The last Great Auks

The last Great Auks, the Dodos of the North Atlantic, were probably caught and killed in 1844 on a rock called Eldey off the south-west coast of Iceland, by Icelanders who rowed out in 2 open boats, each with ten oarsmen rowing and four resting at any one time, a journey of about 12 hours each way through a notoriously dangerous tide race. For many cultures on the North Atlantic seaboard, fowling on cliffs and skerries was an important source of food and of cash crops such as feathers, and the work was of course always dangerous. Fowlers from Ness on the Isle of Lewis were sometimes marooned for days by storms when collecting young gannets (Gugachan) on Sula Sgeir, and falling from cliffs on St Kilda or the Aran islands was not unknown. But the journey to Eldey was particularly dangerous. One year of four boats that set off on a fowling expedition, two were lost with all hands, a total of about thirty men. But these men were not looking for food; they were paid to exterminate the last Great Auks, by rich men who wanted the skins and eggs of rare birds for their collections.

Great Auks, which like the Dodo were unable to fly, were somewhat like a guillemot but the size of a big goose. They originally bred throughout the North Atlantic coastal regions, and even seem to have moved to the Mediterranean during Ice Ages, where early man drew them on the walls of caves. They lived all year on the open North Atlantic except during the breeding season, when they swam to northern islands where they could walk ashore onto flat rocky surfaces to incubate their eggs in large colonies alongside other seabirds. Early reports describe the colonies as so packed with birds with no apparent fear of man that it was hard to walk between them. They were very easy meat, and their feathers were valuable too, and soon the huge colonies on the coasts north of Newfoundland were gone. At one time they seem to have bred on suitable islands along the entire European and North American coastline, including the Baltic and the Mediterranean, but in historic times their range had shrunk and they only bred on islands very remote from mankind.

Oddly, from a modern perspective and considering all the attacks on their breeding sites, the scientists and ornithologists of the time were very puzzled that the Great Auks were no longer using some of their old island breeding colonies. Before the publication of Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ in 1859 it was generally believed by Christians that the creation of life on Earth by God was a one-off event and that the creatures produced were, like God, a permanent fixture. The possibility of one of God’s creation becoming extinct seems to have been literally unthinkable. Extinction was not yet even a concept. So the Great Auk, in spite of having been slaughtered in the hundreds of thousands, was thought to have merely moved somewhere else. One of those places was Eldey, a volcanic island thirty miles off the south west coast of Iceland. The idea that these few birds might have been the last individuals of a species nearing extinction was not taken seriously; the last Great Auks were killed there in 1844, some 15 years before Darwin’s and Wallace’s theories on evolution were made public.

Extinction was integral to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which challenged conventional Christianity; it undermined the biblical Creation story and implied that extinction was essential to evolution; as species evolved to create new species they replaced their predecessors. As may not surprise us, the work of Mary Anning (1779-1847) the working class (and female) fossil hunter, who revealed the existence of ancient and clearly extinct creatures fossilised in the Lias beds around Lyme Regis, was not enough to revolutionise scientific thought; it took a book published by an upper-class man with a big learned-looking beard for the idea of species extinction to be taken seriously. The idea of extinction is integral to the concepts of evolution and of the survival of the fittest and so when Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ was published in 1859 the possibility that species might become extinct started to gain scientific respectability. By that time Great Auks’ skins and their eggs were only to be found in museums and private collections or as bones in middens behind Icelandic farmhouses.

The concept of the Shrinking Baseline has been a useful phrase to describe the way we tend to see the natural world of our youth as a pristine starting point rather than merely another stage in the continual erosion of biodiversity. We need other words for the way that a sought after animal or animal part, such as elvers or Rhino horn, becomes exponentially more valuable as extinction nears and market pressures hasten inevitable extinction as demand causes prices to spiral. Naturalists in the 17^th and 18^th centuries studied birds by shooting them and collecting their eggs. The last female osprey in Scotland (at the time) was shot at her nest by an egg-collector, Charles St John; when her mate, distressed, flew round the nest calling for her, he shot him too. The rarer the Ospreys, the more sought after their skins and eggs became, and the same was true for the Great Auk, which was finally exterminated by a combination of scientists and collectors seeking precious specimens, by certain Reykjavik merchants dealing in them, and by poor farmers and fishermen setting up a cottage industry supplying eggs and stuffed birds to this market. Before the Origin of Species was published, it must have seemed puzzling to ornithologists and collectors that Great Auks were no longer to be found. John Wolley’s and Alfred Newton’s Iceland expedition to look for them in 1858 failed to reassure and as a result of their failure to find Great Auks in their last refuge Newton was possibly the first ornithologist to use words such as ‘extinction‘ and ‘extirpation’.

The belief that each species was an integral and permanent part of God’s creation has arguably now been replaced by the belief that to function correctly an ecosystem needs to be complete. Thus we have another useful phrase, Trophic Cascade, which posits that ecosystems need their apex predators in order to fully function. Implicit in this view is that all the other components of ecosystems – everything that has co-evolved to create a complex ecosystem – need also to be present. Complexity is vital to ecosystem function, and modern systems theory proposes that simplification of complex systems, whether in ecosystems or banking, can lead to sudden collapse.

You might imagine that the nations that had witnessed the first well-documented extinction in human history – unless you include cave paintings of mammoths as documentation – might have changed their behaviour to reduce the risk of extinctions. Whales, for example, were an important resource, and even if whalers lacked any ethical or ecological framework to encourage whale conservation, they surely needed to avoid over- exploitation of whales if their livelihoods were to be sustained. But the nations that had witnessed the extinction of the Great Auk – the USA, the UK, Iceland and Norway – pursued the whales of the North Atlantic to the point of near extinction, particularly in the case of the Northern Right Whale. When it was no longer commercially viable to hunt whales in the North Atlantic, American whalers went around Cape Horn to the Pacific (where the whale ship Essex was sunk by a whale later fictionalised as Moby Dick). The calculations of whaling enterprises were based on profit and loss and return on investment; they appear not to have been concerned with sustainability, even to the point of disregarding the sustainability of their own enterprises, and were prepared to pursue whales until it was no longer profitable even though that was to risk their extinction.

The young Harold Salvesen, for example, from a Norwegian whaling dynasty, had been an economics lecturer at Oxford when he was persuaded to apply his knowledge of economics to the family whaling business, based in Leith in Scotland. They were interested in whaling in the seas around Antarctica since whales were virtually extinct in the Atlantic. Harold became involved in the late 1920s in the development of two floating factory ships and a fleet of 14 whale-catcher boats. In his view the fishing would not last forever, but he believed that ‘even in a poor year it could pay handsomely’. He wrote that ‘The fishery won’t of course last for a long time. The more new factories and especially whale-catchers are sent down the shorter will it last.” His cold-blooded calculations took no account of whales as being worth preserving in their own right or of the risks involved in damage to ecosystems; to him whales were solely a resource which he believed should be exploited as fully and as quickly as possible by an efficient capitalist enterprise in order to earn as much money as possible for the owners of the business – in this case, his family.

Soon 32% of UK margarine was made from whales and the UK government became concerned that the whale fishery needed some regulation. A compromise was arrived at that suited a whaling industry that knew it would soon exhaust the whale stocks in the southern oceans, and that sustainability (as far as the whaling industry was concerned) was quite irrelevant. It was agreed that a tax on whale oil would pay for scientists to work on whaling ships. It was argued (as with the asbestos and tobacco industries) that we needed more knowledge before we could possibly ban whaling (or asbestos or cigarettes). It was undeniably true that we had no idea how many whales there were, how fast they bred, how long they lived, what they fed on and so forth. Rather than arguing that we needed to know more about whales before we could sustainably hunt them, it was held that the scientists needed more whales to be killed so that they could continue to investigate, and it seemed likely that by the time the scientists had concluded that whaling was unsustainable the whaling fleets would have made their money and the investors would have moved on. (The Salvesen family eventually turned to road haulage). The result was that the Blue Whale was reduced to such a low population level that it now appears to be incapable of recovery, though enough occasional individuals succeed in meeting and breeding to keep the population of these long-lived animals from complete extinction. Similarly the 400 or so Right Whales in the North Atlantic seem to be unable to recover their former population many years after they were first protected.

The whaling industry behaved entirely typically of capitalist enterprise. All that mattered to Harold Salvesen was return on investment. It was not, apparently, the business of the capitalist to be concerned about the extermination of individual species, the health of the environment or any kind of morality or ethics. Shareholder value then as now was all that mattered. For the whalers, like the fossil fuel companies today, the future of the planet was not something with which capitalism concerns itself.

Other animals, particularly in the United States, were the victims of deliberate campaigns of extermination rather than of capitalist indifference, although they were conducted in that country that epitomised the settler colonialist attitudes so closely tied to the capitalist project.

Although the fate of the Great Auk should have alerted humanity to the risks of species extinction and the need to take measures to prevent it, extermination seems to have been seen as less of a risk and more of an opportunity in America. There is no doubt whatsoever that the US government encouraged the near-extinction of the buffalo, partly as part of a campaign of genocide against the Native Americans of the Great Plains and partly because the buffalo were not compatible with the inflexible agricultural ideas of European settlers. The buffalo were reduced from possibly 60 million individuals to a few hundred, producing a ‘genetic bottleneck” that came close to causing the extinction of the species. The beaver similarly came within a whisker of extermination, partly because of the value of beaver products but also because the fertile bottomlands created by millennia of beaver dams were coveted by farmers who, as in the UK, were often unwilling to accommodate wildlife. It was also probably farmers who were ultimately behind the extermination of the Passenger Pigeon, though the nationwide hysteria that eradicated what was almost certainly the most numerous bird species on the planet was so extraordinary that it challenges analysis. But there is no doubt that the Passenger Pigeon, a glorious force of nature which roared across America in flocks that could darken the skies for days on end, was a challenge to colonialists who wished to clear the woods where the pigeons fed and nested and replace them, as with the buffalo on the prairies, with agriculture on the European model. Within a few years of frenzied hunting, with trains laid on to take the hunters to wherever the pigeons descended, there were soon only a handful of these pigeons left in zoos, where they were temperamentally unable to breed in isolation and could not be saved.

None of this took place in the UK, apart from the battering to death of one or possibly two of the last Great Auks near St Kilda in around 1840. The English ornithologist Alfred Newton, having failed to find any Great Auks on the Iceland expedition, began to alert the world to the possibility of exterminations caused by man, which in the USA seems to have been embraced on an heroic scale as an economic or political opportunity. Great Britain, of course, had already got rid of all its most inconvenient large wild animals long before the Vermin Acts passed by Queen Elizabeth I initiated a nation-wide campaign to eradicate the lesser category of ‘vermin’. From the 19^th century the gamekeepers of the landed gentry worked towards the local extermination of almost any animal that did not directly benefit mankind or that threatened the game preserves of the gentry. The war on nature in the UK lacked the drama of the eradications of the US, but made up for it by persistent attrition. There were no dramatic, spectacular extinctions, apart maybe from the attempt to use germ-warfare (deliberate infection with myxomatosis) to exterminate rabbits in the 1950s. But meanwhile we in the UK continue with our quiet war on the biosphere everywhere that agriculture is practiced – which, essentially, is everywhere.

This should come as no surprise. Our politics in the UK has been dominated ever since Margaret Thatcher by the ideas of the neoliberal academic Frederick Hayek, who wrote in The Constitution of Liberty in 1960 that “To use up a free gift of nature once and for all is…no more wasteful or reprehensible than a similar exploitation of a stock resource”, a phrase glossed by George Monbiot as “In other words, as long as there is economic gain in converting nature into money, we should do so”. The young Harold Salvesen clearly applied such ideas to the whaling industry.

The men who raided the Great Auk islands for eggs and meat made a practice of deliberately trampling on all the eggs and chicks that they were not able to carry off. If you shudder at such barbarity, have a walk in our lovely English countryside and listen for the calls of the lapwing, the curlew, the cuckoo, or the drumming of the snipe. See if you can find somewhere - anywhere - where the swifts still organise their nightly screaming parties, wires where the swallows twitter, or a quiet common loud with the singing of whitethroats, blackcaps, garden warblers, willow warblers and chiffchaffs. Come and visit my garden, an acre devoted to nature, where there are now no thrushes and no blackbirds singing and the dawn chorus, that once exuberant expression of the life force of dozens of our wild birds -is now only the repetitive cooing of a few pigeons and the cawing of the rooks.

Then try to tell me that our politicians, our farmers and our economists are not the heirs of those who exterminated the Great Auk. You can trample on birds and eggs without getting your boots dirty.

This essay draws on the following books, all heartily recommended:

The Last of its Kind by Gísli Pálsson , The Great Auk by Tim Birkhead, The Gravity of Feathers by Andrew Fleming and The Invisible Doctrine by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson