Sea-Birds

Other huge bird-colonies in the western Arctic are to be found in Ellesmere Island, North Devon Island, Bylot Island and Baffin Island. Indeed, throughout the Arctic, where the naked rock escapes from the clutch of ice, and precipices rear to the sky from shores, the kittiwakes and dovekies, the puffins and guillemots, the fulmars, the glaucous gulls and pale herring-gulls, make their nests, and operate from them to the feeding grounds, to the leads in the ice, the convergences of tide and current, the upwelling zones at glacier faces and by the side of big icebergs. And below the cliff-ledges is the tell-tale of the bird city, rich plants, sudden patches of green in the arctic drab, green swards indeed, bright yellow-green grass; the round leaves of scurvy-grass, lush, six times as high as in the barren places, which means six inches high. On the slopes of scree and talus and broken rocks below is a special mat of little flowering plants, benefiting from the bird-dung leached and washed down from above; perhaps not the purple opposite-leaved saxifrage, which shuns this community (it is too rich for it), but alpine foxtail, the arctic poppy, the arctic buttercups, and the polar creeping willow; and tufted, drooping, alpine brook saxifrages; and the alternate-leaved golden saxifrage; and alpine mouse-ear chickweed, various arctic whitlow-grasses, poas and a woodrush, and Wahlbergella; and sometimes carpets of Jacob’s ladder. There are many mosses, too, with bright colours; and all over these arctic cliffs—not only below the bird ledges—grow lichens. One of them is the beautiful orange Caloplaca elegans; it grows all over the bird rocks of Spitsbergen, shines yellow orange among the dark rock and green grass-ledges of the fulmar-haunted bastions of Disko in West Greenland, and colours from top to bottom the mighty buttresses of Cape Searle in eastern Baffin Island, the site of what may be the world’s largest fulmar colony. Grey fulmars sit on green ledges above orange rocks.

In Britain, St. Kilda is the greatest sea-bird station. Upon its thousand-foot precipices nests one of the densest communities of vertebrate animals in the North Atlantic—probably the densest south of the Arctic Circle. The gannets of Boreray and its stacks have about seventeen thousand nests—one-sixth of the world population of this species. A quarter of Britain’s fulmars (up to forty thousand pairs) nest on St. Kilda. Undoubtedly more than a million puffins’ eggs are laid on St. Kilda in a normal year; the question is, how many million? There are seven separate puffin-slopes on St. Kilda each of which is larger than the largest puffin colony anywhere else in the British Isles, even the largest puffinry in the mossy talus-slopes of the Shiant Isles, where blocks of columnar basalt lie below the cliffs like the forgotten bricks of a child. The puffin is certainly one of the most numerous birds in the North Atlantic. In his monograph on the puffin (1953) Lockley estimates a minimum world population of 15,000,000 adults.

From the study of the ecology of animals we are learning that their numbers are controlled primarily by the amount of food they can get, and only secondarily by their parasites and predators; and parasites are probably more important than predators. But there are exceptions to this; and the chief one is when the predator is man (another is when new predators are introduced through his agency). Except in a few places such as most of Greenland, Jan Mayen, Spitsbergen, Franz Josef Land and a few other arctic islands, man is, or has been, the most important predator of sea-birds. He has been one, of a kind, ever since he has been Man—even before; for there is ample evidence that during the second of the two advances of the ice in the second of the two glaciations of the Great Ice Age, some of the latest members of the species Homo neanderthalensis ate great auks. This was about twenty thousand years ago; the Neanderthals left their auk bones in the cave of St. Brélade in Jersey and in the Devil’s Tower at Gibraltar. Their successors, the first of Homo sapiens, Men of the Aurignacian age (the early part of the Upper Old Stone Age, c.16,000 to c.11,000 B.C.), were of two main races, the tall short-faced Crô-Magnons, and the shorter Grimaldians, perhaps closely related to African bushmen (W. J. Sollas, 1924). Great auk bones have been found in Grimaldian deposits in the Grotta Romanelli in the heel of Italy* and in another cave whose habitation goes back to the end of the Old Stone Age, El Pendo in north Spain, a wall-etching (Fig. 12) of Magdalenian age (c.8,000 B.C.) may represent a great auk (H. Breuil and others, 1911; G. Clark, 1948). It is probable that between the end of the last glaciation of the Ice Age (about 15,000 B.C. in southern Europe, about 10,000 B.C. in northern) and the present day, i.e. during the Upper Old Stone, Middle Stone, New Stone, and Iron Ages the great auk had quite a wide distribution; judging by the number of bones, and the presence of the bones of young, in some prehistoric kitchen-middens in Britain and western Scandinavia, its breeding-range was possibly wider than it was found to be in historical times (Gulf of St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, Iceland, Faeroes and Britain). We cannot, however, quite agree with Clark (1948), who has collected the information about these deposits, that it was certainly wider, for it seems to us likely (see here) that the young great auk left its breeding skerry very early, perhaps, like the razorbill, without either primary or secondary wing-feathers, not much more than a fortnight after hatching; and probably swam with its parents many hundreds of miles before ‘fledging.’ Clark’s list shows great auk bones in middens of the Middle Stone Age in France, Denmark, West Sweden and Norway, of the New Stone Age in France, Denmark and Norway, of the Iron Age in west Sweden and Norway. Several brochs (small forts) in Orkney and Caithness inhabited by the Picts also contained great auk bones; this practically brings the great auk to historical times.

FIG. 12

Upper Palaeolithic (probably Magdalenian) rock-engraving at El Pendo, near Santander, North Spain, showing what are probably great auks of which modern sketch on left. (After H. Breuil, 1911; G. Clark, 1948)

We suspect that the prehistoric exploitation of the great auk was largely confined to interception of the birds on passage and in their winter quarters;* the final collapse and extinction of the species took place only when Man in modern ships reached and attacked its main breeding-haunts.

These, as far as can be discovered, were the certain breeding-colonies of the great auk:

In Britain, St. Kilda and Papa Westray

In Iceland, Geirfuglasker and Eldey, S.W. of Cape Reykjanes and Geirfuglasker in the Westmann Islands

In the Magdalen Islands (Gulf of St. Lawrence), Bird Rocks

In Newfoundland, Funk Island (east)

Other stations at which it possibly nested, but about which the evidence is not entirely satisfactory, are:

In Britain, the Calf of Man

In the Faeroes, Fugloy and Streymoy

In Iceland, Hvalbakur and Tvísker

In Maine, the Georges Islands in Knox County

In Nova Scotia, an island near Yarmouth (? in Tusket Is.)

In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Cape Breton

In Newfoundland, ‘Penguin Island’ off Cape La Hune (south) and ‘Penguin Island’ near Cape Freels (east)

In Greenland, Leif’s and Erik den Røde’s Islands, near Angmagssalik.

There is no doubt that the main population, when history overtook the great auk, was around the island of Newfoundland, and particularly upon Funk Island, where, according to Peters and Burleigh (1951), it was probably first seen in 1170 by some early Norse explorers of the New World from Greenland.

When Jacques Cartier visited Funk Island on his first voyage to Newfoundland in May 1534 his crews filled two boats with the birds in less than half an hour, and every ship salted down five or six barrelfuls. Two years later the voyager Robert Hore came to one of the Penguin Islands or Funk Island, and found it full of auks and their eggs. They spread their sails from ship to shore and drove a great number of the birds on board upon the sails; and they took many eggs. By 1578 it was the normal thing for French and British crews in the Gulf of St. Lawrence or on the Newfoundland Banks to stock their ships with auk-meat, stopping at the Bird Rocks, or Penguin Islands or Funk Island, and driving the great auks aboard on planks. Today there is nothing but old ships’ logs and travellers’ diaries to record where the western auks once lived in thousands, save on Funk Island, where a great many bones have been found.

It seems clear, from the account of Peters and Burleigh, that the great auk became extinct in Newfoundland in about 1800. George Cartwright (1792), who lived in Newfoundland Labrador for most of the period 1770–1786, and who often sailed across the Straits of Belle Isle to northern Newfoundland, only logged personal meetings with great auks in his diary twice, on 4 August 1771 and 10 June 1774. On a visit to Fogo Island harbour on 5 July 1785 he wrote:

“A boat came in from Funk Island laden with birds, chiefly penguins. Funk Island is a small flat island-rock, about twenty leagues east of the island of Fogo, in the latitude of 50° north. Innumerable flocks of sea-fowl breed upon it every summer, which are of great service to the poor inhabitants of Fogo; who make voyages there to load with birds and eggs. When the water is smooth, they make their shallop fast to the shore, lay their gang-boards from the gunwale of the boat to the rocks, and then drive as many penguins on board as she will hold; for, the wings of those birds being remarkably short, they cannot fly. But it has been customary of late years, for several crews of men to live all the 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. If a stop is not soon put to that practice, the whole breed will be diminished to almost nothing, particularly the penguins: for this is now the only island they have left to breed upon; all others lying so near to the shores of Newfoundland, they are continually robbed. The birds which the people bring from thence, they salt and eat, in lieu of salted pork. It is a very extraordinary thing (yet a certain fact) that the Red, or Wild Indians, of Newfoundland should every year visit that island; for, it is not to be seen from the Fogo hills, they have no knowledge of the compass, nor ever had any intercourse with any other nation, to be informed of its situation. How they came by their information, will most likely remain a secret among themselves.”

FIG. 13

Known (•) and putative (Θ) breeding-places of the great auk.

Nobody knows when the Norse-Gaels of St. Kilda came first to Hirta, their main island, and established Britain’s most interesting colony of wildfowlers. Certainly by 1549 there was a stable human community on St. Kilda, whose life was based to a large extent on “wyld foullis” (D. Monro, 1774). In about 1682 the Lord Register, Sir George M’Kenzie of Tarbat, gave an account (1818) of St. Kilda to Sir Robert Sibbald. He probably did not visit St. Kilda himself, but he says: “There be many sorts of … fowls; some of them of strange shapes, among which there is one they call the Gare fowl, which is bigger than any goose, and hath eggs as big almost as those of the Ostrich. Among the other commodities they export out of the island, this is none of the meanest. They take the fat of these fowls that frequent the island, and stuff the stomach of this fowl with it, which they preserve by hanging it near the chimney, where it is dryed with the smoke, and they sell it to their neighbours on the continent, as a remedy they use for aches and pains.”

When Martin Martin (1698), tutor to the son of the islands’ laird, the MacLeod of MacLeod, arrived at St. Kilda in June 1697 he wrote a classic and accurate account of its natural history, which included this:

“The Sea-Fowl are, first, Gairfowl, being the stateliest, as well as the largest Sort, and above the Size of a Solan Goose, of a black Colour, red about the Eyes, a large white Spot under each, a long broad Bill; it stands stately, its whole Body erected, its Wings short, flies not at all; lays its Egg upon the bare Rock, which, if taken away, she lays no more for that year; she is whole footed, and has the hatching Spot upon her Breast, i.e. a bare spot from which the Feathers have fallen off with the Heat in hatching; its Egg is twice as big as that of a Solan Goose, and is variously spotted, Black, Green, and Dark; it comes without Regard to any wind, appears the first of May, and goes away about the middle of June.”

We quote this in full, as it is really a most remarkable and convincing description. As we explain elsewhere (see here) the interval between the first of May and the middle of June is about seven weeks, the combined incubation and fledging period of the great auk’s closest surviving relative, the razorbill. The description also otherwise fits the bird perfectly. Martin arrived at St. Kilda on 1 June 1697 by the calendar of his day, which would be 12 June by our present calendar. If great auks had actually been breeding on one of the islands (Soay would have been the most likely) in that year it is almost certain that he would have been shown them by the inhabitants, and made some comment thereon in his careful notes: as it is his passage that we have quoted reads very much as if the information in it had been taken from natives who themselves had seen the bird nesting and remembered it clearly, but not from Martin’s own observations. From this we conclude that the great auk nested at St. Kilda not in 1697, but within the memory of some alive in that year, i.e. most probably in the second half of the seventeenth century; we can also conclude from the account that its eggs were sometimes taken. The M’Kenzie information for c.i 682 also suggests breeding in this period.

The great auk appears to have been seen at St. Kilda occasionally after Martin’s visit. The notes of A. Buchan, who was minister on St. Kilda from 1705 to 1730, respecting the bird derive from Martin; but Kenneth MacAulay (1764) who was on the island for a year in 1758–59, alludes to irregular July visits (not every year) by the great auk; he did not see one himself. “It keeps at a distance from [the St. Kildans],” he writes, “they know not where, for a course of years. From what land or ocean it makes its uncertain voyages to their isle, is perhaps a mystery in nature.” After MacAulay’s visit the only certain records of great auks at St. Kilda are two: one was taken at Hirta in the early summer of 1821 and kept alive until August. In this month it was being taken to Glasgow by ship; near the entrance to the Firth of Clyde it was put overboard, with a line tied to its leg for its daily swim, and escaped. Another was found on Stac an Armin, the highest rock-stack in the British Isles (though no doubt the auk got ashore at the shelving corner), in about 1840, and was beaten to death by the St. Kildans L. M’Kinnon and D. MacQueen as they thought it was a witch. Obviously it had been a generation or more since any St. Kildan had seen a garefowl.

The existence of the great auk in the Isle of Man is indicated by a picture of an adult in breeding plumage standing on a ledge on the Calf of Man, drawn by Daniel King, probably in 1652. Williamson (1939), who draws attention to this earliest British depiction of the bird, comments that there is no parallel indication in contemporary Manx literature that the great auk inhabited the Calf. It is quite possible that it may have bred, though this of course is not proved; there are suitable low rock-shelves on the Manx coast on which it could have hauled ashore.

In Orkney one pair certainly bred in 1812. It is not at all certain that the great auk had previously been a regular breeder at Papa Westray (the place of the 1812 nest), or anywhere else in Orkney. The site in 1812 was in a recess low down on the Fowls Craig on this island. The female was killed with a stone while sitting on her egg. In 1813 the male was also killed; it was shot by the native Willy Foulis for William Bullock, the collector, having lived on the ledge after the death of its mate. The natives called them the King and Queen of the Auks (Buckley and Harvie-Brown, 1891).

So much for the great auk in Britain; the last of all, except for St. Kilda’s 1840 ‘witch,’ was an odd bird which was found at the entrance to Waterford Harbour in Ireland in 1834, was kept alive for four months on potatoes, milk, and trout, and which is now in the museum of Trinity College, Dublin.

The early historians of the Faeroe Islands, Ole Worm (1655), who died in 1654, and Lucas Debes (1673), both knew the great auk and handled live specimens caught in the islands. J. K. Svabo (1783) who was in the islands in 1781 and 1782, records the capture of a female on the island of Fugloy which was found on dissection to contain a well-formed egg; and Jørgen Landt (1800, 1810), who wrote his MS. not earlier than 1797, mentions great auks as “climbing up the low rocks.” C. J. Graba (1830), who was in the Faeroes in 1828, met old natives who had formerly seen the great auk at Vestmanna on Streymoy, and one who told him that he had killed one on an egg at this place. J. Wolley (1850) in 1849, interviewed an old man who “had seen one fifty years ago, sitting among the Hedlafuglur,* that is young Guillemots and other birds upon the low rocks, and old men told him it was very rare. This was about the time when Landt wrote.” Wolley was told that formerly, when many were seen, it was considered a sign of a good bird year; which suggests that the auks may have been desultory visitors for a long time. Finally H. W. Feilden (1872) interviewed an old fowler in 1872, who claimed to have killed a great auk on the island of Stóra Dímun on 1 July 1808; the last record for the Faeroes. K. Williamson (1948) points out that none of these records constitutes proof of breeding, though we agree with him that, though scarce, it probably did breed in the Faeroes until the eighteenth century.

The great auks of southern Iceland are well documented, and their history has often been related. They certainly bred on two, and perhaps bred on four Geirfuglaskers, or gare-fowl skerries off the coast; from east to west these can be identified as Hvalbakur, the most easterly point of Iceland, about 26 statute miles east of the island of Papey, near Djúpivogur; Tvísker off Breiðamerkursandur under the great southern ice-cap of Vatnajökull; Geirfuglasker, the southernmost islet of the Westmann Islands, and the most southerly point of Iceland; and (until it sank beneath the waves in a volcanic disturbance in 1830) Geirfuglasker, nineteen or twenty miles south-west of Cape Reykjanes, the most south-westerly point of Iceland save a rock Geirfugladrangur less than a mile further to sea, which still stands but was probably never inhabited by great auks. After the volcanic disturbance the garefowls went for as long as they were spared to the island of Eldey, almost exactly between Geirfuglasker and Cape Reykjanes.

It would seem from the accounts of Ólafsson (1772) and Olavius (1780) that Hvalbakur, the distant whale-back skerry of east Iceland, may have been inhabited by great auks when those historians were in Iceland (between 1752 and 1777); but when N. Mohr (1786) visited nearby Djúpivogur in 1781 he evidently found no news of occupation in that year. If it was true, as Ólafsson thought, that Tvísker (a skerry which at present slopes up to a height of about 46 ft.), was a breeding-place, its occupation must be put before 1764, the last year he was in Iceland; there is no subsequent history here. In the eighteenth century the Westmann islet of Geirfuglasker (which rises to 190 ft., but, as we have seen, has a low platform on one side and low skerries around), had a big colony but, as Friedrich Faber (1822), records, the last known breeding-pair and egg were seen there in about 1800.

The end of the great auk in Iceland, and in the world, took place south-west of Cape Reykjanes. It seems probable that the great auks nested only on Geirfuglasker and afterwards Eldey, and never on the satellite stacks belonging to these rocks—Geirfugladrangur and Eldey-ardrangur. It was known that great auks occupied Geirfuglasker, and were at least occasionally raided by Man, in the first half of the seventeenth century. Though the accounts of the eighteenth century (e.g. J. Anderson, 1746; N. Horrebow, 1752) sometimes slightly conflict it seems clear that Geirfuglasker was occupied in 1729 and that in some years of the first half of that century (if not, perhaps, in that particular year) its great auk population was a “great multitude.” Nevertheless, it could have been exaggerated. Horrebow stated that at his time the Geirfuglasker fowlers “filled their boats with the eggs of the Garefowl.” (All through the early, uncritical literature of fowling we find boatloads of eggs—they have even been allegedly taken from Rockall, where seldom have more than a couple of dozen guillemots been seen in attitudes of incubation.) But a manuscript of c.1760 (S. Grieve, 1885, p.19) states that the “garefowl is there not nearly so much as men suppose … the space he occupies cannot be reckoned at more than a sixteenth part of the skerry … and this only at the two landing-places; further upwards he does not betake himself, on account of his flightlessness.” Mohr, who visited Iceland in 1780–81, also thought Horrebow’s account exaggerated, though he did not go out to the skerry himself.

In the nineteenth century the doom of the auks was sealed by the raid of the Salamine, a private pirate-ship which had plundered Tór-shavn in the Faeroes on its way north. The crew of this ship was ashore on Geirfuglasker on (it is said) 8 August (? a late date) 1808, and killed many birds and their young. There may have been another raid from the Faeroes in 1809 (H. C. Müller, 1862); there was certainly a big one in 1813, when, during the war between Britain and Denmark, the armed schooner Faeroe landed a party which killed all garefowls that came within their reach, and arrived later in Reykjavik with twenty-four on board, besides numbers that had been salted down; fifty or sixty were taken back to the Faeroes. On 1 July 1821 Friedrich Faber and H. C. Raben visited Geirfuglasker, and Raben actually climbed Geirfugladrangur. They saw no garefowls at all: it is possible that the auks might have already gone to sea (especially if their eggs had already been taken that season). In 1828 at least one adult was taken, for a skin for the Copenhagen Museum. This is the last visit to Geirfuglasker that we hear of; in early March 1830 a series of earthquakes took place in which the skerry sank beneath the sea. The great auks moved at once to Eldey, ten miles nearer the coast, and attempted to breed there in the same season.

Eldey is a remarkable block of volcanic tuff with sheer sides and a flattish top that is distinguished by being the site of the second largest gannetry in the world (see here). It is about 250 feet high, at its highest point. On the east side of its north end, below the cliff, is a broadish ledge which slopes and slants into the sea (Pl. IIa), and, as one of us (Fisher) who visited it in 1949 saw for himself, was a suitable landing place and, under the sheer cliff, also a suitable nesting-place for the garefowls. Eldey is made of a particularly resistant type of volcanic tuff; normally such a formation weathers and erodes easily, but Eldey has not significantly changed in a century,* and the Icelanders, who are sensitive to tradition and history, and whose fowlers work with their fathers and sons, are positive that the garefowl ledge is still as it was. It was certainly easy, in 1949, to imagine the great razorbills bobbing buoyantly in the fuss of spray and breakers round the landing-places, clawing a foothold and waddling and struggling clumsily ashore. But they only did this at Eldey for fifteen years. In the first year, the year of the earthquake 1830, two boats took twenty or twenty-one skins for dealers; in 1831 twenty-four were taken; in 1834 at least nine skins and several eggs; in 1840 at least one egg; in 1841 three skins and one egg (the egg was probably laid by a female which laid an egg taken in 1840, judging by their remarkable similarity). On a day between the second and fifth (most probably the fourth) day of June 1844 a boat of fourteen men, under the leadership of Vilhjálmur Hákonarsson, sailed the fourteen miles from Kirkjuvogur to Eldey; the sea was rough, and only three men could get ashore, Sigurður Íslefsson, Jón Brandsson and Ketil Ketilsson. They found two garefowls and an egg. Ketilsson smashed the egg, because it was already cracked, and the others each caught and killed an auk. On their way home the men sold the skins to a certain Christian Hansen, who sold them to the bird-stuffer at Reykjavik, Möller. Since that day no great auk has been certainly seen alive by anybody, anywhere.