How documenting the disappearance of the great auk led to the discovery of extinction

When species cease to exist, we often say they went “the way of the dodo.” But it might be more fitting to say they went “the way of the great auk” because it was the Icelandic bird’s disappearance that led to the discovery that humans activities could make a species go extinct.

In his book The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction, Gísli Pálsson retraces a 1858 trip two English scientists took to Iceland to track down the rare great auk, a penguin-like flightless bird that was once abundant on the rocky shores around the Atlantic, including in Newfoundland.

Pálsson, a professor emeritus in anthropology at the University of Iceland, spoke with Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald about the disappearance of these flightless birds and how what happened to them helped to usher in our modern understanding of human-caused extinction.

First of all, tell me about the great auk. What was so great about it?

It was big. I mean, it was in the family with puffins and others, and it was the biggest in the family — 80 centimetres big — and the heaviest, lots of meat, and it couldn’t fly. That was an exception to that family of birds.

There were expeditions to Newfoundland, notably, and Iceland, Norway, the Scottish Isles, and the Mediterranean. In all places, the great auk would nest on skerries, typically, because they were safe from predatory humans or other animals.

The biggest colony was in Newfoundland and probably the second [biggest] in Iceland. So this is where the hunting took the greatest toll and eventually with the disappearance of the species.

The majority spent most of the year in in the North Atlantic Ocean, but at the end of May, early June, they would visit their skerries and lay one egg, and then return once the chick was OK in the water.

Who were the two scientists who wanted to go and search for these birds in Iceland?

One of them was John Woolley. He was trained in medicine in Cambridge and Edinburgh and but he was too much of a naturalist and decided to climb mountains and visit bird colonies in Scandinavia and Iceland, et cetera. Unfortunately, he died a year after the Icelandic expedition from a brain tumour, apparently.

Although the two months they jointly had in Iceland was a collaborative affair, Woolley wrote the manuscripts they left behind, or most of it. It was Newton who carried the message forward and maintained the manuscripts and added some notes and cross references. And so it’s Newton that has the honour of being kind of the discoverer of extinction, in my view.

Alfred Newton was trained in biology and somehow [Woolley and Newton] became friends and decided to go to Iceland to look for great auks. And they had heard rumours that the species was in serious decline and they were passionate collectors of stuffed birds and eggs. And so they decided to give it a try and and headed off to Iceland.

What were they hoping to learn about the great auk on this trip back in 1858?

There wasn’t much known about the great auk. That’s the thing. They had several images, a few drawings, but most people who painted the bird or drew sketches hadn’t seen them alive, so it was still a mystery how the bird would behave, especially in their colonies, where they nested and how they looked and their manners and how they responded to humans and whether or not where they were in colonies with all the birds, etcetera. 

And also the physiological makeup of the birds was relatively poorly known, so they hope to answer all of these questions and to document also details of the history of exploitation of great auk in Iceland.

So how did their search for the great auk go when Woolley and Newton finally got to Iceland?

It didn’t go well. They met some intellectuals in Reykjavik who gave them advice and they travelled to the southern western peninsula, close to where the international airport is now. And there was a renowned foreman or skippers, as we would say today, who had been to Eldey [a small, uninhabited island in Iceland], one of the surviving hunting sites, and they negotiated with him to take them there on two boats.

The foreman was a clever guy. He was skilful in reading the science of weather and waves and the ocean. And he repeatedly called the trip off because he wouldn’t risk his men. These were open small rowing boats and the ocean currents can be really scary close to the island of Eldey.

So they were unable to go there, but they would gaze in the direction of the island from the coast, and eventually admitted in their diaries that they were unable to go. But instead of just giving up, they started to work as kind of anthropologists. They would sit down with the members of the last crew [to see the great auks alive], which had been out to the island in 1844. 

They pushed them on a number of questions and asked them to describe the bird and the results of hunting expeditions to track the visits to Eldey and other islands back to the earlier century.

These documents of the interviews, they are 900 pages kept in Cambridge University Library and it’s a unique source. No other species has such a documentation of its ending. That’s why I found them fascinating.

What did they discover had happened to the last remaining great auks in Iceland?

They got descriptions of the last trip in 1844 and there were three men who went on shore on Eldey. The others in the crew, 11, I think, they stayed in the boat. And they got the two birds, famously the last ones, as the saying goes.

How did the discovery that over-hunting led to the extinction of the great auks fit [into] prevailing notions at the time of how species could come and go?

Darwin and [Carl] Linnaeus, the famous taxonomist in Sweden, they assumed that extinction was either impossible or something taking place over millennia. Fossils were known and recorded.

So [Georges] Cuvier [French naturalist and zoologist] and many other scholars were recognizing that there had existed species which humans had never seen. But still, Darwin wasn’t interested in the possibility of extinction taking place in his time. It was Newton who insisted that extinction was occurring here and now, and that it was partly the result of human activities.

Some of the Newton’s opponents said that the disappearance of the great auk was primarily a matter of natural events, but Newton tried to set the record straight. He insisted that the decline in the greater auk population in his time was clearly the result of over-hunting.

Slowly this has sort of filtered into the literature and environmental policy, although people kind of didn’t recognise it at the time. So I think that Newton deserves space in the literature as someone who played at least a major role in the discovery of extinction.

It’s a bit ironic that Darwin was the master of biology, possibly the inventor of biology in his time, and he failed to see the point.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.