194 



AUK GROUP 



auk will be found described under the name oi Plautus inipennis ; since, 

 however, the species, as its popular name implies, is nothing more than 

 a large auk or razorbill, in which the wings arc so reduced as to be 

 useless for flight, and since this is a purely adaptive character, there 

 are no sufficient reasons for sundering it from the typical genus Alca. 



Since the present work is devoted to existing rather than extinct 

 British birds, of which, by the way, the present species is the only one 



that has completely disappeared 

 from the world within modern times, 

 a very brief notice of the great 

 auk will suffice. Formerly this bird 

 bred in St. Kilda, where, however, 

 it had become very scarce so early 

 as the middle of the eighteenth 

 century; but a specimen was 

 obtained from that group of islands 

 in 182 1 or 1822, and a second 

 about 1840 ; while a pair, of which 

 the male is in the British Museum, 

 were killed in the Orkneys in 1812, 

 and one was taken near Water- 

 ford harbour in 1834, being the 

 only instance of the occurrence of 

 the species in Ireland. Bones of 

 the great auk have, however, been 

 obtained in Antrim and Waterford, 

 as well as in caves at Teesdale, 

 in Durham, and in the superficial 

 deposits of Caithness and Argyll- 

 shire. But Iceland, and more 

 especially the now submerged 

 " Geirfuglasker," or garefowl-rock, 

 was the great stronghold of the species in the eastern hemisphere ; 

 and the last survivors of the species were killed there in 1844. Bones 

 have been also discovered in the peat of Denmark, and in Funk Island, 

 off the Newfoundland coast, the last resort of the species on the 

 western side of the Atlantic, and they have also been recorded from 

 as far south as Florida. 



The lack of the power of flight in the great auk was made up by 

 its extraordinary powers of diving and swimming ; but, like many 

 other flightless species, the bird was extraordinarily tame and confiding ; 



GKKAT ALK. 



