MISSING MACAWS OF THE WEST INDIES - Part 1: RIDDLES IN RED AND YELLOW

Jan Steen's mystery red macaw (left); and Roelandt Savery's mystery red macaw (right) (both public domain)

In two previous ShukerNature blog articles, I surveyed a number of mysterious, seemingly-vanished or even still-undiscovered types of macaw with very diverse histories but united morphologically by their eyecatching plumage whose hues were all drawn from the blue, indigo, and violet sections of the colour spectrum (please click here and here to access these two articles). However, as will now be revealed in Part 1 of this major new 2-part ShukerNature article on missing macaws, also on file are some equally intriguing, mystifying examples of lost mystery macaws whose plumage exhibits vibrant hues drawn from the colour spectrum's red, orange, and yellow sections, and which were all reputedly different from any of the familiar macaw species known today. All of these species, moreover, were reported from the West Indies archipelago (click here for a very much briefer, introductory coverage of them on ShukerNature several years ago), and many chroniclers claimed that macaws were once extremely common there, yet today none of its islands (other than Trinidad, but see my comment later here) are home to any macaws at all.

Although I have since read many much more detailed accounts of them elsewhere, when still only a child I first learned about the Caribbean's lost macaws from Purnell's Encyclopedia of Animal Life. This was an extremely comprehensive, authoritative six-volume wildlife encyclopaedia first published during the 1960s and edited by zoologists Drs Maurice Burton and Robert Burton – which included the following very succinct summary of most of them:

The red macaw of Jamaica has not been seen since 1765 and the green and yellow macaw of the same island became extinct in the early 19th century. The Guadeloupe red macaw became extinct a century before this [i.e. during the 1700s] and the Dominican green and yellow macaw in the late 18th Century. The Martinique macaw has not been heard of since 1640 and then there was one which has been called the mysterious macaw. No specimen of this is known but a description of it was published in 1658 – and that is all we know of it except that it lived on 'one of the West Indian islands'.

The red macaw of Jamaica is A. gossei; the Jamaican green and yellow macaw is A. erythrocephala; the Guadeloupe red macaw is A. guadeloupensis; the Dominican green and yellow macaw is A. atwoodi; and the Martinique macaw is A. martinicus. As for the 'mysterious macaw', this is A. erythrura, and like the Martinique macaw it was principally blue and yellow in colour.

Cuban red macaw on Cuban postage stamps (public domain)

Two additional erstwhile Caribbean macaws not noted above by the Burtons are the Cuban red macaw A. tricolor and the scientifically-undescribed Hispaniolan red macaw (there is also the purple macaw of Guadeloupe Anodorhynchus purpurascens, already documented by me on ShukerNature here). I shall be examining the Caribbean's green and yellow mystery macaws as well as its blue and yellow mystery macaws in Part 2 of this article, so let us concentrate now upon its red and yellow examples.

Incidentally, I wish to point out that the illustrations that I am presenting here and also in Part 2 include several beautiful paintings depicting these birds' possible appearance in life that were commissioned by Lord Walter Rothschild for his magnificent tome Extinct Birds (1907).

In addition, please note that I am omitting from these two Parts' discussion any coverage or consideration referring to the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, because only one mystery macaw has ever been documented from either of them. This is Seaforth's macaw, described in 1822 from Trinidad by ornithologist J.A. Latham (but by no-one else), and almost certainly referable to a colour variety of the scarlet macaw Ara macao, a South American mainland species but which is native there too. Indeed, unlike all other Caribbean islands, but no doubt due to its very close proximity to South America, Trinidad is known to be inhabited by mainland macaw species (no less than four, in fact, including the above-noted scarlet macaw, plus the blue and yellow macaw A. ararauna, the red-shouldered macaw Diopsittaca nobilis, and the red-bellied macaw Orthopsittaca manilatus).

 

THE CUBAN RED MACAW

Depending upon which authority is consulted, as many as 15 endemic macaw species may have once inhabited various islands in the West Indies, but all of them are now extinct – always assuming, of course, that they ever existed to begin with. Indeed, most of them are nowadays commonly referred to in ornithological circles as hypothetical. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt whatsoever that at least one striking, predominantly red-plumed species of indigenous Caribbean macaw did indeed once exist.

This is because there are not only many eyewitness reports of it on file but also at least 19 preserved skins and taxiderm specimens in 15 major city museums around the world (including Liverpool, London, Berlin, Dresden, Paris, Stockholm, Washington DC, New York, Cambridge in Massachusetts, and Havana), plus subfossil remains. This species is, or was, the Cuban red macaw Ara tricolor, which, as its common name suggests, formerly inhabited the island of Cuba (plus the much smaller Isle of Pines, aka the Isla de la Juventud, nearby).

Quite small for a macaw, measuring a mere 20 in long, when adult this species was predominantly red and yellow in colour, but its wings were purplish-blue, and its tail was blue with pale blue upper tail coverts (hence its binomial name, tricolor – 'three-coloured', i.e. red, yellow, and blue). As in all macaws, the sexes were alike, but according to American zoologist Austin Hobart Clark, writing in an Auk paper of 1905 concerning Greater Antillean macaws, its juveniles were mostly green, rather than exhibiting the tricoloured plumage of the adults. No specimen or description of its egg is known.

Cuban red macaw, by John Gerrard Keulemans, from Lord Walter Rothschild's book Extinct Birds, 1907 (public domain)

Judging from a plethora of good native eyewitness accounts, the Cuban macaw existed in small populations scattered virtually throughout its island home, nesting in holes in palm trees and feeding upon fruit and seeds plus flower buds and sprouts, but was most common in the extensively forested area of Cuba's vast Zapata Swamp (Ciénaga de Zapata). There is contention as to how tasty (or otherwise) its flesh was, but it is certainly known that it was hunted by Cubans for its meat, and that its young were captured alive by them to be sold and bred as pets.

Although the Cuban red macaw was still said to be abundant in 1849, by the 1850s only one large flock still existed, which frequently came to feed at a small group of trees at Zarabanda in the Zapata Swamp, where quite a few of them were 'collected' (i.e. killed) by German-Cuban ornithologist Dr Juan C.C. Gundlach. This activity on his part and also by others, coupled with portions of its swampland habitat being lost to the creation of plantations, proved disastrous for the species, and in 1864 the last pair of Cuban red macaws known to have been killed in the wild were shot at San Francisco de la Vega.

This is not near the Zapata Swamp on mainland Cuba as frequently yet erroneously reported, but rather on the Isle of Pines, as correctly identified in 2013 by James W. Wiley and Guy M. Kirwan in their extensive Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club paper on extinct Caribbean macaws. They also correctly stated that it was a pair of macaws that was shot there, not a single one as is still so often mistakenly claimed by other writers.

Cuban red macaw, by François-Nicolas Martinet, 1765 (public domain)

Two single specimens were reputedly shot as late as 1867 by members of Spanish writer-priest Antonio Perpiña's entourage while travelling through central Cuba, and Gundlach believed that the species existed in the Zapata Swamp until as late as the mid-1880s, but there is no physical evidence to support his claim. Perhaps the best-known captive specimen is one that lived at Paris's famous Jardin des Plantes, its body being donated to Paris's National Museum of Natural History in 1842 after its death on 6 October of that year. However, once again contradicting frequent but incorrect claims cited elsewhere, it was not the last captive specimen.

One that was exhibited at Amsterdam Zoo, for instance, survived until 1858, and a specimen living in the Knowsley Park aviaries of the 13^th Earl of Derby died in March 1846. Both of these latter specimens were again donated to museums following their deaths, with the Knowsley Park individual being retained at Liverpool's World Museum.

Habitat destruction, hunting them for their meat, and the capturing of young macaws to serve as pets have also been cited as causes for the extinction of the other lost Caribbean macaws documented here and in Part 2, and certainly they showed surprisingly little fear of their hunters, thereby making their killing a tragically easy task. Yet unlike the Cuban red macaw, there are no preserved skins or stuffed specimens of any of these latter forms. As will now be seen, however, there are for at least certain of them some noteworthy written accounts and intriguing illustrations testifying to their erstwhile reality.

 

RED MACAWS OF HISPANIOLA AND GUADELOUPE

Until the end of the 16^th Century, a scientifically-undescribed species of red macaw, one that was fairly similar in appearance to that of Cuba, may also have existed on the neighbouring island of Hispaniola, judging from a short description given in 1561 by Spanish historian and Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas within his authoritative three-volume Historia de Las Indias (History of the West Indies).

Differentiating by their respective size three different species of Hispaniolan parrot (seemingly a macaw, an amazon parrot, and a conure), he stated:

The largest…differ from those of the other islands in that they have over the bill or the forehead white, not green or red; those of this species that are in the island of Cuba have over the bill or the forehead red.

A single later report of a macaw on Hispaniola, on the authority of local resident M. Deshayes, was subsequently documented in 1779 by the eminent French naturalist Count Georges-Louis de Buffon within his multi-volume magnum opus Histoire Naturelle. In 1983, German macaw enthusiast Dieter Hoppe dubbed the Hispaniolan red macaw Ara tricolor haitius in his book Aras, thereby classifying it as a subspecies of the Cuban macaw.

Possible appearance of the Hispaniolan red macaw, envisaged by Brazilian bird artist Rafael Nascimento (© Rafael Nascimento)

A third alleged Caribbean species that was apparently predominantly red-plumed, and which was formally named by Austin Hobart Clark in 1905, was the Guadeloupe red macaw A. guadeloupensis, also known as the lesser Antillean macaw. The first known mention of this species by a European derived from the voyages of none other than Christopher Columbus, who mentioned in his writings that when visiting Guadeloupe in 1493, his landing party observed "red parrots as large as chickens" there (or guacamayos, as referred to by the island's native Caribs at that time). And according to Diego Álvarez Chanca, who joined Columbus on his second voyage (1493-94), they took two such macaws from the houses of Caribs encountered by them on Guadeloupe.

Furthermore, during the 1650s, French missionary Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre also referred to these very distinctive red macaws of Guadeloupe, which he termed the arras and documented as follows:

The Arras is a sort of Parrot bigger than all the others. This is proved because those of Guadaloupe [sic] are larger than all the other Parrots, both those from the Islands as well as from the Mainland; while this Arras is larger than these by one third. It has the head, the neck, the belly and the back of the colour of fire; its wings are a mixture of yellow, azure, and crimson feathers; while the tail is entirely red and a foot-and-a-half long.

A sepia line drawing of one such macaw in the company of various other Guadeloupe fauna appears in Du Tertre's book Histoire Generale des Antilles (1667).

Guadeloupe red macaw, arrowed, in drawing from Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre's book Histoire Generale des Antilles, 1667 (public domain)

In Die New Welt (1534), German humanist and historian Johann Huttich stated that he had recorded on Guadeloupe a red macaw "present in such numbers as grasshoppers are with us", thereby indicating that it was very common back then. Nevertheless, this fiery-plumed macaw had seemingly vanished before the end of the 1700s, and has never been conclusively identified with any species alive today. Of great interest, however, is that it readily recalls a mysterious, predominantly red macaw featured prominently in one of the most famous depictions of another extinct bird, the Mauritius dodo Raphus cucullatus.

 

The depiction in question is a beautiful oil painting by Flemish artist Roelandt Savery (1576-1639), which was painted in Holland in 1626. It was once owned by George Edwards (1694-1773), a very talented English bird painter and author in his own right, and it is now housed at London's Natural History Museum. This great work has become virtually the 'standard' notion of what the dodo looked like in life (though in more recent times, the veracity of its chubby form has been questioned), and has thus attracted great attention.

In stark contrast, almost entirely ignored from an ornithological standpoint are the two very striking, colourful parrots that Savery painted to the dodo's immediate left and top-right in this same painting. Judging from their size and form, they are evidently macaws, but they do not resemble any known species. I'll be dealing with Savery's right-hand macaw in Part 2 of this article, as it is of potential relevance to two different Caribbean mystery macaws that I'll be documenting there. However, his left-hand macaw may well be equally pertinent to one specific Caribbean mystery macaw discussed here in Part 1, because other than its pale facial skin and some yellow-gold and blue wing plumes, this latter Savery-depicted macaw is entirely red.

Dodo and two mystery macaws, in Roelandt Savery's painting, 1626 (public domain)

If these two depicted macaws were meant to be real, it suggests that they may be lost (and possibly even undescribed) species, or unusual freak/hybrid individuals, but what happened to the specimens that they were based upon? Or could they have been 'invented' by Savery purely as colourful support for the more prosaic plumage of the dodo? Or perhaps they did exist but Savery's depictions of them were based not upon physical specimens but instead upon inaccurate verbal descriptions of known species?

What I find so interesting about Savery's depicted left-hand macaw is that it greatly recalls Du Tertre's description of the arras or Guadeloupe red macaw – so much so, in fact, that I cannot help but wonder whether a specimen of this latter macaw was brought back to Holland and became the model for Savery's red macaw.

Moreover, in his book The Dodo and Kindred Birds (1953), Japanese dodo expert Masauji Hachisuka included as the frontispiece a copy of Savery's original painting specially prepared for him by another famous but much later bird artist, John Gerrard Keulemans (1842-1912), and stated in the accompanying caption that the two macaws depicted in it were indeed from the West Indies.

Dodo and two mystery macaws, in Keulemans's copy of Savery's painting, in the frontispiece of Hachisuka's dodo book (public domain)

Certainly, transportation of Caribbean birds back to Europe in post-Columbus times frequently occurred. Hence it is by no means impossible that one or more Guadeloupe red macaws found their way to Europe at the time of Savery when this species was still extant in its West Indies homeland.

Having said that, while communicating in December 2010 with Jolyon Parrish, subsequently the author of The Dodo and the Solitaire: A Natural History (2012), I was informed by him that Savery sometimes altered the colours of his subjects to suit his specific needs for the painting in question, and that I should therefore be wary of placing too much emphasis upon the colours of the depicted dodo's two macaw companions. Jolyon also stated that some ornithologists have sought to identify Savery's depicted red specimen not as a Guadeloupe red macaw but rather as the much more familiar, and extant, red and blue (aka green-winged) macaw A. chloroptera from the South American mainland.

However, I find such an identification to be both surprising and implausible, because Savery's mostly blue-lacking and entirely green-lacking red macaw bears scant resemblance to A. chloroptera, bearing in mind that the latter species has vivid, instantly visible, and very sizeable portions of both blue and green upon its wings.

Red and blue (aka green-winged) macaw Ara chloroptera (copyright-free)

In any case, Savery's painting is not the only putative depiction of a Guadeloupe red macaw on record. A second, but hitherto much more obscure example was kindly brought to my attention in July 2013 by Brazil-based bird artist and crypto-ornithological researcher Rafael Nascimento.

The bird in question is a large red macaw, depicted sitting on a perch in the top-left corner of an oil painting from c.1665 by Dutch artist Jan Steen, entitled 'The Way You Hear It, Is The Way You Sing It'. As I soon realised when viewing it, this bird closely resembles Savery's depicted red mystery macaw (see the direct visual comparison of them that opens this present ShukerNature article).

Both of these birds have yellow and blue wing plumes (although the blue plumes are scarcely discernable in Steen's bird), but otherwise their plumage is uniformly red. Were these two depictions based upon two different specimens of the same species, I wonder – and could that species have been the now-demised Guadeloupe red macaw? Or perhaps Steen's depicted macaw was directly inspired by Savery's? But who can now say with any degree of certainty, more than four centuries later?

Mystery red macaw in Jan Steen's oil painting, 'The Way You Hear It Is The Way You Sing It', c.1665 (public domain)

Yet for there now to be two classical works of art depicting what is clearly one and the same variety of mystery red macaw, and one that corresponds closely with a verbal description of an ostensibly real but long-lost Caribbean species, certainly lends weight to the prospect that this latter macaw was indeed real, and not merely hypothetical, as some ornithologists have suggested due to no physical evidence for its former realty having been procured to date.

Also worthy of mention here is a colour plate that appeared in François-Nicolas Martinet's Histoire Naturelle (1765), which depicts a supposed Guadeloupe red macaw. Thanks to its wings' very striking blue and yellow plumes, which are much more prominent than those of the red mystery macaws depicted respectively by Savery and Steen, however, this bird bears much more of a resemblance to the scarlet macaw, and it may simply represent an imported scarlet macaw specimen.

A revised version of this plate that appeared in a contemporary work by Buffon makes it look even more like a scarlet macaw. Nevertheless, in both versions it lacks the blue tail feathers characteristic of the latter species but apparently lacking in the Guadeloupe red macaw, so this artwork remains something of an enigma.

Possible Guadeloupe red macaw depiction from François-Nicolas Martinet's book, Histoire Naturelle, 1765 (left); version of Martinet's plate depicting possible Guadeloupe red macaw, in contemporary tome by Buffon (right) (both images in the public domain)

 

THE JAMAICAN RED MACAW

The final principally red Caribbean macaw on record is A. gossei, the Jamaican red macaw (also known as the yellow-headed macaw). It was one of several extinct West Indies parrots formally described and named in 1905 by Lord Rothschild within a paper published by the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club. Rothschild named this particular macaw in honour of the famous Victorian naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, who in his book The Birds of Jamaica (1847) had documented an individual shot about 10 miles east of Lucea in c.1765 by a Mr Odell.

Gosse had obtained his information concerning this specimen from an account sent to him by a Dr Robinson (not Robertson, as often mistakenly given elsewhere) who had observed it as a preserved taxiderm exhibit (but lacking its legs). Sadly, this unique specimen, the only one known of the Jamaican red macaw, is now lost, but Robinson's description of it is preserved in Gosse's book, so here it is:

Basal half of upper mandible black, apical half ash-coloured; lower mandible black, tip only ash-coloured. Forehead, crown, and back of neck bright yellow. Sides of face around eyes, anterior and lateral part of neck, and back, a fine scarlet. Wing coverts and breast, deep sanguine red. Winglet and primaries, an elegant light blue. The legs and feet were said to have been black; the tail red and yellow intermixed.

Jamaican red macaw Ara gossei, by Joseph Smit, from Rothschild's book Extinct Birds, 1907 (public domain)

Of great interest, moreover, is that in 2003, researchers C.T. Fisher and F.E. Warr, writing on the subject of avian-related library and manuscript resources in a paper published by the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club, revealed that a hitherto-overlooked full-colour painting of a mysterious Jamaican macaw largely fitting Robinson's description as documented by Gosse had lately been discovered in a work containing many wildlife paintings published in 1765 – namely, Lieutenant L.J. Robins's The Natural History of Jamaica. The copy of this work in which the painting had been spotted was owned by the Earl of Derby.

Other researchers have since speculated that it was more likely to have been a Cuban red macaw that had been imported into Jamaica. (Moreover, parrot expert Tony Pittman has mentioned to me that A. gossei as a whole, not just this one specimen, might well have been based entirely upon examples of A. tricolor imported or traded from Cuba and therefore never existed as a valid species in its own right.)

Yet as can be seen here by comparing my article's illustrations of the Cuban red macaw with the Robins-derived painting, the Jamaican red macaw does not correspond precisely with the Cuban red macaw. In particular, its golden-yellow underparts differ markedly from the much darker underparts of the Cuban red macaw, as does its bright red back in comparison with the Cuban's very dark back.

Possible Jamaican red macaw painting in Lieutenant L.J. Robins's book The Natural History of Jamaica, 1765 (public domain)

Evidencing that mainland South American macaws (or, at the very least, known macaw species from Trinidad) have indeed been imported into Jamaica, within an Archives of Natural History paper published in October 2010 ornithological researcher S.T. Turvey documented a previously-unconsidered watercolour painting of a probable scarlet macaw A. macao that had lived on Jamaica, where it had been depicted in 1765 by John Lindsay.

However, whereas this latter specimen certainly does resemble the scarlet macaw, it does not recall either the macaw in the Robins painting or the macaw of Robinson's verbal description, indicating once again that A. gossei was a distinct, valid Jamaican endemic. Indeed, concluding their coverage of A. gossei within their authoritative tome Extinct Birds (2012), Julian P. Hume and Michael Walters opined:

Thus there seems to be reasonable evidence that at least one other endemic red macaw, along with Ara tricolor of Cuba, once occurred in the West Indies. Whether it justified specific status is now impossible to ascertain.

Scarlet macaw Ara macao, showing its characteristic blue tail plumes (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Finally: in 1967, within the second revised edition of his classic volume Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World, the esteemed American ornithologist James C. Greenway opined that perhaps the scarlet macaw, the Cuban red macaw, and the mysterious red macaws reported from Hispaniola, Guadeloupe, and Jamaica collectively constituted a species complex, or superspecies as he called it. However, with no specimens of the last three macaws to examine, this must remain just an opinion, albeit a most intriguing one.

 

In Part 2 of this ShukerNature article (click here to access it), I examine reports and illustrations of some lost Caribbean macaws that reputedly sported green and yellow or blue and yellow plumage. I also survey the possible taxonomic status of a most interesting macaw-like mystery parrot featured in a very famous painting by the celebrated 17^th-Century Dutch architect and painter Bartholomeus van Bassen – so don't miss it!

Extinct Birds author Lord Walter Rothschild aboard his famous zebra-drawn carriage (public domain)

 

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)