The last great auks in Scotland

Sadly, one auk you won’t see is the Great Auk. The last one recorded in Scottish waters was actually presented alive in 1821 to Robert Stevenson by a local crofter.

This was while Stevenson was inspecting the Eilean Glas lighthouse on Scalpay, which is just off the larger island of Harris in the Outer Hebrides.

(The Stevenson dynasty of Scottish lighthouse builders included the novelist RL Stevenson.)

Anyway, the bird joined them on the inspection voyage, being allowed to swim and feed via a string on its leg.

At voyage end, before it was donated as a specimen to the Museum at Edinburgh University, it was given one last swim.

By this time the inspection yacht was in the Firth of Clyde. But the string snapped, the bird swam away and was never seen again.

The last encounter with a breeding pair was in 1844 on Eldey, off south-west Iceland. Both birds were strangled, their egg smashed. The last ever sighting was in 1852. Then the great auk was gone for ever.

Flightless, this penguin-like Northern Hemisphere bird was ruthlessly exploited for food and persecuted to extinction. Museum demand for skins also hastened the end of the species. See, I told you being an auk, even a puffin, is a serious business.

…ever wondered why puffins and other auks flap their wings so fast?

Auks in flight - it's a bit of an effort

Now sit up at the back and pay attention. Let’s talk about wing-loading factor.

Puffins and auks have a special problem. They need wings both to fly and to swim with. So they’ve had to compromise. No point in having great long soaring wings like a gull. (Low wing loading factor.) Hopeless under water.

But no point in having wings that are really so small that you can only use them as flippers, otherwise you’d end up like the great auk – and we all know what happened to him.

So, auks and puffins have a high wing-loading factor – little wings useful for swimming but you have to work them hard to get airborne. That’s why puffins flap more or less constantly while flying. No effortless gliding for them.

For my next life, I’m definitely not coming back as a puffin. Sounds like a lot of hard work.

Keen on birds? (There can be no other explanation if you've gone this far down the page.) Then you should get yourself out to North Ronaldsay.

Also, here are some more suggestions for seeing wild nature in Scotland.