240 On the trail of vanishing birds 



the second, and the former seized it close to the edge of the 

 rock, here risen to a precipice some fathoms high, the water 

 being directly below it. Ketil then returned to the sloping shelf 

 whence the birds had started, and saw an egg lying on the lava 

 slab, which he knew to be a garef owl's. Whether there was not 

 another egg is uncertain. All this took place in much less time 

 than it takes to tell it. 



Another account told how the necks of the two old birds were 

 wrung in the next moment, and how Ketil threw the egg away 

 because it showed a tiny crack. It was the last great auk's egg on 

 earth, and these were the last two birds of their race. The men left 

 the island at once, and the great auk was then extinct. It had not 

 taken much more than five minutes! 



After that, all that remained were some 80 skins in museums 

 and private collections (nearly all of them from Eldey and 

 Gierfuglasker), 23 or 24 complete skeletons, 2 specimens preserved 

 in alcohol, and about 75 eggs. Many bones had also been col- 

 lected, some of them from Funk Island where great numbers of 

 garefowls were slaughtered for their feathers. Dr. Lucas, who 

 visited Funk Island in 1878, estimated from the great heaps of 

 bones that literally millions of the birds must have died there over 

 the years. 



For the great auk this was the "uttermost finality." Their kind 

 would nevermore be seen upon the earth. 



The next North American bird to disappear was the handsome 

 Labrador duck (Camptorhynchus labradorius). It was a large 

 bird, of greater over-all length than the eiders. The male was black 

 with a white head, and white on the breast and wings. The female 

 was grayish-brown above and grayish-white underneath. Of the 

 extinction of the Labrador duck, Edward Howe Forbush had this 

 to say: 



The most remarkable fact about the Labrador duck, which 

 seems to have been common on the Atlantic coast one hundred 

 years ago, is that it is now extinct and no one knows why. If it 

 is a fact that it bred only on rocky islands about the Gulf of 

 St. Lawrence and the coast of Labrador, the feather hunting 

 of the eighteenth century and the egging and shooting of the 



