been a large one to persist through more than two centuries of
depredation. By the late seventeen hundreds, though, the birds’ numbers
were in sharp decline. The feather trade had become so lucrative that
teams of men were spending the entire summer on Funk, scalding and
plucking. In 1785, George Cartwright, an English trader and explorer,
observed of these teams: “The destruction which they have made is
incredible.” If a stop were not soon put to their efforts, he predicted, the
great auk would soon “be diminished to almost nothing.”
Audubon’s great auks.
Whether the teams actually managed to kill off every last one of the
island’s auks or whether the slaughter simply reduced the colony to the
point that it became vulnerable to other forces is unclear. (Diminishing
population density may have made survival less likely for the remaining
individuals, a phenomenon that’s known as the Allee effect.) In any event,
the date that’s usually given for the extirpation of the great auk from
North America is 1800. Some thirty years later, while working on The Birds
of America, John James Audubon traveled to Newfoundland in search of
great auks to paint from life. He couldn’t find any, and for his illustration
had to make do with a stuffed bird from Iceland that had been acquired by
a dealer in London. In his description of the great auk, Audubon wrote
that it was “rare and accidental on the banks of Newfoundland” and that it