After exhausting its supply of eider duck feathers in 1760 (also due to overhunting), feather companies sent crews to Great Auk nesting grounds on Funk Island. The birds were harvested every ...

Gísli Pálsson: The great auk was a tall bird — 80 centimeters [31 inches] and quite thick with lots of meat — and it was flightless so would nest on skerries [small rocky islands] where it ...

An auk, after all, was worth more dead than alive. Locals valued its meat, which fishermen used as food and bait. Sailors coveted the oil rendered from the bird’s fat.

The Great Auk is a bird you won't see in the wild. It is extinct globally. Once numbering in millions, and occurring in Europe as far south as Spain, and in America on the far side of the North ...

The great auk, a puffin relative, was a flightless seabird found along the coasts of North America and western Europe. They were large birds, weighing up to 11 pounds with large fat deposits.

Museums and merchants started paying top dollar for great auk eggs and skins. In 1844, members of a small expedition found two of the birds on an Icelandic island, strangled them and crushed their ...

The Last Auk. The last known auk — a plump, penguinlike seagoing bird — had a reserved seat on an Icelandair flight from London to Reykjavik in 1971.

The great auk, a penguin-like bird, was hunted for its meat and feathers. It has been extinct since the 1840s. Courtesy of Jonathan Kavalier [/] In the ...

Pillow-makers prized the auk's feathers. By the 16th century, the bird’s population had plummeted so quickly that conservation laws were written to protect it. By the 1770s, ...

The last Great Auk recorded in Ireland was a bird spotted in May 1834 by David Hardy. It was swimming in the sea under the cliffs between Ballymacaw and Brownstown Head near Tramore in Co Waterford.