by David Day
Professor A. Newton – 1861
The Last Garefowl Hunt – 4 June 1844, Eldey Island, Iceland
As the three men leapt from the boat and clambered up on the rocks they saw two Garefowls sitting among numberless other rock-birds, and at once gave chase. The Garefowls showed not the slightest disposition to repel the invaders, but immediately ran along under the high cliff, their heads erect, their little wings somewhat extended. They uttered no cry of alarm, and moved with their short steps, about as quickly as a man could walk. Jon Brandsson, with outstretched arms, drove one into a corner, where he soon had it fast. Sigurdr 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 was broken, put it down again. All this took place in much less time than it takes to tell it.
Newton gives this account as being recorded in 1861, just 14 years after the event of the slaying of this last pair of Great Auks on the Icelandic skerry of Eldey. Another oral account confirms that Brandsson and Islefsson each killed a bird, but Ketilsson, frustrated at returning empty-handed, smashed the last intact egg with his boot. A third account, by James Wolley, was published in Ibis in 1861: “The capture of these two birds was effected through the efforts of an expedition of fourteen men, led by Vilhjaimur Hakonarsson; but only three were able to land on the rock, and they at great risk, namely, Sigurdr Islefsson, Ketil Ketilsson, and Jon Brandsson. Only two Great Auks were seen, and both were taken – Jon capturing one, and Sigurdr the other. It appears that this event took place between the 2nd and 5th June 1844. It appears that this expedition was undertaken at the instigation of Herr Carl Siemsen, who was anxious to obtain the specimens… the birds were sold for eighty rigsbank-dollars, or about £9.”
It is notably ironic that Great Auk relics have continued to appreciate in value over the years since its extinction. In 1934, in the midst of the Depression, one stuffed Great Auk sold for nearly $5,000, or five years’ wages for a fisherman; and a single egg for two years’ wages. Then, on 4 March 1971, the Icelandic Natural History Museum paid £9,000 for a single mounted specimen of a Great Auk.
ALPHA AND OMEGA
Great Auk or Garefowl – 1844
In the year 1844, Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Stood on the iron deck of the first transatlantic passenger liner
As the age of sail gave way to the age of steam
In that year, Samuel Morse
Sent a coded message singing through the steel lines
And electric relays of America’s first telegraph
Its chosen path was alongside the railway line
Between Baltimore and Washington
The message was biblical and portentous
It read: “What hath God wrought?”
In the year 1844, three daring men climbed
Up a precarious chimney of volcanic rock
In the wave lashed North Atlantic
Here the last lonely pair of Great Auks
Were chased down and slaughtered
Their last egg crushed
This too heralded the birth of our modern age
“What hath God wrought?”
DARWIN’ S DOGS
SECOND WATCH 7 P. M. VESPERS
WARRAH or ANTARCTIC WOLF-FOX – 1876 Disicyon australis
Lord John Byron – 1741
Adventures of Midshipman John Byron , Falkland Islands
Four creatures of great fierceness resembling wolves, ran up to their bellies in the water to attack the people in the boat and so we were forced to put out to sea again to find a safer haven further along the sandy shore. But soon as we saw the beasts again in a state of alarm we set fire to the tussock to get rid of them. But in this we had greater effect than expected as the country was ablaze as far as the eye could reach for several days, and we could see them running in great numbers.
The Adventures of Midshipman John Byron included the wrecking of his ship The Wager in the notorious Straits of Magellan. Midshipman John Byron eventually became Captain John Byron, the fourth Lord Byron and grandfather of the great Romantic poet George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron. This was one of the most famously harrowing adventures of the time. With the survivors of the wreck, John Byron arrived on the Falklands where he encountered these seemingly ferocious “Wolves.” Like his grandson, Byron was a controversial character who earned the name “Foul Weather Jack” after his promotion to rank of commodore after he completed a record-breaking twenty-two month circumnavigation of the globe. As commander of the Dolphin and Tamar he claimed the Falklands for George III in 1764, despite France’s Marquis de Bougainville’s simultaneous efforts at colonization of those islands that same year.
Curiously, the first description of this “Wolf-Fox” on record came from Richard Simson, who sailed on the British ship The Welfare in 1690: “We saw foxes twice as big as in England, we caught a young one, which we kept on board for some months.” However, Simson’s ship became engaged in a battle in the first Falklands War in which the Wolf-Fox became the first casualty: deciding a battleship was no fit place for man or beast, the poor creature panicked after the first cannon volley and leapt overboard.
Dom Pernetty – 1764
A Voyage to the Malouin Islands , Falkland/Malouin Islands
Officers of M de Bougainville’s suite were, so to speak, attacked by a sort of wild dog; this is, perhaps, the only savage animal and quadruped which exists on the Malouin Islands. But, perhaps too, this animal is not actually fierce, and only came to present itself and approach us, because it had never before seen men. The birds do not fly from us: they approached us as if they had been tame.
Dom Pernetty, also the author of Dissertation Upon America, was a member of the Marquis de Bougainville’s famous expedition. These uninhabited islands in the South Atlantic were called the Malouin Islands by the French, the Malvinas by the Spanish, and the Falkland Islands by the British, and were seen by all three powers as a key safe port for ships attempting to passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The Marquis Louis-Antoine de Bougainville also described this animal and its habits in his Voyage Round the World (1770): “The Wolf-Fox, so called, because it digs itself in earth and because its tail is longer and more fully furnished than that of a wolf, lives in the dunes of the sea shore. It follows the game and plans its trails intelligently, always by the shortest route from one bay to another. On our first landing we quite believed that they were the paths of human inhabitants.”
The Marquis de Bougainville’s historic circumnavigation of the globe in 1766-69 in the frigate La Boudeuse and the store-ship L’Etoile just preceded Captain James Cook’s first voyage in the HMS Endeavour to the South Pacific, where both men were ordered to observe the transit of Venus in 1778. Bougainville’s was only the 20th circumnavigation of the world since Magellan’s 250 years previously, in 1519, and since the second by Sir Francis Drake 190 years before, in 1580. It was also the first circumnavigation by the French, and the first that could be said to have a true “natural science” agenda.
Charles Darwin – 1833
Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle , Falkland Islands
Their numbers have been greatly decreased by the singular facility with which they are destroyed. I was assured by several of the Spanish countymen, who are employed in hunting cattle which run wild on these islands, that they have repeatedly killed them by means of a knife held in one hand and a piece of meat to tempt them to approach in the other. The number of these animals during the past fifty years must have been greatly reduced: already they are entirely banished from half of East Falkland. It cannot, I think, be doubted, that as these islands are now being colonized, before the paper is decayed on which this animal is figured, it will be ranked among those species which have perished from
the earth.
Charles Darwin, while on the islands, observed the “Falkland Island Wolf-Fox” or “Antarctic Wolf” (that was locally known as the Warrah) and collected three skins, two of which were later presented to the London Zoological Society. What interested Darwin most about the Warrah was that it was the only predator on the islands and, apart from a small variety of mouse, the only land mammal. The Warrah seemed to live on an unlikely diet of mice, sea birds, eggs, and (perhaps) small sea mammals.
Just how the Warrah could have evolved on these isolated islands without any substantial prey species, and with no other related species on the islands at all, was something of a mystery to Darwin. As Darwin’s prophecy of extinction quite rapidly came to pass, the mystery of the Warrah’s evolution is not likely to be resolved.
Lt. Colonel Charles Hamilton-Smith – 1839
The Dog Tribe , Edinburgh
The Falkland Island Aquara Dog I discovered in the fur stores of Mr Jacob Astor in New York, a large collection of peltry which came from the Falkland Islands, where, according to reports that gentleman received, his hunters had nearly extirpated the species.
Artist-naturalist-antiquarian-spy, Hamilton-Smith, a veteran of the Napoleonic and 1812-14 Wars, was the author of many books on natural history and an authority on the history of military uniforms and costumes. He was only slightly incorrect, in that the Astor hunters did not quite extirpate the “Antarctic Wolf-Fox” or “Aquara Dog.” A few stragglers hid out in the hills for another few decades, and remarkably enough, in 1868 one captive Warrah was acquired by the London Zoo in Regent’s Park. There it survived for a number of years, narrowly missing out on being the last of its species. That dubious honour was bestowed upon a wild Warrah at Shallow Bay in the Falkland’s Hill Cove Canyon, where it was shot and skinned in 1876.
The first North American wolf to become extinct was the Newfoundland White Wolf in 1911. This animal’s scientific name was Canis lupus beothucus in ironic recognition of the similarly extinct Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland. Other North American wolves exterminated during the 20th century were the Kenai Wolf (Canis lupus alces) of the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska in 1915; the Texas Grey Wolf (Canis lupus monstrabilis) and the New Mexican Mogollon Mountain Wolf (Canis lupus mogollonensis), both in 1920; the Great Plains Lobo Wolf (Canis lupus nubilus) in 1926; the Southern Rocky Mountain Wolf (Canis lupus youngi) in 1940; and the Cascade Mountains Brown Wolf (Canis lupus fuscus) in 1950.
Besides these lost North American forms of Canis lupus (Grey Wolf), all three forms of Canis rufus (Red Wolf) became extinct in the wild (or so interbred with coyotes as to cease to exist as a pure species) by 1980. These were: the Texas Red Wolf (Canis rufus rufus), the Mississippi Red Wolf (Canis rufus gregoryi), and the Florida Black Wolf (Canis rufus floridanis).
WARRAH’S LAST SONG
Warrah or Antarctic Wolf-Fox – 1876
Everybody heard singing in the night
One went to the valley to listen
One climbed the hill to see
A wolf was sitting far off
On a high ridge beneath the stars
He was singing
He was an old wolf
His teeth worn and broken
He was an old wolf
On a high ridge beneath the stars
He was an old wolf
But he sang a young wolf’s song
At daybreak I go
At daybreak I go I run I go
At daybreak I go I run I go
At daybreak I go
He was an old wolf
On a high ridge beneath the stars
He was an old wolf
But he sang a young wolf’s song
At daybreak I go
At daybreak I go I go I go
COLUMBUS ’ CURLEWS
THIRD WATCH 8 P. M. VESPERS
ESKIMO CURLEW – 1985 – Numenius Borealis
Christopher Columbus – 1492
De Las Cassas, Columbus’ Journal, Sargasso Sea
Immense flocks of birds, far more than we have seen before, passed overhead all day long, coming always from the north and heading always towards the southwest. Which led the admiral to believe that they were going to sleep on land or were, perhaps, flying from the winter which was about to come to the lands from which they came. On this account the admiral decided to abandon the westward course and to steer west-south-west, with resolve to proceed in that direction for two days but after two days, more birds were sighted and all that night his men heard birds passing so for two days again they sailed west-south-west, whereupon the Pinta being the swifter ship went on ahead of the Santa Maria and was the first to sight land.
In 1961, the ornithologist James Tooke wrote: “Columbus’ Journal tells us the birds the sailors snared from these immense flocks were plainly field birds that could not possibly find rest on water… . Consequently, Columbus decided to change course and follow the birds in hope of finding land. Five days later, Columbus set foot on the island of San Salvador… . Although the mariners did not know what the non-stop birds were, the date and direction of flight – at that time and in that place – identify them as Eskimo curlews and golden plovers, making their oversea flight one of 2,500 miles.”
John James Audubon – 1833
Ornithological Biography , Labrador
During a thick fog, the Esquimaux Curlews made their appearance near the harbour of Bras d’Or. They evidently came from the north, and arrived in such dense flocks as to remind me of the Passenger Pigeons. They continued to arrive for several days, in flocks which seemed to me to increase in number. They flew in close masses, sometimes high, at other times low, but always with remarkable speed, and performing beautiful evolutions in the air. The appearance of man did not intimidate them, for they would alight so near us, or pass over our heads at so short a distance, that we easily shot them.
The legendary John James Audubon was America’s greatest pioneering ornithologist and artist. Born Jean-Jacques Fougère Audubon in Haiti, he was the illegitimate son of a French naval officer and privateer, and a Spanish Creole mistress from Louisiana. The Haiti 1788 slave rebellion forced Audubon’s father to return to France, where the boy was raised and educated. To avoid conscription in the Napoleonic Wars, the young Audubon travelled to America on a false passport where he became a frontiersman and merchant. Eventually he settled on his life’s passion as an ornithologist and wildlife artist. He was a trailblazer in his portrayal of life-size birds “drawn from life,” and in publishing Birds of America with its magnificent octavo colour plates, which was subscribed to by 1100 patrons and earned him $36,000.
The Eskimo Curlew was one of the champion long-distance migrants: flying from the shores of the Arctic Ocean and the Bering Sea to Labrador and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, then making a 4,000 kilometre non-stop ocean crossing to Guiana and Brazil, then overland to southern Argentina and Chile – and as far south as Tierra del Fuego. The return route was up the Pacific side of South and Central America before reaching Texas and Nebraska, and northward back to the High Arctic in an enormous elliptical loop over the entire North and South American continents. This was an overall migratory flight of over 30,000 km.
Dr. A. S. Packard – 1861
Ornithological Journals , Labrador
The Curlews appeared in great numbers. We saw a flock a mile long and nearly as broad; the sum total of their notes sounded at times like the wind whistling through the rigging of a thousand ton vessel; at others the sound seemed like the jingling of multitudes of sleigh-bells.
The noted Massachusetts ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush, author of Birds of New England, first observed vast flocks of Passenger Pigeons as a child in the 1860’s. When he wrote about them in 1916, he explained the manner of their demise: “When the Passenger Pigeon began to decrease in numbers, about 1880, the marksmen looked about for something to take its place in the market in the spring. They found a new supply in the great quantities of Plover and Curlews in the Mississippi valley tha
t season… . They were shot largely for western markets at first; they began to come into the eastern markets in numbers about 1886… . These markets were: Halifax, Montreal, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Wichita, St. Louis, Chicago and Detroit. Boston shipments alone amounted to tens of thousands of birds every spring through 1887 to 1896.”
Myron H. Swenk – 1915
Procedures of the Nebraska Ornithologists Union
In the 1880’s, hunters would drive out from Omaha and shoot until the slaughtered birds literally filled wagonloads up with the sideboards on. Sometimes when the flight was unusually heavy and the hunters were well supplied with ammunition their wagons were too quickly and easily filled, so whole loads of the birds would be dumped on the prairie, their bodies forming piles as large as a couple of tons of coal where they would be allowed to rot while the hunters proceeded to refill their wagons with fresh victims.
The first president of the Nebraska Ornithologists Union, Dr. Lawrence Bruner, wrote about the Eskimo Curlew in 1896: “These flocks reminded the settlers of the flights of passenger pigeons and the curlews were given the name of ‘Prairie Pigeons’. They contained thousands of individuals and would often form dense masses of birds extending for a quarter to a half mile in length and a hundred yards or more in width. When the flock would alight the birds would cover 40 or 50 acres of ground.”
