Guide to Bird Watching

The Great Auk

The great auk is perhaps the most famous of North America's extinct birds. This was a flightless waterbird about the size of a goose. Though its wings were too small for flight and it was very awkward on land, it was an expert swimmer. Its home was in northern Europe, southern Greenland, southern Labrador, and down the Atlantic coast at least as far south as Massachusetts.

Funk Island, north of Newfoundland, was a favorite nesting-place. Sailors landed there and killed the Auk by the thousands for the oil to be obtained from their bodies; by 1844 or 1845, they had been exterminated in North America and Iceland.

The natives used the auk as an article of food, since it was easy to catch when it was on the land Another circumstance which no doubt hastened its extinction was that it laid only one egg to the nest.

In 1852 the last great auk was seen alive, and the last dead one was seen in 1853.

There exist about eighty mounted and unmounted skins, four skeletons and a fair number of eggs.