The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction

"This book is about the great auk, a large, flightless bird that went extinct in recorded history. The great auk was a close relative of living auklets and also puffins. This is a very scholarly work where the author has gone through historical records, some of which were hidden away in difficult-to-access archives, and reconstructed what happened. Two British people went to Iceland to find the last of the auks in the 1840s, which were reportedly on an outlying island. Extinction was a known phenomenon, but was thought to be something that happened to inferior species—they were kind of doomed to go extinct anyway, and not by human causes. In this case, through their very careful investigations and oral histories—interviewing people around Iceland who had seen auks or heard about them— as well as looking at the physical evidence, they discovered the great auk had gone extinct. It took quite a while for this to dawn on them, because it was a new idea: not only that they went extinct, but specifically that they went extinct because of people hunting them for food and for feathers for women’s hats. This was a shock to Victorian naturalists—the idea we could drive a species to extinction. One of the investigators died shortly thereafter and wasn’t able to take this work further, but the other became a passionate conservationist and helped form a lot of important aspects of UK law, which still exists today, regarding the protection of wild birds. It’s a powerful story of how people who love birds discovered a world-changing perspective on what we can do to the environment—that we, our greed, can destroy a species. That’s a pretty humbling revelation. Amazing! I need to visit that place. The great auk iconic for extinction, almost like the dodo. But the details of the dodo’s disappearance in the mid-1600s is more mysterious, much less documented. Whereas the great auk’s extinction only happened in the mid-1800s. That’s pretty recent."