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The last Great Auk is not alive and well, but living in Brussels

There it was. It was called the Great Auk, but at less than one meter tall, the black and white stuffed bird with its tiny wings certainly didn’t look that great. It didn’t stand out among the albatrosses, falcons and peacocks – and hundreds of other birds in the storage room of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels.

However, the reason the only specimen of this bird in the Institute’s possession is in storage is not that it is not great enough. On the contrary, it is absolutely unique. It is because it is one of the last remaining specimens of the Great Auk species.

Too precious for display

It has been a prized possession of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences for 178 years, but the stuffed bird is so valuable that it is not on display and was only made available to UNRIC and the Icelandic National Broadcasting Company, with a special permission.

Tags identifying the Great Auk, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Brussels, Belgium © Árni Snævarr/UNRIC
Tags identifying the Great Auk, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Brussels, Belgium © Árni Snævarr/UNRIC

“Now, it is no longer exhibited because it is too precious,” explains curator Olivier S. G. Pauwels. “There are only a few specimens left in museums around the world.”

The Great Auk was a relatively frequent sight on the shores of the North Atlantic until the 19th century when it was hunted to extinction. Since the bird couldn’t fly, catching it was easy.

Last birds killed in 1844

Before the last two known birds were killed in 1844 – 180 years ago – it was well known in the world of academia that the Great Auk was in danger of extinction, and everyone wanted to acquire a bird for display, before it was too late.

“Museums had to attract people and museums had to show iconic species,” says Pauwels. “I am not sure of the context in which this one was bought; if it was known that it was extinct or near extinct. It probably corresponded at the time to something that museums wanted to have in their exhibition rooms to attract more people and to satisfy the scientific curiosity of the scientists working in the museum.”

The Great auk, John Gerrard Keulemans/Public domain/WikimediaCommons
The Great auk, John Gerrard Keulemans/Public domain/WikimediaCommons

DNA research has recently established that the stuffed bird in The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels is, in all likelihood, the world’s last specimen of the Great Auk. It was already on display here two years after the killing of the last two birds.

The story of the killing of the last Great Auks is known in detail thanks to British naturalists who visited Iceland in the hope of finding the remaining living specimens of the species. However, after interviewing local farmers and fishermen it emerged that their efforts were in vain. They realized that under growing international pressure for museum specimens, the last of the species had been killed.

Easy prey

Three Icelandic farmers told them that they had climbed the island-rock Eldey, off the southwestern coast of Iceland, in the summer of 1844. They were on an assignment by a Danish merchant, who knew this was a lucrative business since Great Auks were in high demand by museums and natural scientists in Europe.

island-rock Eldey, Iceland
©Dagur Brynjólfsson/ WikimediaCommons

 

The two Great Auks that the farmers had spotted were easy prey. “It was incredible, they were just sitting there looking quite dignified,” Ketill Ketilsson, one of the hunters, told the British researchers.

Ketilsson said that when he went after the birds “his head failed him”. If he had some kind of premonition that this was a terrible deed, we will never know, but when his colleague Sigurður Ísleifsson strangled the latter of the two birds, it proved to be the world’s last Great Auk.

A painting of the extinct Great Auk. Oil On Panel. Errol Fuller/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
A painting of the extinct Great Auk. Oil On Panel. Errol Fuller/
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Gísli Pálsson, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Iceland is the author of a new book, The Last of its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction. He warns against blaming the killers of the last Auks. He admits that the story of the killing is “dramatic stuff,” but one has to look at this as a process.

Don´t blame the killers

“To blame the last killers and focus on that is simplistic. In the case of the Great Auk, the mass extinction occurred in Newfoundland in the 18th century. What happened in Iceland in the 1840s is trivia,” Professor Pálsson told UNRIC.

The fate of the Great Auk has been called a lesson in history on biological diversity.

“It is good there are examples in museums,”  Pauwels of the Belgian Institute says.   “We can show people what has existed and what has already disappeared because of humans. For a lot of people, seeing an animal that has recently disappeared, makes us feel that it existed and that we have lost something.”

We have the means – we need political will

Indeed, the fate of the Great Auk is quite relevant now that government officials, academics, and activists are gathering in Cali, Colombia, for an important international conference on Biodiversity.

“We have the means to protect most species. It is a question of political will, of course, to introduce laws and to apply them, to create national parks and protected areas and to maintain them in good condition,” Pauwels says.

However, this is a tall order given the competition from the ever-increasing population and the growth of urban areas.

COP26

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The UN Biodiversity Conference (COP16) takes place 21 October – 1 November 2024. It is the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity.

The Conference is held under the theme Peace With Nature. It is the first Biodiversity COP since the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at COP 15 in December 2022 in Montreal, Canada. At the conference, parties to the Convention are expected to show the alignment of their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) with the Framework.

https://www.unep.org/gef/events/conference/cbd-cop-16

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