Auks, Murres, Puffins 



had been torn off for clothing, they were left to decay. In Nova 

 Scotia he met three men who made a business of egg-hunting. 

 They began operations by trampling on all the eggs they found 

 laid, relying on the well-known habit of the auk and its relatives 

 that lay but a single egg, to replace it should it be destroyed. 

 Thus they made sure of fresh eggs only. In the course of six 

 weeks they had collected thirty thousand dozen, worth about two 

 thousand dollars. As this wholesale destruction of our gregarious 

 marine birds has been going on for a century at least, is it not 

 surprising that they are not all extinct, like the great auk.? 



Without wings to help them escape from the voyagers and 

 fishermen who pursued them on sea and ashore, the great auks, 

 that in Nuttall's day were still breeding in enormous colonies in 

 Greenland, dwindled to a single specimen "found dead in the 

 vicinity of St. Augustine, Labrador, in November, 1870," which, 

 although in poor condition, was sold for two hundred dollars to 

 a European buyer. The Smithsonian Institution, the Philadelphia 

 Academy, Cambridge Museum, and Vassar College own one 

 specimen each, the only ones in this country, so far as known. 



The moral from the story of the great auk that the razor- 

 billed species and its short-winged relatives should take to heart, 

 obviously, is to keep their wings from degenerating into useless 

 appendages, by constant exercise. They certainly are strong 

 flyers in their present evolutionary stage, and, by constantly flap- 

 ping their stiffened wings just above the level of the sea, are usually 

 able to escape pursuit, if not in the air then by diving through the 

 crest of a wave and still using their wings as a fish would its fins, 

 to assist their flight under water. Though they move awkwardly 

 on land, so awkwardly as to suggest the possible derivation of 

 the adverb from their name, they still move rapidly enough to es- 

 cape with their life in a fair race. When cornered, the hand that 

 attempts to seize them receives a bite that sometimes takes the 

 flesh from the bone— such a bite as the sea parrot gives. 



In the nesting grounds, where enormous numbers of these 

 razor-billed auks have congregated from times unknown, the 

 females may be seen crouching along the eggs, not across them, 

 in long, seriate ranks, where tier after tier of cliffs rise from 

 the water's edge to several hundred feet above the sea. Where 

 there is no attempt at a nest, and each buffy and brown speckled 

 egg looks just like the thousands of others lying loosely about 



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