THE SLAUGHTER OF NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS 283 



The Great Auk — Plautus impennis (Linn.), was a sea- 

 going diving bird about the size of a domestic goose, related 

 to the guillemots, murres and puffins. For a bird endowed 

 only with flipper-like wings, and therefore absolutely unable 

 to fly, this species had an astonishing geographic range. It 

 embraced the shores of northern Europe to North Cape, 

 southern Greenland, southern Labrador and the Atlantic 

 coast of North America as far south as Massachusetts. Some 

 say, "as far south as Massachusetts, the Carolinas and 

 Florida," but that remains to be proven. In the life history 

 of this bird, a great tragedy was enacted in 1800 by sailors, 

 on Funk Island, north of Newfoundland, where men were 

 landed by a ship, and spent several months slaughtering Great 

 Auks and trying out their fat for oil. In this process the bodies 

 of thousands of auks were burned as fuel, in working up the 

 remains of tens of thousands of others. 



On Funk Island, a favorite breeding-place, the Great Auk 

 was exterminated in 1840, and in Iceland in 1844. Many 

 natives ate this bird with relish and, being easily captured, 

 either on land or sea, the commercialism of its day soon ob- 

 literated the species. The last living specimen was seen in 

 1852, and the last dead one was picked up in Trinity Bay, 

 Ireland, in 1853. There are about eighty mounted and un- 

 mounted skins in existence, four skeletons, and quite a number 

 of eggs. An egg is worth about $1,200 and a good mounted 

 skin at least double that sum. 



The Labrador Duck, Camptorhynchus labradoricus 

 (Gmel.). — This handsome sea-duck, of a species related to 

 the eider ducks of arctic waters, became totally extinct about 



