The Great Auk by John Gerrard Keulemans (extinct) in summer and winter plumage. Pinguinus impennis with young. Public Domain

Prologue

Tim Birkhead, a British ornithologist, introduced me to the extremely ancient and flightless sea bird, Auk, that made a living in the North Atlantic for millennia. Birkhead, who has written several other books about birds, published a timely history of the savage extirpation of Auk: The Great Auk: Its Extraordinary Life, Hideous Death and Mysterious Afterlife (New York: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2025).

Birkhead explained that hunters and poachers fought Auk so thoroughly and for so long that by 1840 Auk became extinct. The 19th century was an era of machines and extinction.

Why extinction?

Europeans and North Americans mechanized for industry and wars. Machines gave some comfort to their private and public lives. But machines helped the exploitation of other people and, primarily, the grabbing of the wealth of the tropical forests, rivers, mountains: land for farming, minerals from mining, wood from deforestation and wildlife for food and cruelty. The flightless Auk was caught in the deadly weapons of its pursuers and disappeared from the waters of North Atlantic – forever.

Fashion for women turned deadly for birds. According to an 1895 report, “One cause which threatens the existence of many species of birds, if it has not already produced the extermination of some, is the rage for wearing their feathers that now and again seizes civilized women, who take their ideas of dress from interested milliners of both sexes — persons who, having bought a........

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