400 GAME BIRDS, WILD-FOWL AND SHORE BIRDS. 



from Greenland to Iceland, or from Greenland to the North 

 American continent, it must have crossed the open sea. It 

 may seem improbable that a flightless bird could swim in one 

 season from Labrador to Florida and back; but fish make 

 similar migrations, and the Auk was a faster swimmer than 

 the fish on which it fed. When we read that a boat propelled 

 by six oars was unable to overtake an Auk, and that the bird 

 finally escaped its would-be captors, the performance of this 

 long migration appears not improbable. It seems possible 

 also that the species may have had one or more breeding 

 places in Massachusetts. Birds bred here would not have 

 had to journey more than twelve hundred miles to reach north- 

 ern Florida. 



The Great Auk was not a bird of the arctic regions. 

 There is no record of its occurrence within the arctic circle. 

 It is believed to have lived in Greenland at a time when the 

 climate there was much milder than it is to-day, but not 

 within the last three hundred years. It inhabited the tem- 

 perate zone. It probably never bred in any numbers on the 

 mainland of Europe. Being flightless, it was obliged to seek 

 outlying reef -environed islands, where it would not often be 

 endangered by man or predatory animals. It may have lived 

 in prehistoric times off the coast of Denmark, as its bones 

 have been found in Danish as well as in Scotch shell-mounds, 

 and one instance of the supposed occurrence of the living bird 

 in Denmark has been recorded.^ 



It is believed to have occurred in considerable numbers 

 about seaward portions of the British Isles, also; but it was 

 extirpated from Great Britain and the continent so long ago 

 that few records of its presence remain. Within a century 

 it frequented St. Balda, possibly Shetland, Faroe, the three 

 Garefowl rocks off the southern coast of Iceland, and a few 

 other isolated isles. It suffered continual persecution on its 

 nesting grounds. The last specimen recorded at St. Kilda was 

 killed in 1821; and the last at Eldey, off Iceland, in 1844. 

 This may have been the last living Great Auk. 



The history of the bird along the Atlantic coast of the 



1 Grieve, Symington: The Great Aulc or Garefowl, London, 1885, p. 27. 



