The Tragic Tale of the Great Auk (review)

The short of it is that the great auk, a flightless seabird, is extinct. The long of it, however, is that the story of this extinction is one of considerable complexity, with plot threads involving evolution, geology, human history, and several strokes of plain bad luck. Thornbill’s approach to this historical event is so advanced it’s simple: she tells the tale. No chapter headings, no sidebars, no highlighted vocabulary, no literary gimmicks. She just tells the tale.

And what a tale it is. Evolution favored the great auk with a body wonderfully adapted to hunting fish in the cold, open sea. With short wings, and legs set unusually far back, it was a speedy, agile swimmer. The trade-off, though, was the inability to fly, and since birds cannot lay eggs in mid ocean, auks were forced ashore to mate, lay their eggs, and rear their fledglings in an environment in which their only mobility was an awkward waddle. Fortunately the great auk always managed to find nesting grounds on storm-wracked North Atlantic coasts, on uninhabitable islands, or in any number of craggy, cliff-protected spots that foiled predators or at least limited the predators’ threat to their overall numbers. Even early humans, who are known to have developed a taste for great auk, couldn’t make a dent in their thriving populations. Once human hunters took to the sea in ever more efficient boats, though, auk colonies began to diminish and even disappear, losing the race to find protected nesting grounds. Was this the beginning of the tragic end? Or was it when the last excellent rocky island refuge sank in a volcanic eruption? Or when legal efforts to protect the endangered birds against hunters proved too little, too late? Or when the great auk’s rarity made it a target for collectors, who hustled the very last survivors to their demise in the nineteenth century ?

Thornhill engages readers with well-placed questions that anticipate their curiosity. “So why didn’t The Wobble [an New England nickname for the Great Auk] avoid land entirely?” “How, then, did it successfully raise its young for millennia?” “So is that all that’s left of the Great Auk? A few sad taxidermy displays and blown eggs?” She also exploits the natural momentum of the auks’ history: as the tale shifts chronological scale from evolutionary time to the historical time, the pacing accelerates and the details become more plentiful and sharply focused. Humans appear on the scene, and we learn about the tempting richness of auk egg omelettes and pancakes; the usefulness of a fatty auk carcass as a substitute for firewood; the execution of the last known auk in the British Isles for witchcraft; the skyrocketing value of rare auk eggs that drove a collector to crush one specimen in order to raise the value of another; Iceland’s 1971 purchase of a stuffed auk and its celebratory arrival: “A bird that never flew in life flew into Iceland strapped into its very own seat on an airplane.”

Digital artwork, which makes clever use of fine white lines detailing foamy ocean and ghostly images of the decimated species, could easily pass for mixed-media compositions. In keeping with the great auk’s very long backstory and relatively short but deadly connection with mankind, most spreads feature auks in the wild rather than alongside their human predators. A notable trio, though, delivers serious chills: a museum gallery featuring a pair of taxidermied auks; the stuffed auk on its way to Iceland, seen through an airplane window; and a view of the booted legs of the men who strangled the last remaining auks, which now dangle at the hunters’ sides. Yes, Nature dealt the great auks some weak hands, but they beat the odds for countless millennia, until humans finally drove them from the table.

Lists of resources, references, extinct species, and great auk names in thirteen...