The Weston Library in Oxford currently hosts a “Wonder of Birds” exhibition, in which can be seen this Great Auk egg, on loan from the neighboring Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
The Great Auk, a flightless bird that looked a bit like a penguin, was once relatively common, breeding in the northern waters of Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and the like. These large birds — about 2.75′ in height — were hunted by whalers and fishermen for food, feathers, and oil, and later for the increasing rarity of their eggs. Hunters killed the last breeding pair in 1844, although the last credible sighting of a living auk was in 1852. This egg would have been taken by sailors, probably in the 1830s, about a decade before the auks were hunted to extinction, and sold to the collectors’ market that arose as the birds became rarer. Sir Trevelyan received the egg as a gift from Lady Wilson of Charlton House, kept it for 40 years, and willed it to Oxford University.
I took this photograph of the egg, which was doubly hidden behind glass (the display window, the display case), with a peculiar surge of melancholia. The great auks’ extinction wasn’t due to ignorance; people knew that auks were endangered. Great auk hunters knew they were destroying the last of them. Great auk egg collectors knew they were contributing to their extinction. Yet nobody stopped the extinction process, and since then humans have driven other species to extinction, and many more species are on the endangered list.
Ecological grief encompasses grief over the loss of species, environments, ecosystems, and landscapes. Although I’m not by nature a highly emotional person, I’ve felt the tug of ecological grief in the past while contemplating the effect of anthropogenic climate change both at home (solastalgia) or more broadly across the world. And I felt that tug again as I stood in front of the Wonder of Birds exhibit, gazing at this great auk’s egg, walking away from it to look at the other windows, walking back to it again, and finally, reluctantly, pulling out my phone and taking a picture of it, as if doing so would let me keep the great auk egg safe, close to two centuries too late.
One response to “The Melancholy of the Great Auk”
“Ecological grief” is a wonderful term, simultaneously broad and precise. I haven’t heard it before, but I’ve felt it. The internalization of the permanent loss of something unique can be overwhelming, particularly when coupled with the dread of knowing it won’t be the last time we feel that way. I try to turn that into a motivating force, even while it is difficult to be confident that any small action I take has any effect at all. But the world is destroyed and created by the sum of small actions, so they are worth attending to.
Thanks for sharing this.