Auks and Aviaries

 "An auk in flight is sheer delight, it soars above the sea,

An auk on land is not so grand - auks walk AUKwardly."

- Jack Prelutsky

Unlike the dinosaurs and their cohorts, or the prehistoric mega-mammals, we have memories - including photographs - of some recently-extinct species in zoos.  Their numbers include the thylacine, the quagga, and the pink-headed duck; both the last passenger pigeon and the last Carolina parakeet lived at the Cincinnati Zoo.  Not so the great auk, however.  Last of Its Kind makes reference to a Danish academic with an auk for a pet, even walked on a leash, but the species never seems to have been kept in zoos.  Its demise took place not that long after the establishment of the first real scientific zoos, such as the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and the London Zoo.

What would auks have been like in zoos?  Despite their superficial resemblance to penguins (these actually were the first birds to have the name "penguin" given to them), these were members of the Alcidae family, which houses the puffins and their kin.  The closest living relative of the great auk is believed to be the razorbill, a species I've seen only once or twice in zoos.  Puffins - of which there are three species - are considerably less common in zoos and aquariums than penguins, but are still not too uncommon.  Like penguins, the fact that they are colonial in nature means that a single zoo can house many breeding pairs of birds, so it doesn't take many facilities to build a sustainable population.

Puffins and their kin do pretty well in zoos and breed well.  Their diet and husbandry is well understood.  Would great auks have thrived in modern zoos?

Of course, one way that auks are closer to penguins than auklets, murres, and razorbills is that they cannot fly, Prelutsky's poem notwithstanding.  Unlike puffins (which with only a single exception I have seen in indoor enclosures), auks could conceivably have been kept outdoors.  In that case, they might have been just as popular of exhibit animals as penguins.  

The one potential problem I could see with auks is that many cold-weather birds (including the true southern penguins) are intolerant of the diseases of the temperate zoo.  That's why most of the outdoor penguin exhibits you see in zoos are African, Humboldt, or Magellanic penguins, the temperate-zone species, while kings, rockhoppers, etc are generally kept indoors.  The exact historic range of the auk is unknown - vagrants could be soon far south, but by the time the species was really being studied, it was limited to the last, most inaccessible remnants of its range.  Perhaps they would have been even better suited to outdoor exhibits than warm-water penguins.

Assuming caution and keeping them inside would be prudent, I'd say that an exhibit for a king penguin (about the same size, and also usually kept indoors) would work for great auks.  Next time I see an exhibit for this species, I'm going to try to imagine a different bird - the original penguin - in its place.