![]() Kilda, all of which provided rocky terrain and sloping shorelines with access to the seashore. They showed a preference for Funk Island, off the coast of Newfoundland, and Geirfuglasker and Eldey islands, off the coast of Iceland, and St. The auks required very specific nesting conditions that restricted them to a small number of islands. “Living in the north Atlantic where there were plenty of sailors and fishermen at sea over the centuries, and having the habit of breeding colonially on only a small number of islands, was a lethal combination of traits for the Great Auk.” “Overharvesting by people doomed the species to extinction,” says Helen James, curator of the exhibition and a research zoologist at the Natural History Museum. It was not until the mid-16th century when European sailors began to explore the seas, harvesting the eggs of nesting adults that the Great Auk faced imminent danger. She died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens and was packed in ice and shipped to the Smithsonian. Martha, the Passenger Pigeon, was the last of its kind. The Little Ice Age of the 16th to the 19th centuries slightly reduced their numbers and territory when their breeding islands became accessible to polar bears, but even with their natural predators encroaching upon their territory, they were a robust species. Prior to the 16th century, the species was so abundant that colonies consisting of hundreds of thousands packed the shores during the month-long breeding season. Once widely distributed across the north Atlantic seas, Great Auks roosted mostly in the water except during breeding season when the birds inhabited only a select few islands ranging from Newfoundland in the west to Norway in the east. If a stop is not soon put to that practice, the whole breed will be diminished to almost nothing.” “But it has been customary of late years, for several crews of men to live all summer on that island, for the sole purpose of killing birds for the sake of their feathers, the destruction which they have made is incredible. “A boat came in from Funk Island laden with birds, chiefly penguins ,” wrote Cartwright. The Great Auk’s grim fate had been predicted as far back as 1785 by explorer George Cartwright. Now the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History is paying homage to the Great Auk and other extinct birds including the Heath Hen, Carolina Parakeet, and Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon, in a new exhibition from the Smithsonian Libraries called “ Once There Were Billions: Vanished Birds of North America.” Featuring the Great Auk as a cautionary tale, the show-which includes taxidermy specimens from the collections and several antiquarian books like John James Audubon's The Birds of America-paints a striking picture of the detrimental effects humans can have on their environment. The female had been incubating an egg, but in the race to catch the adults, one of the fishermen crushed it with his boot, stamping out the species for good. ![]() The men spotted the mates in the distance and attacked, catching and killing the birds as they fled for safety. Four years later, the Great Auk vanished from the world entirely when fishermen hunted down the last pair on the shores of Eldey Island, off the coast of Iceland. It was the last of its kind to ever be seen on the British Isles. Condemning it as “a maelstrom-conjuring witch,” they stoned it to death. For three days, the sailors kept the Great Auk alive, but on the fourth, during a terrible storm, the sailors grew fearful and superstitious. In any case, they abducted the bird, tying its legs together and taking it back to their ship. Perhaps the men enjoyed the thrill of the hunt, or perhaps they realized its meat and feathers were incredibly valuable. Agile in the water, the unusual creature was defenseless against humans on land, and its ineptitude made it an easy target “Prophet-like that lone one stood,” one of the men later said of the encounter. ![]() The sailors watched as the bird, a Great Auk, waddled clumsily along. Its black and white plumage had earned it the title the “original penguin,” but it looked more like a Dr. The scruffy animal’s proportions were bizarre-just under three feet tall with awkward and small wings that rendered it flightless, and a hooked beak that was almost as large as its head. As they climbed up the rock, they spotted a peculiar bird that stood head and shoulders above the puffins and gulls and other seabirds. Kilda landed on the craggy ledges of a nearby seastack, known as Stac-an-Armin. In June of 1840, three sailors hailing from the Scottish island of St.
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