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Updated: June 13, 2025
But I have forgotten the rest of the company. Foremost in dignity was the Countess Auk, of Stornaway Rock, in the Hebrides; and with her were her two nieces, Lady Isabella Snipe and the Honourable Miss Woodcock. I saw Mr. Reynard, the celebrated member for Hollowoak, having a long gossip with the Countess and her young charges, for both of whom he seemed to profess great admiration. Mr.
'The old Pioneer is now dead, he told us, 'as dead as the Dodo or the Great Auk. 'No more need we shiver in our Kaffir blankets at Kaffir Stores 'fifty miles from the dead-ends of rail-less post-towns. "Le roi est mort." Malaria is dead or dying so far as Alexandra is concerned. We Alexandrians are now becoming wholesome Englishmen in a wholesome White Man's country.
"In vain the speeding or shyness, In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against any approach, In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powdered bones, In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes, In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great monsters lying low, In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky, In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs, In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods, In vain the razor-billed auk sails far north to Labrador, I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.
I had come to the congress prepared to deliver a monograph on the great auk; but now the subject went overboard as the birds themselves had, and I found myself pleading with the committee to give the Countess a hearing on the ux. "Why not?" I exclaimed, warmly. "It is established beyond question that the ux does exist in Tasmania.
There proved to be two birds. They would not suffer me within gunshot, though I carried no gun, but flew off into some ploughed ground, with their usual loud vociferations. Mr. N. C. Brown, in The Auk, January, 1889, page 69.
The great auk and the Labrador duck have both become utterly extinct within living memory. The Eskimo curlew is decreasing to the danger point, and the Yellowlegs is following. The lobster fishing is being wastefully conducted along the St. Lawrence; so, indeed, are the other fisheries.
The grounds for such an opinion are set forth by Dr. Arthur P. Chadbourne in The Auk for July, 1889, page 255. During the month with the history of which we are now especially concerned, I saw nothing more of them; but by way of completing the story I may add that on the 28th of January, in the same spot, I found a flock of seven, and there they remained.
It would be something to rank with the great men who had devoted their lives to the pursuit of the dodo and the roc. But there was a deplorable lack of information about the haunts and habits of the auk.
Petrels are the most aerial and oceanic of birds, but, in the quiet sounds of Tierra del Fuego, the Puffinuria berardi, in its general habits, in its astonishing power of diving, in its manner of swimming and of flying when made to take flight, would be mistaken by any one for an auk or a grebe; nevertheless, it is essentially a petrel, but with many parts of its organisation profoundly modified in relation to its new habits of life; whereas the woodpecker of La Plata has had its structure only slightly modified.
Without any market-value a century ago, the Great Auk now, as a stuffed skin, represents a value of fifteen hundred dollars in gold. There are but seventy-two specimens of this bird in the museums of Europe and America, besides a few skeletons, and sixty-five of its eggs. It was called in ancient days Gare-fowl, and was the Goiful of the Icelander.
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