In the early days of ornithology, before high quality optical equipment was available, it bore more than a passing resemblance to hunting. The only sure way to identify a bird was to shoot it. It was said, ‘What’s hit is history, what’s missed is a mystery’. If successful you could have your quarry stuffed for your personal taxidermy collection, or you might donate it to an academic collection. The corpses would be skinned and the pelts preserved with arsenic then stuffed with cotton or something similarly inert. The little mummified bodies were placed in drawers for future reference. Museums and some bird observatories hold huge collections of bird skins and eggs. I remember being cautioned to wash my hands after touching some of the skins in the collection on Fair Isle. Presumably those specimens went up in smoke with the rest of the archive during the fire of 2019. The Natural History Museum has 750,000 skins and over 200,000 clutches of eggs. Art departments also had collections of stuffed specimens. The immortals were set in fanciful natural settings in large glass cases, their plumage faded and their poses decidedly un-natural. I remember my great aunt Chrissie’s house, Carskeoch, had stuffed exotic birds under a glass dome in the drawing room.
Before they recolonised Scotland, the last official breeding record of osprey was in 1916. Prior to this collectors of these fish raptors would make boasts about their shooting prowess; ‘I obtained both birds with a single shot’. At Loch an Eilean in May 1851 the notorious egger Lewis Dunbar stripped off and swam out to the ruined castle on the eponymous island – in a blizzard. The nest atop the castle ruin had been used for many years. In an atypical error Dunbar forgot to take anything to carry the eggs in. He tried putting one of the eggs in his mouth but found he could not breathe. In the end he swam back to shore on his back with an egg in each hand. He blew them immediately, washed them out with whisky and sold them to an English egg collector.
The Portuguese word for the great auk is penguin. (This might be derived from the Welsh pen gwyn meaning ‘white head’ but no one knows for sure.) When Portuguese sailors first travelled to the Southern Hemisphere and saw those other large, flightless, seabirds they named them penguins as well. In fact the two genera are not closely related. The great auk bred on islands in the North Atlantic and was very easy to capture. The other smaller auks including razorbills, puffins and guillemots are still around, but the last great auks in the world were shot to extinction in the mid nineteenth century to supply museums. Those institutions were desperate to have specimens of the fast-disappearing oddity for their collections. As numbers of these huge birds dwindled towards zero, prices kept rising and their fate was sealed. They did not deserve to be harvested so easily and so completely to feed brutish, thoughtless sailors. Still less to be permanently obliterated from history to supply Victorian museums with specimens.
If some master genetic engineer ever asked me what bird I would most like to see resurrected from extinction from its dessicated DNA I would probably go for the great auk. Imagine the giant razorbill restored to the North Atlantic! And speaking of giants, why not resuscitate the South Island giant moa? The moa’s distant ancestors flew to New Zealand 40 million years ago. Having settled in and found no predators, they gave up flying, grew to a height of 12 feet and swelled to a weight of 250 kilograms. When the Polynesians arrived in the fifteenth century the bird’s great height and weight were no deterrent to hungry Maoris. As the moas disappeared, the astonishing 15 kilogram Haast’s eagle, which preyed on them, was robbed of its food source and it went too. New Zealand still has species of shrub with long outward-facing spines and small leaves (matagouri) thought to have evolved to protect the plants against grazing moas.
There is no doubt in my mind that we and our fellow homo sapiens in our teeming hordes are the entirety of the Earth’s problems. When it comes to getting depressed about it I take some comfort from the late great George Carlin. His eco-heresy is that we are going away – and the planet will be fine…
The Bohemian Waxwing 