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THE SENSE OF AN ENDLING  
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Tim Flannery
November 13, 2024
The New York Review
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_ In the early nineteenth century, the idea of species extinction was
an alien concept. That changed after an expedition to Iceland in
search of the last of the great auks. _

Great auk with juvenile; circa 1900, illustration by John Gerrard
Keulemans

 

Reviewed:
The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery
of Extinction
by Gísli Pálsson
Princeton University Press, 291 pp., $27.95

The concept of species extinction is now so quotidian that it requires
no explanation, but just two hundred years ago, at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, it was an entirely alien concept. Back then,
the word “extinction” was used almost exclusively in relation to
Britain’s landed gentry—a lineage described as having become
“extinct” when the family name died out and its associated
properties passed into other hands. Some fairly clear-cut instances of
species extinction were known by the middle of the nineteenth century
(the dodo, for example), but habits of thought rooted in religion,
along with a far more limited knowledge of the world than we have
today, shielded people’s minds from the reality that species might
vanish forever.

Perhaps the greatest philosophical obstacle to accepting the concept
of species extinction was the biblical idea of the Creation, which
reputedly delivered all of life’s diversity in a single perfect
event: no new species had come into existence since then, and, it was
widely assumed, none could disappear. It was not until the 1880s, a
couple of decades after the publication of Darwin’s _On the Origin
of Species_, that the words “extinction” and “species” became
paired, and that was largely as a result—as the Icelandic
anthropologist Gísli Pálsson argues in his splendid new book, _The
Last of Its Kind_—of a Cambridge University academic’s passion for
the preservation of birds. In 1858 Alfred Newton had traveled to
Iceland in search of the great auk. He subsequently realized that
humans had played a large part in the species’ extinction. Deeply
troubled by the devastation of bird populations for plumes and meat,
he devoted the rest of his life to ensuring that other bird species
did not follow the great auk into oblivion.

Standing around sixty centimeters (or two feet) tall and weighing
around five kilograms, the great auk was a large and stately bird,
often described by those who encountered it alive as a “proud”
animal. It was flightless, the North Atlantic’s ecological
equivalent of the penguins of the southern hemisphere. Distributed
from the Atlantic coast of North America to Europe, its past abundance
is testified to by many early voyagers. One striking example comes
from the narrative of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 expedition to
Newfoundland:

We had sight of an island named _Penguin_, of a fowl there breeding
in abundance almost incredible, which cannot fly, their wings not able
to carry their body, being very large (not much less than a goose) and
exceeding fat.

This doubtless refers to Funk Island, Newfoundland, which was the main
nesting site of the great auk in the Americas.

In prehistory the great auk was even more widespread and common: cave
art in France and Italy seems to depict it, and in Newfoundland a
human burial site was found containing two hundred great auk beaks,
covering what may have been a cloak. Studies of the DNA of great
auks preserved in the nineteenth century reveal considerable genetic
diversity, suggesting that a healthy population existed until close to
the time of the species’ extinction. When it came, however, the
decline of the great auk was swift and relentless.

A skillful and fast swimmer, the great auk was difficult to hunt at
sea, but when it came ashore to breed it was exquisitely vulnerable.
The adults chose remote islands on which to lay their single, large
eggs, but even so their fledglings were exposed to predators such as
polar bears and humans. To limit this period of vulnerability great
auks developed quickly, leaving the nest just three weeks after
hatching. The parents had the endearing habit of carrying their fluffy
young on their backs while at sea.

Great auks were not difficult to tame. In the seventeenth century the
Danish savant Ole Worm kept one as a pet, which he led about on a
leash. Another was kept at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles.
Several highly endangered species have avoided extinction because
herds were established in captivity, including the European wisent,
Przewalski’s horse, and Père David’s deer. If great auks could
survive in the challenging environments of Danish homes and royal
palaces, it is not inconceivable that a captive population might have
survived the persecution of the wild birds.

Anumber of books have been written about the great auk (not the least
of which is Errol Fuller’s 1999 classic, _The Great Auk_), but what
makes _The Last of Its Kind_ special is that it was written by an
Icelander, and Icelanders were the last people to live with, and hunt,
great auks. Pálsson’s deep knowledge of the Icelandic language and
culture allows us to see afresh the last eyewitness accounts of this
extinct bird, as well as the consequences of its extinction. Almost
all we know about the last days of the great auk is recorded in a
series of notebooks known as the _Gare-Fowl Books_. Today they are
kept at Cambridge University Library, where they are, according to
Pálsson, extremely closely guarded and cannot be copied, making the
study of them unnecessarily tedious.

The notebooks were written in 1858 during an expedition to Iceland
undertaken by Newton and John Wolley, both Cambridge graduates.
William Proctor, keeper of the bird collection at Durham University,
had told Wolley that when he traveled to Iceland in 1833 and 1837,
sightings of the great auk had become rare. Wolley’s fellow student
William Milner had been in Iceland some years later, and was informed
that none at all had been seen recently. Investigating whether the
great auk lived or not was a splendid adventure for a pair of young
zoologists.

Wolley was six years older than Newton and seems to have taken the
lead in the expedition. He had previously completed extensive
fieldwork among the Sami people of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and
Russia, where he spent months collecting birds’ eggs and skins and
observing bird behavior. His collection of bird eggs was one of the
largest in Britain and in later years formed the foundation of the
Cambridge Museum of Zoology’s oological collection.

The pair set sail for Iceland on April 21, 1858. As they neared
Reykjavík they passed the rock formation known as Eldey, the last
known breeding site of the great auk. It is in a dangerous stretch of
ocean known as the Reykjanes Race, whose turbulence is caused by the
meeting of powerful currents. Many Icelandic fishing crews have been
lost to it, and the Race added significantly to the danger of
expeditions in search of great auks.

In Reykjavík the pair met Vilhjálmur Hákonarson, an experienced
fisherman who had caught great auks himself and who offered to take
them out to Eldey. Unfortunately, the weather remained unsettled
during the entire period of their visit, and the journey to Eldey
could not be made. This forced the researchers to pivot, and they
instead began collecting testimony from Icelanders who had known the
great auk. The data that they collected has proved invaluable in
understanding the last days of the species, and Pálsson’s fluency
in Icelandic has brought new understanding, as well as new questions,
to this unique trove.

Within Icelanders’ living memory great auks nested on two skerries
off the Reykjanes Peninsula: Eldey and the nearby Geirfuglasker,
otherwise known as the Great Auk Skerry. The Geirfuglasker offered
extensive nesting grounds, but in 1830 volcanic activity resulted in
the island disappearing under the sea. (The rock formation that stands
in its place today emerged from the waves in more recent times.) The
only suitable nesting site on Eldey is a small shelf of rock jutting
from the otherwise vertical rock face, a pitiful remnant upon which to
pin hopes for the species’ survival.

There is a puzzle as to why the Geirfuglasker remained a secure
nesting ground for so long after every other island the species nested
on had been pillaged by humans, and Pálsson offers a perceptive and
convincing explanation: the island was believed to be haunted by
elves. The story goes that

one summer in the fifteenth century, the son of a farmer at Sandgerði
had been left behind on Great Auk Skerry. When men rowed out to the
skerry the following summer, he was found there alive, though barely
surviving.

His preservation was ascribed to the help of an elf-woman, who
“extracted a horrible payment when he later repudiated her.”
Although the Icelanders had been Christians for the better part of a
thousand years by 1858, reports of elves on the Geirfuglasker were
still taken very seriously indeed. One old man swore to Wolley that it
had “never, never, never” crossed his mind to row out there.

Pálsson wonders whether stories of elves residing on the
Geirfuglasker gave the great auks nesting there some sort of
protection. I think that this is highly likely, as elsewhere taboos
and beliefs about the presence of supernatural beings offer strong
protection to species that are otherwise vulnerable to overhunting.
One such species is the Tenkile tree kangaroo of Papua New Guinea,
whose last colony, of around a hundred individuals, survived in a
place called Sweipini, which was reputed to be the haunt of evil
spirits. The village priest exorcised the demons, and within a year
the tree kangaroos were almost entirely killed off.

Before the volcanic eruption that destroyed the Geirfuglasker,
Icelanders never rowed to Eldey because it was considered impossible
to land a boat there. But the following spring, a bird hunter and his
crew found dozens of breeding pairs of great auks nesting on Eldey’s
rock shelf. Two years later they made two expeditions to the skerry,
and took eight birds on each occasion. The year after that, in 1833,
they went out again and took twenty-four.

Pálsson points out that all of the testimonies about great auk
encounters were given by Icelanders in the present tense: “it runs
away from one to the left, like auks do,” for example. As he
comments, “There is no past tense here; no sadness, no nostalgia.”
For people who do not travel far, this is understandable. In my
experience dealing with endangered species in Australasia, indigenous
peoples invariably assume that the species in question has just moved
away, and they often explain that it can be found on the other side of
the farthest hill. The trouble is that, having been there, I know that
the people living over the hill say exactly the same thing.

Back at the beginning of their expedition, Wolley and Newton knew none
of this. They realized, however, that they could not cover all
possible nesting sites themselves, so they contracted an Icelander
named Eiríkur Magnússon to travel to the Great Auk Skerry off
Iceland’s southeastern coast (a different island from the
Geirfuglasker off Reykjanes Peninsula). Pálsson quotes at length the
contract that Magnússon worked under, “if only one bird is
found,” to collect it and preserve it whole. If a second was found
it was to be skinned, as was each successive even-numbered bird, while
each odd-numbered one was to be preserved whole, for up to eight
birds. No more than half of all the birds encountered, however, should
be taken. Pálsson makes much of this contract—possibly too
much—as balancing the wish to collect specimens with the desire to
protect the last great auks. But at the time the contract was written,
all that Newton and Wolley knew was that the birds had become
increasingly scarce.

There is also a broader moral dilemma here. Imagine being a biological
collector who encounters what you definitively know to be an
endling—the last individual of a species. You have a gun in your
hand, and you line the animal up in your sights. Should you pull the
trigger? The sheer horror of such an act obscures logic. As the last
of its kind, an endling cannot breed. If you decide not to kill and
sample the animal, it, and all knowledge derived from it, will be lost
forever. If you do collect it, there will at least be a record of its
existence and the possibility that DNA preserved in the sample might
in future assist in the species’ de-extinction. Such are the
dilemmas faced by museum curators and other collectors—and so
contentious are they that they fuel discussion among those in the
profession to this day.

After exhaustive questioning, Wolley and Newton established that the
most recent record of the great auk dated to 1844. This “latest
successful trip” was headed by none other than Vilhjálmur
Hákonarson, their guide. In all, fourteen men had been on his boat on
that trip, and Wolley and Newton interviewed as many as they could.
The trip had been made on the initiative of a merchant who was keen to
obtain skins of great auks.

The boat left around six o’clock in the evening, sometime between
May 30 and June 5, 1844. The crew expected to row for twelve hours and
to arrive at Eldey early the following morning. It was a fearful
voyage. Howling supernatural beings had been heard not far
away—“an uncanny thunderous roar,” so terrible that it made the
men who heard it feel that “bones were scraping at their skin.”
When the nervous men reached Eldey, Hákonarson saw two great auks on
the rock ledge; a rower commented to Wolley and Newton that “their
white breasts were turned out toward the ocean.” As they approached
the cliffs, “the sea boiled at their foot, as if a volcanic eruption
were in progress beneath the rock.”

Hákonarson asked four men to go ashore, but only three, Jón
Brandsson, Ketill Ketilsson, and Sigurður Ísleifsson, dared make the
leap onto the rocks. Ketilsson and Ísleifsson ran up the ledge after
the birds. When they came to a cliff, Ketilsson’s “head failed
him.” The auk “must have run faster than a man—it ran…upright,
with its wings by its sides, and gave no sound or cry,” he later
said.

Brandsson and Ísleifsson caught the two adult birds—a breeding
pair. Ketilsson, after giving up the chase, went to the nest site,
where he found a single egg. It had cracked on the underside, perhaps
damaged when the brooding bird arose in haste. Inexplicably (as great
auk eggs were worth a good deal of money), Ketilsson laid the egg down
again where he found it. And that was the last time anyone ever
touched a living great auk.

Wolley and Newton recorded a great deal of information about the great
auk. But equally interesting are the perspectives on Icelandic life
that Pálsson wrings from their accounts. He notes, for example, that
there was no hint of secrecy around great auk hunts, nor a sense of
shame. Icelanders relied on seabirds for food, and the only difference
with the great auk was that outsiders were willing to pay considerable
sums for their skins and eggshells. Another fascinating dimension
concerns the Icelanders’ sense of time. Some did not know how old
they were, nor in which year any given event occurred, forcing Wolley
and Newton to cross-reference events with remembered dates, such as a
visit by the crown prince of Denmark and Iceland in 1834.

There is a strange codicil to the story of Ketill Ketilsson, the last
man to touch a living great auk. In 1929 Mads Nielsen, a naturalist
living on Iceland’s south coast, published a story in a local
newspaper about the man who killed the last great auk. Although he did
not identify him by name, a couple of months later Ólafur Ketilsson,
the son of Ketill Ketilsson, responded that the article expressed
“bitter resentment and accusation,” which he assumed was aimed
toward his father.

Indeed, Ketilsson had been accused of many things over the years: of
dropping the egg or of smashing it with his boot. But all of that was
pure speculation and contrary to the man’s own recollections and
what was observed by others on that fateful day. Pálsson thinks that
Ketilsson, who was only twenty-one at the time, may have been
traumatized by the events on Eldey. Later he became a successful
farmer and “had the ways of a great man.” Yet his name came to be
associated, falsely, with the killing of the last great auks. I’m
intrigued by the halt in his hunt, when his “head failed him.” Did
he sense something that stayed his hand?

It’s likely that some great auks survived beyond 1844, for seemingly
reliable sightings continued to be reported from Icelandic skerries,
Greenland, Newfoundland, and Norway. Pálsson informs us that the
current consensus among ornithologists is that the last living great
auk was seen off Newfoundland in 1852. As Newton wrote in 1861 in his
summary of the expedition:

Whether the Gare-fowl be already extirpated or still existing in some
unknown spot, it is clear that its extinction, if not already
accomplished, must speedily follow on its rediscovery.

The fates of Wolley and Newton were very different. Wolley was the
more brilliant of the two, in his short life collecting over 10,000
birds’ eggs and leaving behind his invaluable field diaries
(the _Gare-Fowl Books_, most of which he wrote). He died just
eighteen months after returning from Iceland, aged thirty-six and
engaged to be married. His mind had begun to break down—his writing
deteriorating, his memory and concentration failing evermore until he
passed away in November 1859.

Newton spent the rest of his life in Magdalene College, Cambridge,
documenting Wolley’s egg collection. His _Ootheca Wolleyana_, an
illustrated catalog of the collection, was published in parts between
1864 and 1907. Strangely, Newton never published the_ Gare-Fowl
Books_. He did, however, devote much time to bird conservation,
promoting the idea of bird surveys in Britain and disseminating the
thought that species could be driven into extinction by human actions.

Importantly, Newton saw the extinction of birds as a process, a
critical part of which was “making them grow rare.” His hope for
bird conservation lay in his belief that “if we go to work in the
right way there is yet time to save many otherwise expiring
species.” He helped draft legislation on bird protection, founded a
society for the protection of birds, and wrote and lectured on the
subject. Pálsson sees Newton’s contributions to the study of
extinction by humans as so profound that he names it “Newtonian
extinction.”

A section of the final chapter of _The Last of Its Kind_ deals with
the issue of de-extinction. Following the detailed and revelatory
chapters on the _Gare-Fowl Books_ and the broader history of great
auks in Iceland, it feels like a letdown. Just three pages long, it is
almost perfunctory and seems uninformed on important matters. The book
would have been far stronger without it. Overall, however, Pálsson
has crafted a fascinating work that will rewrite our understanding of
the last days of the great auk. And in the age of the Sixth
Extinction, that is an important contribution indeed.

_TIM FLANNERY’s books include Among the Islands: Adventures in the
Pacific, Europe: A Natural History, and, with Emma Flannery, Big
Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator That Ever
Lived, which was published this year. (December 2024)_

_THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS has established itself, in Esquire’s
words, as “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English
language.” The New York Review began during the New York
publishing strike of 1963, when its founding editors, Robert Silvers
and Barbara Epstein, and their friends, decided to create a new kind
of magazine—one in which the most interesting and qualified minds of
our time would discuss current books and issues in depth. Just as
importantly, it was determined that the Review should be an
independent publication; it began life as an independent editorial
voice and it remains independent today. _

_Subscribe to New York Review of Books.
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