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Updated: June 13, 2025
"Like swimming squirrels, you navigate with the help of Heaven and a stiff breeze, but you never land where you hope to do you?" Rather red in the face, I said: "Don't you believe the great auk to be extinct?" "Audubon saw the great auk." "Who has seen a single specimen since?" "Nobody except our correspondent here," he replied, laughing.
He formed a resolution then and there to become a good shot, and although he did not succeed exactly in becoming so that day, he nevertheless managed to put several fine specimens of gulls and an auk into his bag. The last bird amused him much, being a creature with a dumpy little body and a beak of preposterously large size and comical aspect.
In this process, the bodies of thousands of auks were burned as fuel, in working up the remains of tens of thousands of others. On Funk Island, a favorite breeding-place, the great auk was exterminated in 1840, and in Iceland in 1844. Many natives ate this bird with relish, and being easily captured, either on land or sea, the commercialism of its day soon obliterated the species.
One of the chief's houses is opposite our camp a mile or two distant, and we concluded to call on him next morning. I wanted to examine the Auk Glacier in the morning, but tried to be satisfied with a general view and sketch as we sailed around its wide fan-shaped front. It is one of the most beautiful of all the coast glaciers that are in the first stage of decadence.
I suppose I might as well speak of it, as you are bound to hear about it sooner or later." He hesitated, and I could see that he was embarrassed, searching for the exact words to convey his meaning. "If," said I, "you have anything in this region more important to science than the great auk, I should be very glad to know about it."
When I meet a brutal looking fellow I often think that he and his type may soon be as extinct as the great auk. I am not sure that in the interest of the 'ologies we ought not to pickle a few specimens of Bill Sykes, to show our children's children what sort of a person he was. And then the more we progress the more we tend to progress.
I pressed his hand warmly, and thanked him for his care of me, and of one so dear to me. He laughed. "That is all right," he said; "good and unselfish men are so scarce in this world that one cannot do too much for them. We must be careful lest, like the dodo and the great auk, the breed becomes extinct." "But," said I, "may not the Oligarchy find you out, even here?"
That is how a bird would do it, if some High Pope of Birds lived in Rome and needed visiting, as, for instance, the Great Auk; or if some old primal relic sacred to birds was connected therewith, as, for instance, the bones of the Dodo.... But I digress. The point is that the straight line takes one over the Brienzer Grat, over the lake, and then over the Wetterhorn.
Ah, yes! the tomtit is the embodiment and poetry of nimbleness. But he is more than a mere feathered gentleman; he is an extremely useful citizen. Prof. E. D. Sanderson published a valuable article in "The Auk" for April 1898, in which he proved that this bird serves a most useful purpose as an insecticide.
He devotes to it a paper in The Auk for October, 1890, to which I am happy to refer readers who may wish a more thorough discussion of the matter than I have been able to give. My own paper was printed at the same time, in The Atlantic Monthly, and had been accepted by the editor before I knew of Mr. Brewster's intention to write. References to a roost in Belmont, Mass., discovered by Mr.
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