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Praise for The Living and the Dead

‘Conor O’Brien brings a number of Irish “Dead Zoo” specimens vividly to life in his imaginative reconstructions of wildlife loss and return. Widely researched, the book puts in context the regretful historical effects of habitat and species loss and the urgency to be aware of their ongoing vulnerability.’

Gordon D’Arcy, author of Ireland’s Lost Birds

‘A remarkable dive into the world of Ireland’s lost animals and the stunning return of some of them. An evocatively written exploration into the tragic loss of some of Ireland’s natural wonders.’

Pádraic Fogarty, ecologist and author of Whittled Away

‘At once a lament for creatures we have lost and a celebration of the power of nature to recover and regenerate, The Living and the Dead is an essential read for anyone with even a passing interest in Ireland’s natural heritage.’

Niall Hatch, Birdwatch Ireland

‘A timely and well-researched reminder that humans have caused the extinction of many species from this island but have the ability to bring others back from the brink. A personal and persuasive book.’

Richard Nairn, ecologist and

author

For Lucy.

May yours be an Ireland where cranes dance and eagles fly.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the support of some wonderful people.

In particular, I would like to thank Eric Dempsey for giving me his time and advice, as well as Dr Kate McAney of the Vincent Wildlife Trust and Margaux Pierrel of the National Parks and Wildlife Service for very kindly allowing me to accompany them surveying lesser horseshoe bats.

Additional thanks go to Professor Greg Breed of the University of Alaska, as well as Pádraig Whooley (of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group), Susan Parks and Michael J. Moore for their input on the right whale chapter of this book.

Further thanks go to Vicky Knight (of the Vincent Wildlife Trust), Niamh Roche (Bat Conservation Ireland), Dr Jörn Gessner (for his advice on the sturgeon chapter), Peter Eeles (for his help with the mountain ringlet chapter) and Peter Phillips.

A final thank you to Butterfly Conservation and the West Oxfordshire Farmland Bird Project for their help.

To my family, for tolerating a son, husband and father in his pursuit of creatures living and dead, my gratitude.

Introduction

That smell.

It’s an aroma that brings childhood excitement flooding back to me. Sweet, pleasant and yet artificial, like turpentine and yet not. The smell of preservative. The smell of death. It hits you before you enter the museum proper.

The great antlers, over three metres from tip to tip, greet me as I step inside this treasure trove of Victorian natural history collecting. They crown the skeletons of two Irish elk stags, among the largest deer that ever lived. A female completes the triumvirate that presides over all visitors entering Dublin’s Natural History Museum. Together, they form a vanguard from the distant past, emissaries from an Ireland emerging from the grip of the last Ice Age into an uncertain future, a human future. A world now gone forever.

In the cabinets all around them, a gallery of Irish wildlife locked in death. Ambassadors from almost every Irish bird species stand or perch, preserved in taxidermied torpor: ravens from Luggala, cuckoos from Terenure, merlins from Clare and Kerry. Bullfinches in a wilting gorse bush crouch over eggs that will never hatch, while a beakful of pigeon remains stuck in permanent transit between peregrine parent and chick.

They share their cabinet terracing with more exotic specimens. A White’s thrush stands entombed in a jar, having survived an incredible journey all the way from Siberia to

The Living and the Dead

Westport, only to end up shot and stuffed in 1885. A crane, a bird that feels utterly out of place in Ireland today, rears up to my chest. It dwarfs a nearby Eskimo curlew, now feared extinct, segregated in a glass box. This specimen was apparently collected in County Sligo. If only the person who killed it knew the harm they were doing.

The museum is more than just an ornithological catalogue. Practically every Irish animal species has found its way into its terminal embrace. Many are posed in a simulacrum of sentience. A pine marten snarls in futile frustration at her cub latching onto her tail; hares freeze mid-gallop. Above them all, a gargantuan basking shark oversees the collection with a grimace.

It’s hard not to admire the incredible skill of the taxidermy and the array of exquisite specimens amassed over generations. And yet, you’re reminded that each one was once a living creature: a parent sundered from its young, a chick torn from a nest, an endangered species one individual closer to the precipice. Some of the creatures that make up the collection remain endangered to this day. Others have already crossed that threshold.

A few have even made it back again.

I’ve been fascinated by extinct creatures for as long as I can remember. I grew up on a diet of dinosaurs and other prehistoric megafauna. This is why I first became enamoured with the mighty Irish elk standing guard at the entrance to the National History Museum. What made these creatures even more compelling was that here were prehistoric giants from our own island, who once roamed the primordial plains

Introduction

of Limerick or whose great antlers cast many-tined shadows across the mountains of Wicklow or Dublin. This was no dodo from far-off Mauritius, or thylacine from the eucalypt forest of Tasmania. Here was an extinct icon all of our own. The giant deer, of course, were lost to distant antiquity. It has been thousands of years since they roamed the Irish landscape – or, indeed, anywhere else. But what other creatures have come and gone since then?

You can’t choose the times you live in. And I am sad to say that we live in an age of extinction. Since about ad 1500, the rate of human damage wrought on Planet Earth has driven more than 700 vertebrate species to their doom. Among them are 181 birds, 171 amphibians and 113 mammals. For invertebrates, the picture is even more grim; up to half a million species of insect are thought to have gone extinct in just the last 150 years. Most of these vanished with few, if any, to mourn their loss. In a world where we are only beginning to understand the vital role insects play at the base of so many food webs – including our own – we might yet come to rue their ongoing demise.

Ireland hasn’t been spared the tidal wave of extinction that has followed in the wake of human progress, and we are still counting the damage. Fortunately, only one of the species in this book – a magnificent flightless seabird known as the great auk – is lost entirely to the world. But creatures once abundant here are now altogether absent. There are no corn buntings to be heard on our farms, nor capercaillies in our forests. Pádraic Fogarty, author of the landmark book Whittled Away on Ireland’s (depressing) environmental history, estimates that over 100 species have become extinct here since the arrival of man. Some are irrefutably gone: outside of captivity, you are not going to find a wolf in Ireland now, no matter how hard

you look. Others have been absent for so long, or are now so incredibly rare, that they can be practically discounted as a going concern in Ireland. One was even so rare its presence here at any point remains under dispute, giving the creature an air of mystique that just enhances its appeal.

Even in a country as small as Ireland, there is always somewhere to see and a story to unwind.

This book looks at seven such creatures, from the Lilliputian to the leviathan. In the various chapters, I will be chasing ghosts, travelling from the mountains of Leinster to the rugged coast of Mayo to walk in the footsteps of creatures long gone. It will take me around the country, to places I’ve known my whole life and others I’ve never visited before. Even in a country as small as Ireland, there is always somewhere to see and a story to unwind. In much the same way as we walk historic battlefields countrywide to try to evoke the experiences of those who died there long ago, I’ll be hoping to go beyond the glass cabinets of the museum to find, if not the beasts and birds themselves, then the places they once called home, how they have changed, and how those changes led to their decline. In so doing, I will unravel the tragic stories of their extinction.

Within their tales the broader narrative of the rise and fall of Ireland’s habitats comes to light. As the Ice Age grasslands that once nourished the giant deer gave way to vast temperate rainforests, a whole new host of forest creatures emerged to call Ireland home. The loss of those forests would spell doom for some of our species, forcing our last wolves into the hills, while woodland specialists, like the woodpecker, disappeared altogether. As our forests faded, an agricultural Ireland of the

kind so many of us are familiar with today emerged. This, in turn, became a welcome home for farmland specialists, creatures designed to thrive on a verdant steppe that could take equally well to the man-made grassland now carved out of Ireland’s lost wilderness. Sadly, as we shall see, changes to that habitat would send some of our farmland birds –including the iconic corncrake – into a near-terminal decline. For others, the changes were too much. Man giveth, then man taketh away.

What we are left with is a drama, from triumph to tragedy, playing out over the course of centuries. It’s a dimension of Irish history that remains largely unknown and untold. It mirrors the highs and lows of human history in Ireland, as the forces of colonisation, industrialisation and modernity conspired to change our landscapes beyond all recognition. In so doing, they killed off some of our most spectacular wildlife. It’s a story of rivers dammed, mountainsides grazed and burnt bare, and fields sprayed until they are sterile. This, sadly, was the Ireland I grew up in. Still beautiful? Of course. A fantastic place to spend a childhood and with enough wildlife to imbue me with a love of nature that is still central to who I am. But a country as wild as it once was? Far from it.

They say you don’t miss what you never had. However, I can’t help but wonder if Ireland is less now for what we have long lost. With the disappearance of species that our ancestors once shared the forests and fields with, the creatures they saw, whose sounds formed part of the natural symphony they knew, what have we lost in the process? Is our experience of Ireland poorer for the vanishing of creatures that left their imprint on our ancestors’ folk tales, art and even their laws? Incredibly, we still have people in Ireland old enough to have heard the corn bunting sing – a bird now lost to us altogether.

The

Living and the Dead

I wonder who the last person in Ireland was to hear a wolf howl. Did they realise the magnitude of what they were hearing? With this in mind, if you know anyone who can recall a time when the likes of corn buntings, corncrakes and other birds now largely gone from the country could still be heard on farms nationwide, cherish them. They are a living link to a disappeared Ireland, part of a memory we should treasure for as long as it lives with us.

It’s not like this corrosion is confined to the past. It continues, on a localised level, all around us. There is a generation of children growing up in Kerry without hearing the song of the yellowhammer, now gone as a breeding bird in that county. I, a Wicklow native, had to cross the country to find my first corncrake, something that would have been unthinkable to my grandparents. It is a depressing thought, but in the decades to come will I be telling my daughter about species I saw that she never had the chance to enjoy?

Even if the impact on our culture from the loss of wildlife we once had can’t be quantified, the impact on the ecosystem, in many cases, can. At the time when so much of our lost wildlife ebbed into extinction, our own understanding of the natural world was far less sophisticated than it is now. Ecosystems in which every creature, from the minuscule mountain ringlet butterfly to the mighty right whale, had its place lost vital chains as key species were removed by man one by one. So we wiped out apex predators (wolves, eagles) and persecuted others (pine marten) without a second thought as to how this would impact everything else. But impact it did – and we’re still seeing that impact today in our severely depleted and compromised ecosystems, which are, sadly, so much poorer than they once were. Don’t believe me? Just take in an Irish mountainside devastated by deer and sheep,

or a stretch of trees along whose branches the beautiful red squirrel no longer runs.

This is the legacy of the wild Ireland we’ve lost. The creatures that have gone with it still have fascinating (if tragic) stories to tell us. All we can do is wander the desolate spaces they once called home, in homage to what once was there. We can learn from what was done to them – and aspire to consign the mistakes of the past to the past. If that past feels like a story written in death, the present (and future) gives hope for the creatures still living. Ours is an age of extinction, but it’s also a time when a desire to preserve the natural world has never been more acute. This is certainly the case in Ireland.

Just to prove that all is not lost, part two of this book will take us on a tour of the living. In it, we’ll meet some species once lost that have returned and recolonised Ireland –either under their own steam or with the help of man through reintroductions. Others, like the pine marten and the grey partridge, previously on the verge of extinction, have been saved either through a cessation of human hostility or an incredible conservation effort. Once, we destroyed the habitats our lost creatures needed. Now, we’re creating and preserving refuges for our endangered wildlife: abandoned buildings for bats, ponds for the natterjack toad. All of them have benefited from the work of dedicated groups and individuals across Ireland to stem the tide of extinction and conserve the wildlife we still have. It is to their stories we must turn for hope for a future in which man and nature can coexist and, with a little compromise, even flourish together.

Our ancestors bequeathed us an Ireland shorn of some of its most charismatic creatures. Now a father, I would like to see my daughter inherit a more biodiverse Ireland than the one I was born into. Yet amid all the ecological gloom, we

have some incredible successes to look to. In 1999 Gordon D’Arcy’s book Ireland’s Lost Birds chronicled eleven species that had vanished from Ireland over the centuries. In the quarter century since then, eight of these have started breeding in Ireland again (although sadly we have lost another, the corn bunting, while more are under threat). When I was a child, the return of the white-tailed eagle or great spotted woodpecker would have looked like distant pipe dreams. Both have since come true. On top of this, Ireland is now a vital repository for species that have declined or even gone extinct elsewhere in Europe, such as the fascinating lesser horseshoe bat.

There remains much to be done; some would even call it an uphill road. One hundred and twenty-four of our insect species are now at risk of extinction according to the National Biodiversity Data Centre. The plight of some of our rarest breeding birds (including the curlew) and native mammals (such as the pine marten) are now well known. But part two of this book will testify to nature’s incredible resilience, its ability to right past wrongs if given space and time, and our own capacity to conserve what is left – however fragile, however few. It’s not too late. The future is still for us to write.

For the tales of things that were and things that are, I must now leave the museum behind. It’s time to hit the road. Let’s strike out on a trail through place and time, to the haunts of the dead and the holdouts of the living.

Part I

Where Wolves Once Walked

Great Auk

A narrow, winding lane, a thatched cottage, a whitewashed old coastguard station and blackthorn hedges crowned with stonechats. And I’m there. Ballymacaw Beach. The sound of the waves greets me as I open the car door. This is one of the things I miss the most now I’m living inland. Although I’m very content in my little Eden in the Boyne Valley, I always find myself drawn back to the sea.

Having the Celtic Sea so close was one of the things I liked most about living in Waterford. The coast of the county is studded with little coves like this. Before me, a layer of coarse gravel dusted over the beach gives way to stretches of dull brown sand and rocks rounded and shaped by the waves. The little beach is wrapped in two great piers of rock, narrowing to a choke point at the entrance of the bay. Beyond them I can already see the swell, the Celtic Sea chomping at the bit to get in.

A pair of ravens croak as they fly overhead, disappearing in the direction of Brownstown Head, from where I’ve just driven. Beyond this little bay, the cliffs follow the coast westward before peaking at the Head, capped with its signature twin signal towers. From above the little beach, I fix my eye on a fishing boat far out in the haze, sitting atop a thin layer of dark blue water that demarcates the break between sea and sky.

It’s too tranquil a setting for a tragedy, yet it was somewhere along this stretch of coast that Ireland’s last known

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great auk, among the very last of its species, was caught. Before it met its fate, I can’t help but wonder if it ever took shelter here, this quiet cove protecting it from the worst weather of the open sea.

pCobbled footpaths between stately Georgian splendour lead me to Trinity College’s Zoological Museum, a little gem of natural history hidden in Dublin’s south city centre. The small collection has plenty to catch your interest, pulled together from specimens gathered all over the world. Only one of them, though, captivates me. Locked in its glass coffin is the stuffed form of a great auk: Ireland’s only flightless bird, and our only bird to become completely extinct (from here, from everywhere) within historical times.

The size is the first thing that strikes you. Dr Robert J. Burkitt, an amateur ornithologist, took detailed measurements of this great auk before giving it to Trinity: twenty-nine inches (nearly seventy-four centimetres) long in total. Fully grown, a great auk would stand around eighty centimetres tall, slightly bigger than the average penguin. In fact tall enough to peck my two-year-old daughter on the nose.

Of the seventy-eight or so stuffed great auks in existence, this is thought to be the only one in juvenile plumage, making it even more precious. The feathering is mottled brown all over the back and head, fading to off-white on the chest. It’s a far cry from the clear-cut, black-and-white plumage of so many paintings; indeed, in all my research I’ve never come across a reproduction of a juvenile great auk. Even the diffuse, juvenile colouring, though, cannot hide the distinctive white patch on the face, a cushion between the eyes and the enormous

hatchet of a beak, thin and grooved, like a razorbill’s writ large. You could be forgiven for thinking this was a penguin, but no penguin has a bill like that.

This specimen, a young female, was the last confirmed great auk captured in Ireland or Britain. She arrived in Trinity College at the end of a truly remarkable journey. The details are, sadly, somewhat patchy in places, and so we have to make do with the few facts we have. In May 1834 a man named David Hardy spotted the bird swimming near the cliffs between Ballymacaw and Brownstown Head. Even at that time, the great auk – known then as the ‘garefowl’ – had largely become a creature of myth and legend along the coasts of Europe where it had once thrived, a species of murre (auk) so huge it had lost the ability to fly. The rarity of this find was not lost on its human observers – nor was its value.

The task of capturing the bird fell to a local fisherman, named in sources only as Kirby. For all the centuries that great auks were hunted by man, this usually took place when the birds came ashore. This young auk, however, was halfstarved, so Kirby used sprats to tempt the bird close enough to catch her in his landing net. Then she was brought ashore. This great auk would never put out to sea again.

Ten days later, the bird was bought by Francis Davis of Waterford (what, if anything, Kirby received for this priceless specimen is unknown). Davis then passed her on to Jacob Goff of the aristocratic Goff family in Horetown, County Wexford, who was possibly his brother-in-law. Where the bird was kept for the remaining four months of her life is unclear, but Horetown House, the ancestral seat of the Goffs, would appear to be a safe bet.

For a time after she was captured, the auk refused to

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eat. Eventually, potatoes and milk had to be forced down her throat. Thereafter, she ate voraciously. Fish offered to her would be swallowed whole; curiously for a seabird, she seemed to prefer trout to pelagic fish. Even more bizarrely, for a creature built to swim, she developed an aversion to water. Unable to fly, this would have left her with no choice but to waddle around the halls and manicured grounds she called home – that is assuming she was granted the freedom to do so.

Her captors remembered the auk as fierce but stately. They recalled how she would stroke her head with her webbed foot and the curious way she shook her head when offered a fish, clearly savouring the meal to come. And yet, the Wexford countryside must have been a strange and unsettling surrounding for a seabird, so far away from the North Atlantic for which she was built.

After the bird died, Francis Davis gave her to Burkitt. The skin was impeccably preserved, stuffed and mounted. Ten years later, Burkitt presented the specimen to Trinity College. Animal collecting was all the rage in the nineteenth century; scientists often cared more for stuffed animals than living ones, the rarer the better, and were willing to pay accordingly. Trinity agreed to pay Burkitt £50 a year for the rest of his life. This ‘Great Auk Pension’ would amount to more than €6,500 today. In a country then on the cusp of catastrophe, you have to wonder how many mouths could have been fed, or evictions stayed, by that kind of money.

It was a stark reminder of how valuable the great auk had become in the final years of its existence. A price had been put on its head. With that, the species’ days were numbered.

Blackhall Strand, County Wexford. It’s just over an hour’s drive from Ballymacaw, on the far side of Hook Head. Instead of an enclosed space hemmed in by headlands, I see a long, thin stretch of beach terminating in low cliffs and jagged rocks at each end. The strand peters out into clumps of grey rock festooned with brown seaweed and barnacles, stepping stones leading the eye to the Keeragh Islands hanging in the water just offshore.

The islands are like inverse plates, sloping gently downwards at each end before sinking into the sea. In the glare, it’s hard to make them out in any great detail, even though they are less than two kilometres from shore. I scan both of them through my telescope. Rocky shores give way to gentle grassy slopes crested with bushes. On one, a triangle of stone betrays the ruin of an old house, roofless, exposed to the elements. This was never a permanent abode. Despite being so close to the coast, the Keeraghs had a treacherous reputation. The islands are ringed with reefs, and ships often fell afoul of these. The house dates from the nineteenth century and was built to offer overnight refuge to any poor sailors who ran aground. Now its ruins are nothing but a perch for a gull, one of many that throng around the island. A great northern diver patrols just offshore, the dagger-like bill held aloft. It might contrast with the curved cleaver of the great auk, but apart from that, the body shape and size are much the same. Behind it, the outline of the Keeraghs is pierced in places by tall, black birds – not great auks, sadly, but cormorants, many of which breed here.

For a flightless bird, the gentle shores rising out of the Celtic Sea must have looked very inviting. Richard J. Ussher, the great Irish ornithologist of the turn of the last century, certainly thought so. Great auk bones were uncovered in

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ancient kitchen middens in the sand dunes around Tramore. This led Ussher to speculate that there must, at one time, have been a colony in the area. But where? He saw the Keeraghs as somewhere ‘eminently suited for such a bird to breed on’. Accounts from the eighteenth century speak of penguin-like birds in the waters and islands around Ireland. It’s likely these refer to the great auk, and the Keeraghs might well have been some of those islands on which they were found.

If Ussher was correct, the Ballymacaw bird could have begun life here. From what little was recorded of the great auk before it went extinct, we can piece together a loose biography. As with all our living auks – razorbills, guillemots, puffins –her parents came ashore to breed in summer. Like its cousin the razorbill, the great auk had a yellow mouth, a striking deviation from its otherwise black-and-white uniform. This flash of colour probably served to attract a mate. So, too, did the grooves in the enormous bill and the splash of white on the face as the birds assumed their breeding finery. Great auks are thought to have paired for life. Out of one such union, the Ballymacaw bird was conceived.

The white egg would have been vividly marked in black or brown, its pattern as unique as a fingerprint on a human hand.

The enormous egg, over twelve centimetres long, from which she hatched would have been laid by June. It was pyriform in shape, broad at the base before narrowing to a rounded tip. As such, if you tipped it, it would only roll in a circle and not go careering into the sea, an adaptation common to many seabirds. Eggs like this are more common in birds that don’t bother with a nest, laying their eggs instead on bare stone. The white egg would have been

vividly marked in black or brown, its pattern as unique as a fingerprint on a human hand. In living guillemots, the individually patterned eggs help their parents recognise them amid the congestion of the colony. This might well have been the same for the parents of our great auk.

By July, she would have emerged from her egg. As the Ballymacaw bird was among the very last of her kind, she might have been among the few great auk still on the Keeraghs. Had she hatched in an earlier time, she could have emerged into the full cacophony of colonial life: hundreds, even thousands of great auks teeming on the rocks around her. They were noisy birds; natives of St Kilda in Scotland described their racket as ‘like that made by a gannet but much louder’. The Keeraghs could have been a deafening place for a young great auk to spend its early days, as towering adults competed for mates and squabbled for space.

The young bird’s stint on the islands would have been short-lived. From what we know of the great auk, gleaned from first-hand accounts of people interested in studying rather than killing it, the bird had evolved to spend minimal time on land. Both parents probably took turns to incubate for the forty days she needed to mature in the egg before hatching. After that, our great auk may have spent as little as three weeks being fed on the Keeraghs, reaching about a quarter of her adult size before one or both of her parents enticed her into the sea with their calls. That first plunge must have been frightening for a chick who had known nothing but terra firma. Sooner or later, though, she would have braved the waves, and may even have hitched a lift on a parent’s back as she acclimatised to the water. The sea, in which she should have spent the rest of her life, bar a brief interlude on land each summer, awaited.

This brief time on land – a fleeting chapter between egg and sea – helps explain why accounts of juvenile great auks are so rare. This makes the Ballymacaw great auk even more remarkable, the final ambassador of her kind frozen in adolescence.

Arguably no bird that has ever lived was as well built for life at sea as the great auk. Much like the penguins south of the equator, the auk had sacrificed the ancestral avian birthright of flight to become the consummate living torpedo, able to easily outpace a six-oared rowboat. Legs placed extremely far back on the body might have left the auk clumsy on land but made for perfect propulsion underwater, aided by a sleek, hydrodynamic body and laterally compressed bill. Disproportionately small wings provided minimal resistance as the bird pursued prey at devastating speed, while narrow nostrils and tiny ear openings prevented water from flooding in. The bird’s internal architecture was equally impressive. V-shaped ribs anchored to fused vertebrae shielded the auk’s organs from the immense pressures of feeding at depths that would crush a human diver.

In a classic example of convergent evolution at work, the auk’s penguin-like colouration – black on top, white below – helped to shield its silhouette from approaching prey. The large white patch on the face – a feature shared with the killer whale – could also have played a part in the hunt, diverting attention away from the razor-sharp beak. The power of the auk’s bill was evidenced by eyewitnesses. They recalled the noise it could make when snapped closed and the blood it could draw from human fowlers, slicing through a calfskin jacket and into the arm. This suggests that the auk was amply equipped to eat crabs and other crustaceans, as well as the sculpins, lumpsuckers and other bottom-dwelling fish that

made up much of its diet. An adult auk would have needed up to two pounds of fish a day to survive – all the more reason to get the growing chicks out to sea quickly, making them easier to feed.

The auk ranged widely across the North Atlantic, from Norway in the east to Newfoundland in the west. It seems to have filled much the same ecological niche in the northern hemisphere as penguins still do south of the equator. In this respect, it was even more unique: there are eighteen penguin species plying the waters of the southern hemisphere, but the great auk was the only comparable bird in the North Atlantic. There are a few possible reasons for this. For one thing there are fewer larger landmasses south of the equator, so the penguins had more ocean for spreading out and diversifying. In Antarctica they also had a vast continent devoid of terrestrial predators, something denied to seabirds in the North Atlantic and which undoubtedly limited the breeding range of the great auk.

Despite the auk’s vast domain, it is only known for certain to have bred at a few specific sites. These included Funk Island (off Canada), St Kilda (Scotland) and a few of the smaller islands off Iceland. But when it did come ashore, it did so in vast numbers, as an eyewitness from Funk Island describes: ‘The quantity of birds which resort to this island is beyond belief … as soon as you put your foot on shore you meet with such thousands of them that you cannot find a place for your feet, and they are so lazy they will not attempt to move out of your way.’ Such abundance would have made the birds seem like an inexhaustible resource – a lethal miscalculation.

The great auk was known by many names to the seafaring peoples of Europe. In Irish it was an falcóg mhór, in Icelandic

the geirfugl, in English the garefowl. Another possible name for the bird might have come from Welsh: pen gwyn, meaning white head. As such, the great auk was, in fact, the original penguin. When European sailors came across the birds we now call penguins as they explored the southern oceans, these new flightless seabirds were thus named after the pen gwyn they were so familiar with from the seas back home. Therefore, when Robert J. Burkitt recorded his acquisition of a ‘young penguin’ on 7 September 1834, he was not technically wrong. In one of those bizarre twists of nomenclature, the great auk’s legacy lives on, an entire hemisphere away, in birds to which it is completely unrelated.

How tragic, then, that the original ‘penguin’ is now lost to us. Man hunted the great auk from the time he could reach the remote islands on which it bred. The ancient Irish certainly did so; kitchen middens in Antrim, Clare, Donegal and Waterford bear witness to this. The distance between these sites raises the tantalising possibility that the auk might once have bred around the Irish coast. Ussher considered this a possibility, citing Rathlin Island off the coast of Antrim as another potential breeding site. If this was the case, it couldn’t have gone unnoticed by early hunter-gatherers. They could scarcely have asked for better quarry: a large, fat seabird that couldn’t fly or run away.

This taste for great auk flesh persisted into historical times. As with other seabirds, there is even evidence that the great auk was fair game during Lent, qualifying as fish rather than meat. As a result, the great auk was a rare bird in the seas of Europe as early as the sixteenth century. Then, having depleted their fish stocks at home, European fisherman eagerly explored the New World – and also the vast great auk colonies that awaited them there. The French explorer

Jacques Cartier killed over a thousand when he landed on Funk Island in 1534, filling two boats with dead birds in just half an hour.

Worse was to come. Auk feathers, designed to keep their owner insulated against the chill of the North Atlantic, were perfect for pillows. Groups of men began to arrive at the colonies each summer to collect them. This was a gruesome process, turning one of the North Atlantic’s great natural spectacles into a horror show. An infamous quote from 1794 details the almost unimaginable cruelty with which this harvest took place:

If you come for their feathers you do not give yourself the trouble of killing them, but lay hold of one and pluck the best of his feathers: you turn the poor penguin adrift to perish at his leisure … Whilst you are on this island you are in the constant practice of horrid cruelties, for you not only skin them alive but you also burn them alive to cook their own bodies with.

As lonely as the last months of the Ballymacaw bird’s life might have been, cut adrift from the sea, it was certainly a better fate than this.

Only in Iceland did the auk hang on. The last breeding population in the whole world made its stand on one small island, the Geirfuglasker (‘great auk rock’). Protected by offshore currents, as well as the superstition that surrounded the island, these auks appeared to have found their refuge. Tragically, a volcanic eruption dragged the rock beneath the waves in 1830. In its absence, the remaining great auks

were forced to locate to Eldey, a sea-stack much closer to the mainland and, therefore, accessible to human hunters. As the great auk grew increasingly rare, the price on its head grew increasingly large. The last birds were killed not for pillow stuffing but for their intact skins to be passed on to museums and private collectors in Europe. It was for them that the last known pair of great auks was killed in 1844, the same year the Ballymacaw bird would find her final resting place in Trinity College.

Occasional sightings were still reported. One of the more credible came from Belfast Lough in September 1845. There, according to William Thompson’s Natural History of Ireland (1851), wildfowl hunter H. Bell saw ‘two large birds, the size of Great Northern Divers (which were well known to him) but with much smaller wings. He imagined they might be young birds of that species until he remarked that their wings were “much more clumsy”. They kept almost constantly diving, and went to an extraordinary distance each time with great rapidity.’

If this is true, these would have been among the very last great auks on Earth. Soon, the great auk would live only in folk memory and popular culture. The bird drifts into the dreams of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses. But its most famous, and tragic, incarnation would come atop the All-Alone Stone in Charles Kingsley’s classic children’s novel The Water Babies, recounting the cause of its demise: ‘Once we were a great nation, spread all over the Northern Isles. But men shot us so, knocked us on the head and took our eggs … At last, there were none of us left …’

The capercaillie is thought to have once lived in the ancient woodlands of Ireland, until deforestation took a dreadful toll.

Now extinct in Ireland, the corn bunting used to be a common sight on farmland across the country. © Richard Brooks (rspb-images.com)

The mysterious mountain ringlet is thought to have lived on the slopes of Croagh Patrick. © Sandra Standbridge | Dreamstime.com

North Atlantic right whale. In the early twentieth century, this species was hunted by Norwegian whalers operating out of Mayo. © 6381380 iStock