BIRDWATCHING
THE LAST OF ITS KIND The search for the great auk and the discovery of extinction
GÍSLI PÁLSSON Translated by Anna Yates 328pp. Princeton University Press. £22 (US $27.95).
In 1858 the naturalists John Wolley and Alfred New ton departed Britain for Iceland to observe the great auk, a flightless sea bird, in the wild. They failed to find so much as an egg. In The Last of Its Kind the Icelandic anthropologist Gísli Pálsson tracks their realization that human action had brought the species to its end. Pálsson’s book was originally published in 2020 – it now appears in an expanded, revised and updated version, lyrically translated by Anna Yates.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the prevailing scientific opinion on extinction was that species populations were either permanent and unchanging, or else declining in a slow, natural and unavoidable way. The Iceland trip suggested to Newton a novel theory: human action could cause extinction and, for the great auk, it had happened quickly.
The beginning of the end was collecting. Since the middle of the eighteenth century naturalists had been taking both birds and eggs – once merely occasional foodstuffs – on a large scale. On Christmas Day in 1861 Newton found ten great auk eggs languishing, uncatalogued, in a Cambridge collection; his own collection included seven. Pálsson pulls no punches: “the last great auks were killed for ‘science’”.
The author braids field trips with excerpts from archival texts, notably Wolley and Newton’s Gare-Fowl Books, expedition notes now housed in the Cambridge University Library. These provide an almost real-time extinction narrative. As the pair waited to sail to Eldey, the sheer rock that comprised the birds’ final breeding grounds, they interviewed hunters (including members of “the last” successful expedition), oarsmen, taxidermists and collectors. Pivoting from ornithology to anthropology, they learnt that the bird was good eating, but that skins were worth far more. Interlocutors mimed its movements and their techniques for killing it. One used a dead specimen of a related species “like a puppet to demonstrate”; another, “a live razorbill”. Great auk remnants were everywhere. Bones protruded from the turf mix used in a churchyard wall. Further afield, an Irish auk was kept alive for months on milk and potatoes before suffering, of all things, a choking death by potato. The Last of its Kind is a slow-moving thriller, a murder-mystery where we know from the outset who did it.
Wolley died the year after the expedition, but Newton became a vocal conservationist, recommending the prohibition of bird-hunting during breeding season. His changing sensibilities when faced with the environmental consequences of human actions offer a parable for today.
EXORCISMS
LEARNING TO THINK TRACY KING 336pp. Doubleday. £16
