The end of the Great Auks

It will possibly be my last book, but Not Your Usual Science is going to be HUGE, close to 1.5 million words, equal to a dozen 'airport books', the thick tomes you buy to read on a long flight. It collects together many of the articles and essays that I have generated over the past 35 years, covering science, how science works and how what we now call science was put together. It even includes some of the blog entries that have appeared here. In due course, it will be released as an e-book.

Here's a small taste of it...

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After a set of Icelandic islands called the Geirfuglasker Skerries were submerged by volcanic activity in 1830, there was just one home left for the Great Auks, on the island of Eldey, off the coast of Iceland. On June 3, 1844, an expedition of 14 men went there, intent on getting specimens before all the birds died. They were sent there by an Icelandic bird collector named Carl Siemsen.

Later in the 19^th century, Symington Grieve described their raid. Although there were 14 in the party, led by a Vilhjälmur Hakonarsson, only three men actually landed on the island: Sigurör Islefsson, Ketil Ketilsson and Jón Brandsson. Grieve tells it like this, using the name Garefowl to refer to the Great Auk:

Public domain.

As the men clambered up they saw two Garefowl sitting among numberless other rock-birds (Uria troille and Alca torda) and at once gave chase. The Garefowl showed not the slightest disposition to repel the invaders, but immediately ran along under the high cliff, their heads erect, their wings somewhat extended. They uttered no cry of alarm, and moved, with their short steps, about as quickly as a man could walk. Jón [Brandsson], with outstretched arms, drove one into a corner, where he soon had it fast.

Sigurör [Islefsson] and Ketil [Ketilsson] pursued the second, and the former seized it close to the edge of the rock, here risen to a precipice some fathoms high, the water being directly below it. Ketil then returned to the sloping shelf whence the birds had started, and saw an egg lying on the lava slab, which he knew to be a Garefowl’s. He took it up but finding it broken put it down again. Whether there was not another egg is uncertain. All this took place in much less time than it takes to tell.

Vilhjälmur Hakonarsson went back to Eldey in 1846 and again in 1860 looking for Great Auks but saw none. A species had been snuffed out in the name, not of science, but of an amateur enthusiasm for a sad sort of stamp collecting, in a pale imitation of science.

Other ways to extinguish life

Large game animals with impressive pelts or horns are equally at threat, but so are smaller animals. Species can also be endangered by what we loosely call pollution, or using fancier terms, environmental degradation. Plastic bags that blow or wash into the sea, pesticides that drift away from crops, chemical fertilisers that wash into streams and rivers are just a few of the problems that animals have to contend with.

Two other causes of endangerment are habitat destruction and habitat fragmentation. Habitat destruction comes about when we take land that is carrying an ecosystem and turn it into roads, dams, farms or housing.

Nearly half of Earth’s land area has been transformed by humans. Habitat fragmentation comes about when a continuous forest is broken up into small islands with small populations.

Imagine a family of gorillas in a forest which is wiped out. In time, other gorillas will wander in, find there are no other gorillas there, and set up a new family—so long as they can reach there.

Open fields, cities, or even roads may be enough to block new gorillas from coming in. It matters not whether they were killed by disease, fire, hunting or something else: others of their species must come in to replace them, or the species goes locally extinct.

The same thing happens with every species in an ecosystem: if new animals or plants can find their way in, they eventually will, but when a pocket of rain forest is surrounded by farms, this is less likely.

The answer, say conservationists, is to set up wildlife corridors. If corridors are established, the biodiversity of small pockets can be maintained, but there is still a problem, because fewer species can be maintained in a smaller area.

Islands of less than 3000 km² are at particular risk, and there are about 40 nations with areas less than that size. In order of size, the small nations under threat (mostly islands) are Midway Island, Tokelau, Macau, Nauru, Tuvalu, Norfolk Island (an Australian territory), Bermuda, San Marino, Montserrat, Jersey, Liechtenstein, the Marshall Islands, Guernsey, Niue, St Kitts and Nevis, Maldives, Malta, Grenada, Virgin Islands, Mayotte, St Helena, Turks and Caicos, Andorra, Seychelles, Palau, Guam, St Lucia, Singapore, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Tonga, Netherlands Antilles, Sao Tome and Principe, Hong Kong, Martinique, Faroe Islands, Guadeloupe, Mauritius, Réunion, Western Samoa.

Extinction is demenaing of life.