The Great Auk: Its Extraordinary Life, Hideous Death and Mysterious Afterlife

The life, death and afterlife of one of the true icons of extinction, the Great Auk

The great auk was a flightless, goose-sized bird superbly adapted for life at sea. This 'penguin of the north' once ranged across the North Atlantic, diving deep to exploit vast shoals of herring and mackerel. The summer months saw great auks massing together in large, bustling breeding colonies. Their lives were idyllic: a few months ashore to breed, the rest of the time riding the ocean waves.

Fat, fleshy, flush with feathers and easy to capture at the nest, great auks were desirable commodities for mariners from antiquity. The rate of destruction increased from the sixteenth century, when European sailors began to visit the auks' once-remote New World breeding colonies. Places like Funk Island, off north-east Newfoundland, would soon become scenes of almost unimaginable slaughter. Men would haul up their boats onto the shallow shore before killing the birds in their millions. The auks would be pushed alive into vats to burn them down for their oil to use in lamps; their feathers were collected for bedding, their flesh salted for food at sea. No bird could withstand such sustained ferocity, and by 1800 the auks of Funk Island were gone. In a final act of desecration, the very soil of the island was taken away to be sold as fertiliser in the markets of the eastern seaboard.

A few hundred birds hung on in Iceland. But not for long; a boom in bird studies in the early 1800s led private individuals and museums to desperately seek specimens. No sooner had the Icelandic birds become known than a scramble for their skins and eggs began. It was a ruthless, bloody, unthinking destruction of one of the world's most extraordinary birds. The last pair of great auks was killed in June 1844, with their single egg smashed in the process.

But this wasn't the end of the great auk story, as the bird went on to have a most extraordinary afterlife. Scarcity breeds obsession, and great auk skins, eggs and skeletons became the focus for dozens of collectors. This became a story of pathological craving and unscrupulous dealings involving vast sums of money that goes on to this day, almost two hundred years after the bird became extinct.

This book is the story of the great auk's life before humanity, its death on the killing shores of Funk and later in Iceland, and the unrelenting subsequent quest for its remains. The author, Tim Birkhead, has studied guillemots and razorbills, the great auk's closest living relatives, for more than fifty years. His research on the great auk itself has revealed previously unimagined aspects of its life and also, unexpectedly, its afterlife; in a curious twist of fate, Birkhead found himself the recipient of the archive of man who accumulated more great auk skins and eggs than anyone else.

Rich with insight and packed with tales of birds and of people, this astonishing book reveals the great auk's life, its death at humanity's cruel hand, and the unrelenting subsequent quest for its remains - the first seabird ruthlessly destroyed by our actions, and an all-powerful symbol both of human folly and of the necessity of conservation.

Author: Tim Birkhead
Publisher: Bloomsbury SIGMA
Published: 06/10/2025
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.02w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781399415743

About the Author

Tim Birkhead FRS is an author and biologist. Emeritus Professor of Behaviour and Evolution at the University of Sheffield, he is one of the world's foremost ornithologists, and a leading light in popular science communication. Tim's professional interests span ornithology, evolution and reproductive biology, as well as the history of science. He is known for his work on both the mating systems of birds, on sperm competition, and the history of ornithology. Tim has also led one of the world's best-known long-term research projects, studying the biology and population dynamics of Britain's auks and other seabirds.

Elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004, Tim's awards include the Elliot Coues Medal for outstanding contributions to ornithological research, the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour medal, the BOU's Godman-Salvin Medal, for distinguished ornithological work, the Zoological Society of London's Silver Medal, and the Stephen Jay Gould Prize.

Tim's previous books include four popular science titles published by Bloomsbury - The Wisdom of Birds (2008), Bird Sense (2012), The Most Perfect Thing (2017) and The Wonderful Mr Willughby (Bloomsbury 2018).