Book Review: The Last of Its Kind - The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction

These days, to talk about animals is, by and large, to talk about extinction, and how close said animal is to the edge of extinction.  Even outside of conservation, the word has very much become part of our shared lexicon, so much so that it's hard to believe that, historically speaking, it wasn't that long ago that the word didn't even exist.   The idea that a heavenly creator would allow one of his creations to disappear from the earth was unthinkable.  As a result, when Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to the American West following the Louisiana Purchase, he had hopes that they'd bring him back tales of mastodons and ground sloth, creatures that Jefferson knew only from bones.

When biological extinction was finally understood as a concept, it was mostly in the context of deep time - animals like the dinosaurs, that died off long ago.  The thought that we, humans, could be responsible for the eradication of another species was unthinkable.  The world seemed so large, so unmapped, that even if you couldn't find any more of a species, the assumption was that there were always some just hiding in the next valley, on the next island, further out at sea, etc.  After all, how does one prove a negative?  The concept of rarity, however, was clearly understand - and the rarer a species was, the more desperately it was sought after by collectors

In 1858, British naturalists Alfred Newton and John Wolley set of for Iceland in search on perhaps the rarest bird known to the Victorian world, the great auk.  This giant flightless seabird, resembling the penguins but more closely related to the puffins, was highly sought after by scientists and collectors, and the naturalists were keen to obtain skins, eggs, and whole specimens for study, as well as the chance to observe the species in the wild.  In this, they were too late.  As their season in Iceland wore on, it eventually became clear to them that the auk was no more.  They came to suspect that the last individuals of this enigmatic seabird weren't in hiding or on some uncharted island - that they had ceased to exist, and that their demise was directly attributable to human hunting.

The Last of Its Kind - The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction, by Icelandic anthropologist Gísli Pálsson, is, essentially, a book about a book.  Unable to see living auks themselves, Newton and Wolley instead dedicated themselves to anthropological research, trying to learn as much as possible about the interplay of humans and auks in the northern seas and interviewing the hunters who had dispatched the last few birds.  They recorded their findings in The Gare-Fowl Books, which takes its name from the other common name of the species that was in use at the time.  The author tells the story of their time in Iceland and their meetings with local people.  Through the eyes of Newton and Wolley, we begin to see the shaping of the modern concept of human-caused extinction.

Perhaps the most fascinating single thought that came to me when I read this book was learning about how one of the naturalists was a correspondent of Charles Darwin.  Darwin would publish his On the Origin of Species at the same time that Wolley and Newton were sitting in Iceland, waiting idly for boats to take them to inspect distant rookeries that the auks once haunted, and he'd been cooking his theory for many years at this point.  It shocked me to realize that the Theory of Evolution was introduced to the world before the concept of human-caused extinction (and this centuries after the passing of the dodo, the poster-species for human-caused extinction).  

The former is still contentious for many people, especially those who oppose it on religious grounds.  The later is now an inescapable biological fact of our world.

Last of Its Kind - The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction at Amazon.com