The Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis) was a large flightless seabird, some 75–85 cm long, with a stocky black-backed, white-bellied body. Its small wings were useless for flight but served as efficient flippers underwater. The bill was tall, powerful and black, marked with several white cross-grooves, and during the breeding season the bird carried a distinctive white patch between eye and bill. In build and bearing it resembled a greatly enlarged Little Auk, or superficially a small penguin, though it was not related to the penguins of the southern hemisphere.
No sound recordings exist, since the species went extinct before audio recording was possible; historical accounts describe simple grunting and hoarse calls, along with loud cries that rang out from its densely packed breeding colonies. The Great Auk bred on a handful of isolated, rocky islands across the North Atlantic, from Canada and Greenland via Iceland and the Faroe Islands to the British Isles and Norway, and subfossil bones found on Gotland and in Skåne show that it once occurred along the Swedish coast as well; outside the breeding season it lived out on the open northern Atlantic. Pairs nested in dense colonies on predator-free rocky islands and laid a single egg per year directly on bare rock, with no nest material, feeding on fish and other marine prey caught in skilful underwater dives. Centuries of intensive hunting for meat, eggs, down and oil, made easy by the bird's flightlessness, combined with its very slow reproductive rate to drive a rapid decline; the last confirmed pair was killed on the island of Eldey off Iceland in 1844, and the species' fate remains one of the most cited examples of extinction driven by human overexploitation.
Read about this species in Swedish →