The Great Auk by Tim Birkhead

The Great Auk by Tim Birkhead

The life, death and afterlife of one of the true icons of extinction, the Great Auk

The great auk was a flightless, goose-sized bird superbly adapted for life at sea. Fat, flush with feathers and easy to capture, the birds were in trouble whenever sailors visited their once-remote breeding colonies. Places like Funk Island, off north-east Newfoundland, became scenes of unimaginable slaughter, with birds killed in their millions. By 1800 the auks of Funk Island were gone. A scramble by private collectors for specimens of the final few birds then began, a bloody, unthinking destruction of one of the world’s most extraordinary species.

But their extinction in 1844 wasn’t the end of the great auk story, as the bird went on to have a remarkable afterlife; skins, eggs and skeletons became the focus for dozens of collectors in a story of pathological craving and unscrupulous dealings that goes on to this day.

In a book rich with insight and packed with tales of birds and of people, Tim Birkhead reveals previously unimagined aspects of the bird’s life before humanity, its death on the killing shores of the North Atlantic, and the unrelenting subsequent quest for its remains.

The great auk remains a symbol of human folly and the necessity of conservation. This book tells its story.

Tim Birkhead FRS is an author and biologist. Emeritus Professor of Behaviour and Evolution at the University of Sheffield, he is one of the world’s foremost ornithologists, and a leading light in popular science communication. Tim is best known for his work on the mating systems of birds, on sperm competition, and on the history of ornithology. He has also led one of the world’s best-known long-term research projects, studying the biology and population dynamics of Britain’s auks and other seabirds.

Elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004, Tim’s awards include the Elliot Coues Medal for outstanding contributions to ornithological research, the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour medal, the BOU’s Godman-Salvin Medal for distinguished ornithological work, and the Stephen Jay Gould Prize and Zoological Society of London’s Silver Medal, both for science communication.

Tim’s previous books include four popular science titles published by Bloomsbury – The Wisdom of Birds (2008), Bird Sense (2012), The Most Perfect Thing (2017) and The Wonderful Mr Willughby (2018).