propulsive ability – they acted more like paddles or flippers.
The anatomy of flightless auks like Pinguinus impennis was further adapted to improve their ‘aquatic flight’. From dissections of extant auks and penguins, examination of the few intact great auk skeletons that remain, and clever modelling and statistical analysis, researchers have shown that the elbow joint was stiffened by large ligaments, making it more rigid and flipper-like. Even more interesting, the attachment-points of ‘flight’ muscles to the wing bones and the torso made for a greater leverage on the wings – especially on the upstroke. For it turns out that (counter-intuitively, when you think of wings beating against air) it’s the upstroke of the wings that is important underwater – counteracting the effect of drag and resistance, and producing a greater forward thrust [5].
How many long-dead great auk specimens are available for further examination? According to R.A. Baker, a museum curator at the University of Leeds who researched the provenance and fate of the Durham great auk, ‘the entire collection frenzy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is 75 eggs, 81 mounted skins and 24 complete skeletons and two sets of innards’ [6]. There are other estimates. And we can’t even guess at the number of birds who were killed as game: plucked for their down and feathers, boiled for their fat, stored and eaten as meat, or cut up for bait by hungry or avaricious sailors and ‘blue-nosed hell-hounds’.
Superstition and fear played a part in the killing, too. There’s an interactive story-book next to the great auk in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum, which tells the tale of the ‘last Great auk to be seen in Scotland, killed on Stac an Armin in 1840’. Three men from St Kilda arrive on the sea-stack to catch an auk. They close in on the bird, who warns them off – if you press the picture of the auk it utters a raucous, harsh cry. A storm approaches, and the islanders are convinced the bird is a witch and has raised the lightning and the rain to scare them away. To save themselves, they kill the bird – and the storm abates.
However, the dignified specimen in the glass case next to the story-book is not from St Kilda. Its provenance isn’t entirely clear but it’s thought it might even have come from Eldey Island. Its story is typical of the acquisitiveness of Victorian naturalists and collectors: its skin was shunted from one dealer and collector to another. In 1835 a dealer from Dresden, Friedrich Schultz, acquired it; he sold it to Hugh Reid of Doncaster, a dealer in birds’ eggs; in the late 1830s the Rev. Thomas Gisborne bought it from Mr Reid for the University of Durham. Sometime in the 1860s the skin was ‘re-stuffed’ by the university’s taxidermist W. Proctor.
A sorry job he made of it, too: the photo shows a bird with a lumpy neck and an awkward upright stance. Fortunately the university realised the worth of the sickly looking bird, because in about 1900 it was sent to be ‘re-stuffed’ by Rowland Ward of Piccadilly – a taxidermist especially famous for his work on African big game. The ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos in Baker’s paper show a great improvement, with the bird’s dignity, shine, and proper stance restored. It looks well-muscled and fit.
In 1977, Durham University sold this much-improved specimen at Sotheby’s; a Mr Michael Pilkington bought it, and loaned it a year later to the Glasgow Museums. Finally, after an appeal in 1994 for public funding, the Glasgow Museums bought the great auk for £30,000. Thanks to Rowland Ward, ‘It is reputed to be one of the best mounted specimens of those in existence.’
Now, it sits alone – so very alone – in the Kelvingrove Museum’s ‘Creatures of the Past’ gallery, in a glass case at the corner of the display platform. Its neighbours are the skeleton of the giant Irish deer, and a pair of vast, flat antlers. Nearby is a beaver, a brown bear, a wolf, and (a model of) a very tiny mammoth, just 18 inches high.
But beavers are no longer creatures of the past in Britain, they’ve been reintroduced as ‘eco-engineers’ (and have escaped, or been helped to escape) in many parts of the country. There’s discussion about reintroducing top predators like wolf and lynx to reduce the numbers of wild red deer. Mammoth DNA has been rescued from frozen corpses emerging from the Siberian permafrost, and there’s talk of editing its genes into an elephant embryo to try to recreate the past. The company involved, Colossal, has plans for the Tasmanian tiger (thylacine), and even for the dodo. This has a name: ‘de-extinction’. In 2016, a similar idea was proposed for the great auk, after it was shown to be genetically closely related to the razorbill. Its genes could be edited into the razorbill’s embryo, and the modified embryo transplanted into the egg of a large bird like a goose. The Farne Islands off the English north-east coast might then provide a suitable home for the new great auks [6].
Yet even if the intellectual energy, practical effort and money were spent on this project, what would the great auk chicks find? A very different place from what their ancestors knew: a warming sea, changes in the fish population; and no elders to teach them how to behave. The great auks’ homes and support networks have gone. It’s true that some behaviours are inherent (my rescue hens, who had never known anything but a battery cage, soon started to explore the outdoors and take dust-baths), but so much of the behaviour needed for survival must be learnt.
We have killed the great auks. The mammoths, the dodos, the thylacines have gone. Stephen Maturin, with his limitless curiosity about the natural world, would be so very disappointed. The great non-volant, fish-eating auks, have gone.
Yet we are starting to remember and to grieve; we celebrate the lost birds in art and words, to remind us what we have done. On the south-western cliffs of Iceland, a bronze great auk stares out towards the blocky profile of Eldey Island [7]. At Papa Westray, Shetland, another lonely bird looks out to sea. Scanned and cast in bronze, it is an exact replica of the fragile specimen in the Natural History Museum, which was half of Papay’s last breeding pair, killed in 1813.
NOTES
(A version of this article has been published in Dark Mountain volume 29, 2026, A Bestiary )
[3] The Great Auk skeleton at the Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum; see here and here. [4] My sincere thanks to Julie Staithes and James McFaul for their correspondence and stories about the Great Auks on Rathlin Island.
[4] Wing Musculature Reconstruction in Extinct Flightless Auks (Pinguinus and Mancalla). Open Access. Junya Watanabe, Daniel J. Field, Hiroshige Matsuoka Integrative Organismal Biology, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021, here.
[5] I am very grateful to Robyn Haggard, Curator (Zoology), Glasgow Life Museums, for providing me with background information about the Kelvingrove’s specimen, and for the copy of Going, going, gone: the Durham Great Auk. R.A. Baker 1999. More here.
[6] The Great Auk: from extinct to extant? More here.
[7] Aerial video, Iceland here.