LATE SURVIVAL OF THE LOST AUK? GAREFOWL, GREAT AUKS, AND A PARADOX OF PENGUINS

Tom the water-baby meeting the last of the great auks or garefowl – an exquisite painting by Warwick Goble for an illustrated 1909 edition of Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies, which is one of my all-time favourite children's novels (public domain)

And there he saw the last of the Gairfowl, standing up on the Allalonestone, all alone. And a very grand old lady she was, full three feet high, and bolt upright, like some old Highland chieftainess. She had on a black velvet gown, and a white pinner and apron, and a very high bridge to her nose (which is a sure mark of high breeding), and a large pair of white spectacles on it, which made her look rather odd: but it was the ancient fashion of her house.

   Charles Kingsley – The Water-Babies: A Fairy-Tale For a Land-Baby

As fondly commemorated above in Charles Kingsley's classic children's novel The Water-Babies: A Fairy-Tale For a Land-Baby (1863), one of the most famous extinct species of modern-day bird is the great auk Pinguinus impennis, also known as the garefowl, gairfowl, or geirfugl. Almost 3 ft tall (the only taller auk was the prehistoric Howard's Lucas auk Miomancalla howardi), this sturdy flightless black-and-white seabird from the northern hemisphere was superficially reminiscent of the southern hemisphere’s familiar penguins, but its link with them does not end there – because the great auk was the original penguin, the latter name having been initially bestowed upon this puffin-allied species. Only later was it applied by those European sailors first penetrating Antarctic waters to the wholly-unrelated birds that they encountered there and which retain it today, long after the original northern penguin’s extermination.

The great auk once existed in tens of millions, nesting on the rocky coastal areas of islands on both sides of the North Atlantic, but it was in America that it first met its end. Its feathers were prized for use in eider-downs and feather beds, its flesh was tasty and therefore much sought-after by sailing vessels, and collectors coveted its eggs, and so this imposing but helpless bird was massacred in countless numbers. On Funk Island off Newfoundland, for example, its precious nesting grounds were frequently raided and mercilessly desecrated. Thousands of auks were captured alive and cooped together in great enclosures like domestic fowl until it was their time to be slaughtered en masse by being clubbed to death and then thrown into furnaces, enabling their feathers to be more readily removed from their bodies. By the second decade of the 19th Century, the great auk was merely a memory in North America.

In Europe, its major stronghold was the Icelandic coast, but great auks even existed around the more northerly islands of Scotland, most notably St Kilda but also visiting the Orkneys, with one particularly famous Orcadian pair being nicknamed the King and Queen. Sadly, however, they were no safer from hunting here than they had been in the New World. Moreover, it was especially ironic that as this species became rarer, it became ever more persecuted by museum collectors - anxious to add specimens and eggs to their collections before it died out! The last known pair of great auks constituted a couple that were clubbed to death (and their egg smashed) on the Icelandic island of Eldey on 3 June 1844, since when the species has long been deemed extinct (but see below). A particularly moving novel reconstructing this terrible, shameful event, entitled The Last Great Auk and first published in 1964, was written by Allan Eckert, and was reviewed by me here in an earlier ShukerNature post.

The Last Great Auk by Allan Eckert – Collins hardback 1^st edition, 1964 (© Allan Eckert/HarperCollins, reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

For some decades thereafter, however, various quite convincing reports of lone living specimens emerged from various remote far-northern European localities, and it is with these little-mentioned, 'post-extinction' reports of great auks that this present ShukerNature article is concerned.

Perhaps the most (in)famous of these is also the most recent one. On 19 April 1986, London’s Daily Telegraph carried the remarkable news that an expedition was to set sail for Papa Westray, a tiny islet in Scotland’s Orkney group, in response to reputed sightings of a living great auk there. Unhappily for cryptozoology as well as for mainstream zoology, however, it proved to be more of a canard than an auk! For as documented in the International Society of Cryptozoology's ISC Newsletter for spring 1987, it turned out to be nothing more than an imaginative advertising promotion for a certain brand of whisky, using a robotic auk!

This is not the first false alarm for this long-lost species. Reports of great auks in the Lofoten Islands, an archipelago off Norway's northwestern coast, emerged every so often during the late 1930s. When finally investigated, however, the birds proved to be genuine penguins – namely, nine king penguins Aptenodytes patagonicus, which had been brought from sub-Antarctica as pets by whalers and had been released on the Lofotens in August 1936 when no longer wanted. The last two died there in 1944.

King penguins in a delightful illustration from 1910 (public domain)

Nevertheless there are a number of more promising reports of post-1844 survival too. Indeed, a sighting of a single living specimen on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in December 1852, made by eminent field naturalist and ornithologist Colonel Henry Maurice Drummond-Hay with the aid of binoculars, and at a distance of only 30 yards or so away while he was traveling aboard a steamer, has lately been formally accepted by the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources). It was first brought to mainstream attention in 1979 by T.R. Halliday in a paper on the great auk published by the periodical Oceans. Moreover, in 1853 a dead great auk was supposedly found on the shore of Trinity Bay on Newfoundland's eastern side, and three years later another one was reputedly caught on its western shore, but neither specimen was submitted to scientists for confirmation (or otherwise).

Most of the others report, conversely, are buried in Norwegian journals and newspapers of the 1800s, but a good example from a 19^th-Century English publication was contained in Dr Isaac J. Hayes’s The Land of Desolation (1871), which describes his adventures in Greenland during summer 1869. The auk-related account concerns a conversation that Hayes had with a naturalist called Hansen:

The great auk, long since supposed to be entirely extinct, he told me had been recently seen on one of the Whale-fish Islands. Two years before [in 1867] one had been actually captured by a native, who, being very hungry, and wholly ignorant of the great value of the prize he had secured, proceeded at once to eat it, much to the disgust of Mr. Hansen, who did not learn of it until too late to come to the rescue. How little the poor savage thought of the great fortune he had just missed by hastily indulging his appetite!

The great auk – when did it really die out? (public domain)

On 10 November 2004, Dr Alan Gauld of Nottingham, England, kindly brought to my attention the following account. Published in the autumn 1929 issue of Bird Notes and News, it was reported by H.A.A. Dombrain, a manager for an English concern in Norway’s Lofoten Islands. Dombrain noted that one of his boatmen, a Finn called Jodas, who was an experienced hunter and amateur naturalist, had told him that earlier that day (presumably the same day that Gauld wrote his account to Bird Notes and News) he and Dombrain’s shipwright, a man called Evenson, had seen a bird under the wharf that, in spite of their experience, they were wholly unable to identify.

Intrigued, Dombrain showed them separately a series of bird illustrations, including all of the likely (and unlikely) species that it could be. To his great surprise, both of them, independently of each other, selected an image of the great auk as the species that matched their mystery bird.

Prior to its extinction almost a century earlier, the great auk had indeed inhabited the wild, sparsely-inhabited coasts of these islands. Moreover, the earlier-noted release there of sub-Antarctic king penguins was several years after the sighting of Evenson, so these birds could not explain it. Consequently, is it possible that he had truly seen a lone, elusive great auk from some small colony that had somehow persisted beyond their species’ official extinction date in this remote locality?

A great northern diver, from Cassell's Book of Birds, 1875 (public domain)

Equally enigmatic is the taxonomic identity of the mysterious Arran auk – the name given by the elderly pilot of a boat carrying the Reverend G.C. Green around Scotland's western coast to a strange seabird as large as a goose or turkey and with a large sharp beak, but with such short wings that it never flew, only paddled, and was black in colour dorsally, white ventrally. As the Rev. Green noted in an article by him that was published on 27 March 1880 in The Field magazine, when he showed the pilot an illustrated book of birds the latter readily identified the picture of a great auk as portraying the Arran auk. He also stated that it only appeared on the coast of western Scotland's Isle of Arran in March each year, that he had shot three specimens, and that he would obtain one for Green the following March.

Tragically, however, the pilot, who was an old man, passed away not long after taking Green in the boat, but his sons vowed that they would obtain a specimen of this bird in his stead. Sure enough, they did subsequently present Green with what they claimed to be an Arran auk, but it proved to be merely a great northern diver Gavia immer (aka the common loon in North America). However, Green pointed out that their father the pilot had readily distinguished between divers and the Arran auk when talking with him during their boat journey, so Green suspected that if he had been alive the pilot would not have sent him a diver.

A few additional cases of putative post-1844 survival for the great auk can be found within a short chapter entitled ‘Late Records, Anomalous Sightings and Cryptozoology’ in Errol Fuller’s definitive book The Great Auk (1999).

Errol Fuller's authoritative tome The Great Auk (© Errol Fuller – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

For example, he notes that in 1971 the famous English nature-writer and broadcaster J. Wentworth Day recalled how back in 1927 he was informed by an acquaintance from his youth named Edward Valpy, whom he deemed to be a first-rate naturalist and explorer of unimpeachable truth, that while spending some time on one of the Lofotens he had spied a great auk slipping off a rock near the local boat-builder's yard and quay. Day also stated that when Valpy had informed the boat-builder of what he had seen, the builder confirmed that it had been around for some time, that his sons had often seen it, and that once it had even dived beneath the boat on which he had been sailing. Note again that this was several years before the king penguins had been released here, so they cannot explain this report of multiple sightings.

Also of interest is the much-disputed claim by a Norwegian named Brodtkorb that he had shot a great auk, one of four supposedly encountered by him one day in April 1848 while he was rowing with some companions in a little strait constituting an arm of the sea separating Vardö from the islets of Hornö and Renö in Norway. The four birds were paddling in the water, and continued to do so, not flying away, even after he had shot one of them. As far as he could remember, its back, head, and neck were all completely black, except for a white spot at the eye on the side of the neck. Its wings were extremely small, and in shape it resembled those familiar auks the razorbills and guillemots.

Sadly, Brodtkorb threw the dead bird's carcase on the beach when he landed, then later regretted doing so, but when he returned to the beach the following day to retrieve it, it had gone, carried away by the tide. Brodtkorb's mystery bird has since been discounted by various sceptical naturalists as having merely been a diver or some familiar auk species, but those who knew him personally vouched for his knowledge of wildlife, stating that if this is really all that it had been, as an experienced sportsman he would have readily recognised it as such.

John Gould's exquisite 19^th-Century great auk painting (public domain)

Problematically, as Errol pointed out in his book, Vardö is much further north than any currently-known locality for great auk occurrence in historical times, but its remains in prehistoric middens from this region confirm that in earlier ages it did indeed occur there. Errol's book also contains other post-1844 claimed sightings of this species in Norwegian and Greenland localities further north than would be expected, based at least upon its confirmed historical distribution and irrespective of the sightings' dates.

Might it just be possible, however, that in such far-north localities, out of the ready reach of hunters, some few great auks did indeed survive beyond, possibly even well beyond, their species' official extinction dates (1844/1852) – and might some even be lingering there today?

It would be a very bold person indeed to state with any degree of confidence that the great auk is not a lost auk after all. Then again, it would be a very bold person indeed to attempt spending the extensive period of time that would be required to seek with any degree of proficiency this iconic bird in such inhospitable, inaccessible Arctic terrain. So who can truly say for certain?

Two famous taxiderm specimens of the great auk: (left) the Leipzig Museum great auk; and (right) the great auk and replica egg at Kelvingrove, Glasgow (© Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 3.0 licence / © Mike Pennington/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)

Finally: Here is my two-page review of Errol's superb great auk book that was published in the autumn 2000 issue (#21) of the late Mark Chorvinsky's Strange Magazine (please click its pages to enlarge for reading purposes):

And here is a scraperboard illustration – the very first scraperboard picture that I ever attempted – of a great auk that I prepared more than 30 years ago, its black and white plumage making it an ideal subject to depict via this very striking medium:

My scraperboard illustration of a great auk (© Dr Karl Shuker)

MOCKERY BIRDS AND TURQUOISE DRAGONS - A SHUKERNATURE TOP TEN LISTING OF LESSER-KNOWN VINTAGE CRYPTOZOOLOGY-THEMED NOVELS

The Mockery Bird by Gerald Durrell – Fontana paperback edition, 1990 (© Gerald Durrell/Fontana Books)

Today, there are numerous novels whose themes deal with cryptozoological beasts or scientifically-known but out-of-place animals, and many have become bestsellers, some even giving rise to blockbuster films too – but this has not always been the case. Decades ago, for every unequivocal success story like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World or Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Land That Time Forgot, there were other, less epic but no less interesting and certainly no less readable novels that for whatever reason(s) failed to attract widespread attention, and for the most part have long since faded to varying degrees into the forlorn mists of undeserved but inevitable literary obscurity and out-of-print status.

As a connoisseur of wildlife-related curiosities in whatever form they may take, over the years I've made a point of collecting – and reading, naturally – as many of these unfairly forgotten or tragically neglected works of natural history fiction as I could find. So here – in the hope that perhaps this much-deserved (albeit all-too-brief) return to the spotlight may help to introduce them to a whole new audience and gain for them a sizeable new fan base – is, in no particular order, a ShukerNature Top Ten of personal favourites of mine drawn from the somewhat esoteric literary genre of lesser-known vintage novels that contain a mystery creature or out-of-place (OOP) animal theme.

Or, to put it another, rather more concise way, here imho are ten of the best crypto-novels that got away.

Cat by Andrew Sinclair – Sphere paperback edition, 1977 (© Andrew Sinclair/Sphere Books)

CAT [vt THE SURREY CAT] – Andrew Sinclair (Michael Joseph: London, 1976)

Book blurb: The Cat was at large! The people of the quiet Surrey village of Wittlemead called it simply 'The Cat', for they could find no better words to describe the ravening black beast that prowled the nearby woods. The Cat was deadly, inexorable and fearless; no living thing, human or animal, was safe while it lived. Peter Gwynvor, Master of the local hunt, spearheaded the efforts to track down and kill the Cat before it could strike yet again. But as his campaign progressed he realised that the conflict between man and beast was merely a mirror for another, far deeper and more personal conflict within himself — a conflict he hardly dared acknowledge. The Cat had become the symbol of Peter's secret fears — and only when they met face to face, to kill or be killed, would those fears finally be resolved...

ShukerNature comments: Today, mystery cats are the subjects of many novels, for adults and children alike. A fair number of these have been set in Britain, but as far as I am aware this was the very first one. Without giving too much of the plot away, its ferocious feline antagonist is a highly exotic escapee originating in the steamy jungle marshes of Sumatra, the like of which has never before been seen in the West.

Rare Bird by Kenneth Allsop – Jarrolds hardback 1^st edition, 1958 (© Kenneth Allsop/Jarrolds)

RARE BIRD – Kenneth Allsop (Jarrolds Publishers: London, 1958)

Book blurb: When Philip Parfitt, secretary of the local Natural History Society, finds black-winged stilts actually nesting near his Wiltshire home – the first time in Britain for 200 years – his village becomes almost a mad-house. Down come the London bird protectionists, TV units, nature broadcasters and publicists, an army of photographers, reporters and feature writers...all the mendicants of sensation.

Kenneth Allsop's experience of Fleet Street and his life-long interest in bird-life combine to give an unusually authentic country background to this extravaganza of the ballyhoo age, which might (almost) really have happened.

ShukerNature comments: Although the black-winged stilt Himantopus himantopus is an uncommon visitor to Britain, this very distinctive species of wader has bred here occasionally – namely, in Nottingshamshire during 1945, in Norfolk during 1987, and in both Kent and West Sussex during 2014.

Smith's Gazelle by Lionel Davidson – Book Club Associates hardback edition, 1972 (© Lionel Davidson/BCA)

SMITH'S GAZELLE – Lionel Davidson (Jonathan Cape: London, 1971)

Book blurb: Hamud the one-eyed Arab shepherd, righteous murderer of murderers, flees from retribution to the depths of a haunted ravine near the Palestine border. Instead of souls and djinns, he finds there only bones and boulders – and the last pregnant representative of an extinct species of gazelle named Smith. As animal and vegetable life prosper beneath his care, Hamud comes to see himself as the subject of divine grace: his unworthy life's mission, to repopulate with gazelles the Holy Land.

Lionel Davidson's new novel is a delightful entertainment – fresh, funny and wholly charming. He has created three of his most unforgettable characters: the wickedly wise small boy, the delicate – but so prolific – gazelle and the indomitable old man, toiling like an Old Testament archetype in his flowering ravine.

ShukerNature comments: Although Smith's gazelle is a fictitious species, there is at least one bona fide mystery gazelle – the red gazelle Eudorcas rufina. This enigmatic species has never been reported in the wild state, and is known to science only from three museum specimens that were purchased in various markets in Algiers and Oran, northern Algeria, during the late 19th century. Following scientific examination, one of these specimens was unmasked in 2008 as being a specimen of the red-fronted gazelle E. rufifrons.

The People of the Chasm by Christopher Beck – C. Arthur Pearson hardback 1^st edition, 1923 (© Christopher Beck/C. Arthur Pearson Ltd)

THE PEOPLE OF THE CHASM – Christopher Beck (C. Arthur Pearson: London, 1923)

Book blurb: Dick and Monty Vince put their plane aboard the missing Anton Javelot's ship 'Penguin' and sail to Antarctica in search of him. They eventually locate Javelot inside a hidden verdant chasm populated by a tribe of friendly pygmies, a band of very unfriendly bipedal apes, and a diverse assortment of lethal monsters including giant arthropods and a terrifying species of rampaging man-eating mole-pig!

ShukerNature comments: The 'Lost World' sub-genre of cryptozoology-themed novel is represented in the present ShukerNature list by this gripping but long-forgotten volume, which contains some decidedly bizarre mystery creatures. 'Christopher Beck' was a pseudonym adopted by Thomas Charles Bridges (1868-1944), a prolific French-born UK writer who wrote many sci-fi novels and magazine articles, and spent several years in Florida.

Tiger in the Bush by Nan Chauncy – Puffin paperback edition, 1978 (© Nan Chauncy/Puffin Books)

TIGER IN THE BUSH – Nan Chauncy (Oxford University Press: Melbourne, 1957)

Book blurb: The Lorenny family lived in a secret valley, hidden so deep in the mountains that no map makers had dis­covered it, where the rarest creatures lived safe from the menace of hunters or the curiosity of scientists. It was, most of the time, a wonderful place, but there were drawbacks, especially for young Badge, the lonely one of the family, who had never met a stranger yet felt the need of companionship without realizing the hazards it could bring in such a very special place.

The crisis came when Dad and the others were away on a prospecting trip, and Badge and his mother were left in charge of the farm. Two friendly strangers appeared and asked to set up camp, and, fatally warm­ing to their friendship and interest, Badge confided to them that the rarest animal of all, the nearly extinct Tasmanian tiger, could still be seen in the valley.

The moment he had spoken, he sensed the disaster and, desperate to find a way to undo the damage before the wild and splendid creature was outlawed or killed by too much interest, he embarked on the only plan he could think of, one that was to lead him into real danger...

ShukerNature comments: When this novel was written, it was still widely believed that the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger Thylacinus cynocephalus was merely very rare as opposed to extinct (its current official status, numerous unconfirmed sightings notwithstanding) – back then, the last confirmed specimen had only died 21 years earlier, in 1936.

The White Gorilla by Henri Vernes – Corgi paperback edition, 1967 (© Henry Vernes/Corgi Books)

THE WHITE GORILLA – Henri Vernes (Éditions Garard: Brussels, 1966)

Book blurb: In the heart of the Dark Continent lurked Niabongha, the white gorilla. Though the natives built images to him, there were vicious white hunters who wanted his life…

It was up to Bob Morane to capture the fantastic beast – and to capture it alive. And the dangerous quest meant a battle – not only with the jungle and its inhabitants, but also with his fellow man…

ShukerNature comments: Henri Vernes is the nom-de-plume of Charles-Henri-Jean Dewisme (b. 1918), an extremely prolific French author who has written over 200 action and science-fiction/fantasy novels. More than 50 of these star Bob Morane, a bold derring-do Indiana-Jones-type hero. Vernes's novel The White Gorilla was originally published in French as Le Gorille Blanc back in 1957, but by a remarkable coincidence, just a few months after it was first published in English in 1966 a real-life white gorilla, but only a baby one, was captured alive in the forests of Rio Muni, Spanish West Africa, after its normal-coloured mother had been killed. The only white gorilla ever confirmed by science, it was brought back to Barcelona Zoo in Spain where it was dubbed Little Snowflake and became a major international star for almost 40 years (click here for a full ShukerNature biography of this unique animal).

The Mockery Bird by Gerald Durrell – Collins hardback 1^st edition, 1981 (© Gerald Durrell/HarperCollins)

THE MOCKERY BIRD – Gerald Durrell (Collins: London, 1981)

Book blurb: Peter Foxglove is sent to the island of Zenkali, a small British colony, as an assistant to the native King's (or, as he prefers to call himself, Kingy's) advisor. After meeting the many eccentric inhabitants of the island, he discovers that a thought-to-be-extinct bird, the Mockery Bird, worshipped as a deity by the island's native Fangoua tribe, is not so extinct after all. But the valley where the bird lives is about to be flooded to build a dam to provide energy for Zenkali's airport, and Peter and his friends need to stop this plan to save the bird.

ShukerNature comments: Gerald Durrell's non-fiction books documenting his family life and formative years as a young naturalist on the Greek island of Corfu, his many subsequent animal-collecting expeditions, and the establishment of his celebrated conservation-based zoo on Jersey are famous worldwide (My Family and Other Animals, The Bafut Beagles, Three Singles To Adventure, The Drunken Forest, Menagerie Manor – and many more), but it is not so well known that he has also written several excellent works of fiction, of which The Mockery Bird is a first-class example – slyly satirical, deftly incorporating a range of environmental and conservation issues, and, like all of his works, truly hilarious. Its avian star is a goose-sized, flightless species sporting blue plumage, long legs, and a large hornbill-like beak that bears a large hump in the male but only a small bony shield in the female. It earns its name from its call, which resembles loud mocking laughter.

The Turquoise Dragon by David Rains Wallace – The Bodley Head hardback 1st edition, 1985 (© David Rains Wallace/The Bodley Head)

THE TURQUOISE DRAGON – David Rains Wallace (The Bodley Head: London, 1985)

Book blurb: 'I kicked my way to the shallows, stood up, and lifted from the water a creature that seemed made of turquoise and lapis lazuli, with ruby belly and topaz eyes. It was shaped more or less like a salamander, but it wasn't any species I'd seen...'

The Turquoise Dragon is a fast-paced adventure thriller with an ecological twist. George Kilgore, a forester living quietly in the foothills of California's rugged Klamath Mountains, stumbles into a deadly web of intrigue when he discovers the body of a murdered biologist friend. With the uncomfortable feeling that homicide investigators have put him at the top of their list of suspects, Kilgore reluctantly begins his own investigation, compelled first by horror and then by growing curiosity.

David Rains Wallace has already been widely acclaimed as an award-winning nature writer and now, with The Turquoise Dragon, he has made an auspicious fiction debut. He skilfully interweaves deft prose, a highly individual storyline involving collectors of endangered species, cocaine-dealers and the exotic location of the Klamath mountain range, with a deep understanding of the wilderness.

ShukerNature comments: Although no turquoise-blue, ruby-red salamanders have been reported there in real life, the Klamath Mountains include the Trinity Alps – which are famous among crypto-herpetologists as the reported home of an alleged undescribed species of giant salamander. This mystery beast was famously sought, albeit unsuccessfully, by the millionaire crypto-enthusiast Tom Slick, but during the expedition an elderly local man was interviewed who claimed that in his youth he had seen several salamanders as big as alligators on the shore of a lake there.

Brother Esau by Douglas Orgill and John Gribbin – Sphere paperback edition, 1983 (©Douglas Orgill and John Gribbin/Sphere Books)

BROTHER ESAU – Douglas Orgill and John Gribbin (The Bodley Head: London, 1982)

Book blurb: Turned towards them, seen more and more clearly as the flare sank towards the ground, was a face. In the bluish light the teeth seemed to be bared. The face was broad and hairy with a flattened nose, and heavy brow-ridges. The reddish hair which fringed it grew thickly round the large ears and head. As the light from the slowly sinking flare became more intense Harry saw that the desperate eyes were fixed on his. For a moment an extraordinary sense of urgent communication filled his mind...It was something like a gorilla, something like a man covered in hair. It was hard to estimate height while the creature was still crouched in the shadows, but it was probably around six feet. The body was barrel shaped, squat and obviously powerful...

The Earth does not belong to man alone. The Himalayas bury their secrets well. Two skulls unearthed in the cradle of the human race — the remote heights of Kashmir — throw evolutionary theory into chaos. But a far more disturbing secret lies hidden deep in the bleak mountains and snow-swept valleys unseen by human eves.

A few miles from the explosive triangle of tension where Afghanistan and Pakistan border on India the story of the century breaks. And the echoes of the most shattering revelation yet made to man threaten to plunge the world into total war which will turn the cradle of the human race into its final grave.

ShukerNature comments: This was the first cryptozoology novel with a man-beast theme that I ever read, and it remains one of my favourites. Its title derives directly from the Biblical account of Jacob and his twin brother Esau, who was hairy all over. Some cryptozoologists believe that this story is evidence for the existence of two separate human species – our own Homo sapiens and a distinct, hirsute species traditionally referred to as the wildman.

The Last Great Auk by Allan Eckert – Collins hardback 1^st edition, 1964 (© Allan Eckert/HarperCollins)

THE LAST GREAK AUK – Allan Eckert (Collins: London, 1964)

Book blurb: Eldey Island loomed ahead of them like a gigantic red iceberg jutting from the frigid grey waters of the North Atlantic. Dimly in the haze behind it the swimmers could see the desolate coastline of south-western Iceland…There were more than eighty birds in this flock, and they spread out haphazardly in loose clusters which trailed behind the lead bird to a distance of nearly half a mile. The great auks had come home.

The great auks were handsome penguin-­like birds with head, neck, back and wings a deep glossy black, and underside a startling white. With tiny wings, they were the only flightless birds of the North Atlantic, but with their powerful legs and large webbed feet they swam and fished wonder­fully.

Mr Eckert has reconstructed with great skill and compassion the story of the great auks' last annual migrations between Eldey Island where they bred, off southwest Iceland, and South Carolina where they wintered. Each journey meant an almost incredible swim of three thousand miles. On the island and along the migration route lurked many perils—storms, killer-whales, fish-hooks, scientists, and worst of all, the murderous onslaught of feather and meat hunters. The story is that of the last of these birds, from his hatching and his adventures as a fledgling until as leader of the dwindling flock he returns to Eldey for the last time. By then the reader is hoping against what he knows is inevitable, against what did happen on June 3rd, 1844. The species became extinct. One species out of 8,000—does it matter? It does, and no reader of this sad and beautiful novel will forget it.

ShukerNature comments: Whereas its flightless feathered subject is itself neither strictly cryptozoological nor out-of-place, this novel is so remarkable a work that it definitely deserves to be read by as wide and as numerous an audience as possible, its poignant story a terrifying reminder of what has happened – and is still happening – to so many extraordinary animals at the hand, rifle, machete, chainsaw, and introduced livestock of humankind. Moreover, and where this novel is definitely pertinent to cryptozoology, the grim prospect of losing remarkable animal species to extinction before science has even confirmed their existence still lingers and overshadows conservation efforts like a dark, brooding wraith – one that can only be dispelled forever if future generations read books like this one, and take heed of its message.

Last of the Curlews by Fred Bodsworth – Dodd, Mead paperback edition, 1955 – another, more famous novel dealing with a once-common species (this time the eskimo curlew Numenius borealis) now confronting seemingly-inevitable extinction (© Fred Bodsworth/Dodd, Mead & Company)

THE MISSING MENAGERIE – CREATURES CURSED BY THE STAMP OF EXTINCTION

Following on from my two most recent ShukerNature blog posts (click here and here to view them), here is a third one that once again links a couple of my greatest interests – natural history and philately.

Thanks to my trio of definitive books documenting them (The Lost Ark, 1993; The New Zoo, 2002; and The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals, 2012), I am more readily associated with zoological arrivals and revivals than I am with extinct and endangered species.

So now, by way of contrast and compensation, this present ShukerNature blog post surveys a varied selection of the most famous and extraordinary residents of Nature’s missing menagerie of vanished creatures. Although they are represented nowadays only by lifeless museum specimens and a few faded photographs, their original beauty and grandeur is recaptured for all time in numerous modern-day works of art – including, as selected from my own personal collection of wildlife-themed postage stamps and presented here, an eyecatching gallery of the philatelic variety.


AS DEAD AS THE DODO

By popular zoological convention, an animal is said to have become extinct in historical times if it died out after 1681 AD. However, this is not an arbitrary date. On the contrary, 1681 is the official year of demise for the most famous modern-day extinct species of all – the dodo Raphus cucullatus of Mauritius. ‘As dead as the dodo’ is a popular contemporary expression of extinction or general obsolescence, but the dodo was once very much alive. This giant hook-beaked relative of doves and pigeons had survived untroubled by other species for countless ages on its island home in the Indian Ocean, and, as a result of having no need to flee from anything, had gradually lost the power of flight, becoming ever larger until it was the size of a turkey.


Size, however, was not the only characteristic that the dodo shared with the turkey. Like the latter bird, it was not overly encumbered with brainpower, and its flesh, though not tasty, was at least palatable. These two attributes would spell its inevitable doom if ever it were to encounter humankind – and finally, after Mauritius had enjoyed centuries of secure isolation, this is precisely what happened.


During the early 16th Century, Portuguese sailors began visiting the island, using it as a stop-over location for supplying their ships with food during long oceanic voyages. The dodo, trusting and edible, was a prime target. Later, the Portugese were replaced by the Dutch, who in 1644 established Mauritius as a Dutch colony. By now, the slaughter of dodos had become almost a sport in terms of popularity among the colonists, and its inevitable demise was hastened by persecution from various non-native species introduced here by humans, most notably the rat, dog, cat, monkey, and pig.


By the end of the 17th Century, less than 200 years since the island’s first visitation by Europeans, Mauritius had lost its most iconic inhabitant (and several of its other exotic endemic birds would also be exterminated in the years that followed). The dodo was no more, and the age of modern-day extinction had begun.




THE PASSING OF THE PASSENGER PIGEON

During the next three centuries, a host of other pigeons, doves, and even a swan-sized dodo relative called the Rodrigues solitaire would be wiped out in remote localities all over the world, but no such extinction would be more surprising – indeed, scarcely believable - than that of the passenger pigeon Ectopistes migratorius. Not only was this handsome species native to the North American continent (as opposed to some far-flung tropical isle only lately reached for the first time by humankind), but it was once incomprehensibly numerous. In fact, as recently as the 19th Century it was deemed to be the most abundant bird that had ever existed anywhere on the planet – its single species accounting for almost 40% of North America’s entire bird population. The following incident demonstrates this well.


One autumn day in 1813, while travelling on a wagon from his Ohio River home to Louisville, Kentucky, around 88 km away, the great American bird painter John James Audubon (who famously painted this now-lost species) witnessed a stupendous flock of passenger pigeons flying overhead in a colossal mass, which so filled the sky above that in his own words: “[the] light of noonday sun was obscured as by an eclipse”. So immense was the flock that when he arrived at Louisville at sunset, it was still passing overhead - an unbroken, seemingly never-ending cloud of life that according to conservative estimates must have contained well over one billion pigeons!


It will come as no surprise, sadly, to learn that the sight of such unimaginable numbers triggered in every sense an insatiable bloodlust among the sporting fraternity of America, and hunters would shoot endlessly at these massive migrations of pigeons, a single bullet often bringing down multiple birds. On and on the slaughter continued, year after year, decade after decade (around a billion pigeons were killed during a single hunt held in 1878 close to Petoskey, Michigan), as it seemed impossible even to contemplate that any depredation, however sustained, would affect the numbers of this innumerable bird – but it did.


Astonishingly, by the end of the 19th Century, the most abundant bird that had ever been had become, in relative terms, a rarity, but even worse was to follow. Less than a quarter of a million pigeons remained, all contained within a single great nesting flock in Ohio - which was almost totally destroyed when a massive hunting party descended upon it, leaving no more than 5000 birds alive.


Too late it was realised that this uniquely prolific species needed enormous numbers for successful reproduction. The sparse quantity that now remained was insufficient, and so the passenger pigeon plummeted headlong into the abyss of extinction. The last known wild specimen was shot in Ohio in 1900, and on 1 September 1914, at the grand old age of 29, the last passenger pigeon in the world, a lone female called Martha Washington, died in her cage at Cincinnati Zoo, and in so doing marked the death of an entire species – one that had once seemed indestructible. The unthinkable had happened – the passenger pigeon was extinct.


Incredibly, only four years after Martha’s death, a second very significant North American species also met its untimely end in the very same zoo, when in 1918 the world’s last Carolina parakeet Conuropsis carolinensis died here. Although nowhere near as numerous as the passenger pigeon, this highly attractive yellow-headed, green-bodied species – the U.S.A.’s only native species of parrot – had once been a common sight through much of the continent’s eastern and southern regions, but it was irresistibly attracted to the fruit of farmers’ orchards and the grain of their fields, and so, like the pigeon, it was doomed.


RAIDERS OF THE LOST AUK

Another famous vanished species is the great auk Pinguinus impennis. This large flightless black-and-white seabird from the northern hemisphere was superficially reminiscent of the southern hemisphere’s familiar penguins, but its link with them does not end there – because the great auk was the original penguin, the latter name having been initially bestowed upon this puffin-allied species. Only later was it applied by those European sailors first penetrating Antarctic waters to the wholly-unrelated birds that they encountered there and which retain it today, long after the original penguin’s extermination.


The great auk once existed in tens of millions, nesting on the rocky coastal areas of islands on both sides of the North Atlantic, but it was in America that it first met its end. Its feathers were prized for use in eider-downs and feather beds, its flesh was tasty and therefore much sought-after by sailing vessels, and collectors coveted its eggs, and so this imposing but helpless bird was massacred in countless numbers. On Funk Island off Newfoundland, for example, its precious nesting grounds were frequently raided and mercilessly desecrated. Thousands of auks were captured alive and cooped together in great enclosures like domestic fowl until it was their time to be slaughtered en masse by being clubbed to death and then thrown into furnaces, enabling their feathers to be more readily removed from their bodies. By the second decade of the 19th Century, the great auk was merely a memory in North America.


In Europe, its major stronghold was the Icelandic coast, but great auks even existed around the more northerly islands of Scotland, most notably St Kilda but also visiting the Orkneys, with one particularly famous Orcadian pair being nicknamed the King and Queen. Sadly, however, they were no safer from hunting here than they had been in the New World. Moreover, it was especially ironic that as this species became rarer, it became ever more persecuted by museum collectors - anxious to add specimens and eggs to their collections before it died out! The last known great auks constituted a pair clubbed to death (and their egg smashed) on the Icelandic island of Eldey on 3 June 1844.


For a few decades thereafter, some quite convincing reports of lone living specimens emerged from various remote far-northern European localities, but none was confirmed. Reports emanating from Norway’s Lofoten Islands during the 1920s and 1930s were duly investigated, only to discover that the birds in question were actually released Antarctic penguins. And a supposed great auk spied in the Orkneys during the 1980s that attracted considerable media attention owed more to a clever publicity campaign for a certain brand of whisky than it did to any unexpected resurrection of the lost auk.


ONE BIRD, TWO BEAKS

The great auk was not the only species hastened into extinction by the mercenary actions of museum curators. Moving from the North Atlantic to the North Island, of New Zealand, the huia Heteralocha acutirostris was a large predominantly black-plumaged bird whose long broad tail’s tip bore a striking white horizontal band, and its cheeks sported a pair of bright orange wattles. Indeed, it was a member of a small family of birds known as wattlebirds, found only in New Zealand.


What singled the huia out from all other birds, however, was its beak – or, rather, its beaks. Uniquely, the beak of the male huia was totally different in shape from that of the female huia - the former’s was short and straight, the latter’s was long and downward-curving. A pair would work together when seeking the wood-inhabiting grubs on which they fed – the male using his hard, sharp beak to chisel through rotting bark in search of the grubs, and the female then hooking them out with her more delicate, curved beak.


Tragically, however, this unparalleled avian teamwork would soon come to an end – when the species itself died out. Traditionally, the huia’s eyecatching tail feathers had been used in ceremonial Maori head-dresses, but when Europeans arrived their usual unwelcome contingent of rats and cats lost no time in decimating the endemic bird population of New Zealand, and the huia proved to be particularly vulnerable not just to predation by these and other alien species but also to various diseases associated with them. And as with the great auk, once the huia’s numbers crashed, museum curators who realised that they held few specimens of this extraordinary species soon made known their requirement for more, thereby sounding the death knell for this highly endangered bird.


The last known huia was sighted in 1907, and although, as documented in my book Extraordinary Animals Revisited (2007), a few unconfirmed sightings have been made since, including one by Danish zoologist Lars Thomas as recently as 1991, until further notice the huia remains yet another tragic inhabitant of the missing menagerie.


THE SORRY SAGA OF A SEA COW

Birds are not the only species to have lost some of their most dramatic members either. Three of the most spectacular mammals to have disappeared since the dodo are Steller’s sea cow Hydrodamalis (=Rhytina) gigas, the quagga Equus burchelli quagga, and the thylacine (Tasmanian wolf) Thylacinus cynocephalus.

Scientifically discovered in 1741 by Russian naturalist Georg Steller, during the Bering Expedition to the icy waters of far-eastern Russia’s North Pacific, and duly named after him, Steller’s sea cow measured approximately 8 m long. This made it by far the largest member of the taxonomic order of mammals known as sirenians, named after the fondly-held belief that sightings by sailors of some of the smaller species, known as manatees and dugongs, had inspired the belief in mermaids or sirens.


When his ship was wrecked on the coast of one of the Bering Sea’s previously-uncharted Commander Islands, Steller had plenty of time to observe in detail these enormous but wholly inoffensive, herbivorous mammals that grazed upon seaweed and gave voice to loud, lugubrious groans. Among the countless discoveries that he made about them was that their flesh was delicious – a fact not lost upon the various expeditions that arrived here in the years to come. So much so, in fact, that by 1768, a mere 27 years after the first one had been seen by Steller, the last of his eponymous sea cows was killed, and the mournful song of this strange mega-mermaid was forever stilled.


THE ZEBRA THAT LOST ITS STRIPES…AND ITS SURVIVAL

Named after the sound of its strange high-pitched whinny, the quagga of South Africa could more aptly be termed a quasi-zebra, for unlike the uniformly striped zebras familiar to one and all today, the quagga, uniquely, was striped only on its face, neck, and anterior forequarters – its flanks and hindquarters were wholly brown and unstriped, and its legs were predominantly white. Although still present in huge herds as late as the 1840s, during the next three decades the quagga was hunted in great numbers by the Boers for its hide and its meat. Its decimation in the wild was completed with the killing of the last known wild specimen in 1878. On account of its unusual appearance, a number of quaggas had been exhibited at various zoos, but in those pre-conservation days no attempt was made to breed this very interesting creature, so when the last captive specimen died at Amsterdam Zoo in 1883, the quagga was gone forever – or was it?


A fascinating captive breeding programme, the Quagga Project, pioneered by natural historian Reinhold Rau, has been underway since the 1990s in South Africa, attempting to recreate the quagga by selective breeding, using specimens of the plains zebra Equus burchelli (of which the quagga was a subspecies) with fewer stripes than normal. Some decidedly quagga-like individuals have already been engendered, but whether they share the original quagga’s genetic make-up rather than merely its outward form has yet to be determined.


THE ONCE AND FUTURE THYLACINE?

Another lost creature that may yet rise again like a veritable phoenix in stripes was – or is, or will be again? – the thylacine or Tasmanian wolf Thylacinus cynocephalus (popularly translated as ‘pouched dog with wolf’s head’, on account of its decidedly canine head and offspring-rearing pouch). Remarkably lupine in superficial external appearance (but wholly unrelated to real wolves and dogs), it was also known as the Tasmanian tiger due to its series of distinctive body and tail stripes. This very impressive creature was the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial (pouched mammal), and although confined in historical times to the island of Tasmania, only a couple of millennia ago it also thrived in mainland Australia, and formerly in New Guinea as well.


Yet despite its spectacular appearance, the thylacine won no fans among European settlers on Tasmania, especially those with farm livestock, whose lambs and sheep proved particularly tempting to this meat-eating mammal – although to be fair, more sheep were killed by introduced domestic dogs there than were ever killed by this island’s pouched counterparts. Nevertheless, in 1888, the Tasmanian government offered a bounty for every thylacine shot, and so, as had happened to all too many other species at other times elsewhere, the annihilation duly began. In 1936, when realisation of the fate awaiting what by now had been scientifically recognised as a priceless product of Antipodean evolution belatedly hit the Tasmanian government, it finally granted the thylacine full protection. The timing was impeccable – impeccably bad, that is, bearing in mind that the world’s last thylacine, a female specimen known somewhat oddly as Benjamin, died at Hobart Zoo just two months later; the last confirmed wild specimen had been shot in 1930.


Having said that, the thylacine has since earned itself the title of the world’s most common extinct animal, because seldom has a year gone by ever since without alleged sightings of specimens emerging from one region or another of Tasmania, and sometimes by very experienced, reliable eyewitnesses such as national park wardens. Consequently, some zoologists remain reluctant to deny categorically that the thylacine still survives, but without any physical, unequivocal evidence to hand, the case for its survival remains unresolved.


Like the quagga, however, plans are afoot to resurrect this fairly recently-extirpated enigma, but this time by means of cloning DNA extracted from various well-preserved museum specimens. Some Australian scientists are confident that the technology to accomplish this Jurassic Park scenario may soon be forthcoming, and that before much longer a living breathing thylacine will once more be a reality.


AND NOT FORGETTING…

Meanwhile, the extinct species described in this article are just a handful of the hundreds of truly exceptional creatures that have been wiped out since the dodo. Others include the colossal ostrich-like elephant bird of Madagascar Aepyornis maximus (end of the 18th Century), South Africa’s blaauwbok Hippotragus leucophaeus (1799; Africa's first large mammal to become extinct in historical times); the Labrador (pied) duck Camptorhynchus labradorius (1875; black-and-white North American waterfowl only distantly allied to other ducks); and the Falkland Islands fox Dusicyon australis (1876; wholly confined to this South Atlantic island group).


Over a dozen species of finch-related Hawaiian honeycreepers have become extinct in modern times too (including in 1898 the gorgeously-plumed mamo Drepanis pacifica), plus at least three different species of exotic black-and-yellow o-o birds (also Hawaiian, and named after their distinctive call).


Also extinct is the toolach Macropus greyi (1939; an exceptionally beautiful wallaby); the Caribbean monk seal Monachus tropicalis (1952; a specimen was once owned by Fidel Castro); and the all-white Chinese river dolphin or baiji Lipotes vexillifer (declared extinct in 2004, after having first been made known to western science as recently as 1918). And these are just a few from the disturbingly long list of species that have vanished since the dodo's own disappearance just over three centuries ago.


The cloning of a thylacine, or any other of the presently lost species documented here, would certainly be a marvel, but just because extinction might indeed become reversible in the up-and-coming future, we must never forget what destruction our ancestors have wrought upon the living world in the not-so-distant past, and we must ensure that such activity is never repeated anywhere in the present. Who knows – perhaps in the not-too-distant future extinction may no longer be forever, but it should never be at all.