GÃsli Pálsson (Princeton University Press Out now in the US; in the UK 2 April)
IN 1858, John Wolley and Alfred Newton, two British scientists, travelled to Iceland to study the great auk, a large, flightless seabird. They hoped to observe the bird in its natural habitat and perhaps bring home an egg, a skin or a stuffed bird to add to their collections.
This didn’t quite work out, as we discover in The Last of Its Kind: The search for the great auk and the discovery of extinction, an engaging book by anthropologist GÃsli Pálsson. He dates modern concerns about extinction and the need for conservation to their work. This gives their effort and his book true relevance for today – and a new role for both men.
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In the 19th century, extinction was seen either as an impossibility or a natural part of life. Charles Darwin was aware many species had died out over the centuries and this understanding was central to his thinking on evolution. But he believed it was always natural and inevitable, and happened slowly.
When Darwin’s breakthrough paper with Alfred Wallace, outlining the concept of natural selection for the first time, was read to the Linnean Society in July 1858, Wolley and Newton were still in Iceland. They were slowly coming to terms with the fact that the great auk had disappeared – and human activity was largely to blame.
The two men may not have seemed like natural companions. Pálsson paints vivid pictures of them. Wolley was sociable, restless and athletic, a strong swimmer and a skilful climber, one of the few who had managed to climb Mont Blanc in the Alps. By contrast, Newton was an introverted loner. A childhood injury limited the use of one of his legs, so he used a cane to walk.
But they were drawn together by natural history – in particular, a shared interest in the great auk. They had seen relics of these fascinating creatures, but longed to see them in the flesh, as Pálsson recounts, bringing to life a very 19th-century passion for exploration and first-hand experience. The two worked on a plan to travel together to Iceland to find some.
They journeyed to the coastal town of Kirkjuvogur, where their host, Vilhjálmur Hákonarson, was in charge of the local fishing boat and was the man most likely to get them to the inaccessible island of Eldey.
They knew it would be hard to land and they would be lucky to find great auks. But it was the last place the birds had been seen, when a breeding pair had been killed 14 years earlier. Pálsson captures their disappointment when bad weather prevented their journey, and explains how the ornithologists had to settle for gathering information from locals who had some memory of seeing and hunting the birds.
They told of a bird that, on land, liked to look carefully to the left and right with its neck outstretched, before running forward with tiny steps. In the water, however, it swam with great elegance and speed, using the tiny wings that looked purposeless in the air to control its motion.
The two men left Iceland after three months, having failed to see a great auk, but still hopeful that the bird survived, somewhere. Wolley died tragically the following year, and it was up to Newton, seven years later, to reluctantly accept that the bird was now extinct.
Greak auks had once been hunted for food and for the oil that could be extracted from their carcasses. But it was the market for their eggs and stuffed remains, created by scientists and collectors, that had led to their demise – an irony not lost on Pálsson.
Newton became a campaigner for animal protection, and Pálsson makes a good case for remembering him as a pivotal figure in the history of our relationship with other species, and in understanding how our behaviour can affect them.
Tom Tierney is a writer based in Dublin, Ireland
