Animal

Great auk

Pinguinus impennis

Also known as: Pinguinus impennis, Garefowl

A flightless seabird of the North Atlantic — large, black-and-white, superficially resembling a southern-hemisphere penguin but unrelated. The original *penguin*: the name was applied to great auks by European sailors centuries before it was transferred to the southern flightless birds we now use the word for. Bred on rocky islands of the North Atlantic from Newfoundland to Iceland to the British Isles. Hunted to extinction over four centuries for meat, eggs, oil, and feathers — first by Indigenous peoples and Norse settlers in sustainable numbers for millennia, then at industrial scale by European fishermen, sailors, and feather-traders from the 1500s onward. The last known breeding pair was killed on Eldey Island, Iceland, on June 3, 1844, by men hired by a museum collector. The single egg they were brooding was crushed by one hunter's boot. The species was already so rare that this was an extinction event in its own incident.

What was

Great auks stood about 30 inches tall, weighed roughly 11 pounds, and could not fly. Their wings were short and adapted for underwater propulsion — they swam exceptionally well, dove deep, fed on fish. They bred only on a few low-lying rocky islands of the North Atlantic, in dense colonies where they were vulnerable to anything that could reach them.

The original penguin was the great auk. Sailors gave the name to southern-hemisphere flightless seabirds centuries later because they reminded them of the northern bird. The southern penguins kept the name; the great auk did not keep itself.

Indigenous peoples of the North Atlantic — Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, Inuit, others — hunted great auks for thousands of years sustainably. Norse settlers in Iceland and Greenland also took them at non-fatal levels. The species was abundant when European industrial-scale exploitation began.

How it ended

From the 1500s onward, European fishermen on the Grand Banks and elsewhere stopped at great auk colonies for fresh meat. Some islands had populations slaughtered in single seasons. The down trade in the 1700s and early 1800s drove an extraction wave focused on feathers — birds were boiled to loosen the down, the carcasses left in piles. The largest known colony, on Funk Island off Newfoundland, was reduced from millions of birds to zero between roughly 1500 and 1800.

By 1820 the species was reduced to perhaps a few hundred breeding pairs, largely on Geirfuglasker — the great auk skerry — off Iceland. A volcanic eruption in 1830 destroyed that island. The remnants moved to Eldey, a small island nearby. By 1844 only a small handful of birds remained.

A museum collector in Reykjavík commissioned three Icelandic men to obtain specimens. They reached Eldey on June 3, 1844, found a breeding pair brooding a single egg, killed both birds, and crushed the egg in their haste. No verified great auk has been seen since.

What the loss means

The great auk’s extinction is the first documented case where the final extinction event was a deliberate collection for museum specimens. The species was already so rare that this single incident ended it. The museum cabinets across Europe and North America that hold preserved great auks are, in a literal sense, the species’ last members.

The North Atlantic still has its rocky breeding islands. Puffins still nest on some of them. The great auk is not coming back.

Sources

The Great Auk, Errol Fuller
A Gap in Nature, Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten
Multiple historical sources on the 1844 Eldey expedition

Rooted in life.

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