196 EXTINCTION OF THE SPECIE8. 



It was only necessary to go on shore, armed with sticks, to kill as 

 many as they chose. The birds were so stupid that they allowed 

 themselves to be taken up on their own proper element by boats 

 under sail ; and it is even said that on putting out a plank it was 

 possible to drive the Great Auks up out of the sea into the boats. 

 On land the sailors formed low enclosures of stones into which they 

 drove the birds, and as they were unable to fly, kept them there 

 enclosed till they were wanted for the table. It is said, too, that 

 as the birds were fat and burnt well, they were actually used for 

 fuel, as the dried bodies of the Auks and Guillemots are still 

 employed on the Westermann Islands.* 



As may be supposed, this wholesale slaughter of the birds 

 speedily reduced their numbers, and there is no certain informa- 

 tion that any individuals of the species have been seen on those 

 coasts during the present century. The last known breeding- 

 places of the bird are two isolated rocks, extremely difficult of 

 access, off the south coast of Iceland ; and at long intervals, 

 sometimes of ten or fifteen years, a few individuals have been 

 obtained thence up to the year 1844:. In that year a pair of the 

 birds, male and female, were shot at their nest on a little islet 

 near to one of the former breeding-places, and since that time, 

 notwithstanding that the most careful search has everywhere 

 been made for it, the Great Auk has nowhere been seen alive. 



It is conjectured that the bird may still be an inhabitant of the 

 inaccessible shores of East Greenland, though none of the vessels 

 passing that way ever come across it, nor has it ever been seen by 

 any of the Arctic exploring expeditions. It may of course yet 

 be discovered on some part of that ice-bound coast ; but it is by 

 no means improbable that the Great Auk has now ceased to exist, 

 and has thus taken the place till now occupied by the Dodo, of the 

 last in the series of extinct birds. 



The most generally diffused, perhaps, of all our birds of pas- 

 sage are the different members of the Swallow tribe, which every- 

 where in northern lands are welcomed as glad harbingers of 

 approaching summer. Of the four species of these birds which 

 regularly migrate to the British isles, two species, the Swift, the 

 largest, and the Sand-Martin, the smallest of the four, are com- 



* On the Great Auk. A Paper by Edward Charlton, M.P., in the 

 Transactions of the Tyneside Natural Histoi-y Society ; and republished in 

 the " Zoologist." 



