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Tim Birkhead’s The Great Auk (2025) is a richly layered natural-history narrative that reconstructs the life, extinction, and legacy of the flightless Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis), a close relative of puffins and other alcids. Drawing on historical records and modern seabird science, he depicts its dense colony life and specialized diving ecology before detailing its rapid destruction by human exploitation for food, feathers, and specimens, culminating in its extinction in 1844. The book also explores the bird’s “afterlife” in museums and collections, offering a powerful cautionary tale about human impacts on seabirds—highly relevant to modern puffin and auklet conservation.
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An excerpt from The Great Auk
“Even though the great auk itself no longer exists, its stuffed skins, empty eggshells and disarticulated bones continue to exert a powerful magic. Like the relics of saints, they are talismanic, objects of awe – pieces of the true auk – imbuing those that own them with an uncanny power. The great auk is a bird with a past, a present and, remarkably, a future. Why else would I be writing this book? “
“Just 75 eggs and 78 skins survive, and their rarity means that both museums and private collectors set great store by them. For almost two centuries, these fragments of a life once lived have been avidly sought and bought, often for exorbitant sums. The acquisition of great auk relics is, for some, an all-absorbing – and often self-destructive – obsession.”
“It is May 2017, and I am chatting on the phone to a retired miner and former egg-collector. In his strong South Yorkshire accent, he casually tells me that a mate of his is repairing a great auk egg. I’m stunned. With so few known eggs of this vanished, revered bird, it seemed extraordinary that not far away – and in an area of social deprivation made famous by the film Kes – such an egg exists. Amazed and intrigued, I ask who it is. My ex-miner tells me his mate’s name, and agrees to introduce me. A few days later I go to his house to meet him. Once a miner too, and now a night watchman in the local steelworks, Graham Axon’s hobby is creating replica eggs and repairing real ones.”
“I ask where the egg had come from, but Graham is evasive; ‘I can’t tell you,’ he says. I am not surprised, for everything to do with great auk eggs is cloaked in mystery and intrigue, so I don’t persist. When Graham says that the now completely restored egg has gone back to its owner my heart sinks. But he tells me that he has recorded his repair in photographs on his phone. We go into the shed in his garden, where Graham sits at his workbench and pulls out his mobile phone. In more detail than I had dared to hope, he reveals the entire process, from the arrival of the damaged egg, through its dismantling and the careful and seemingly miraculous reassembly of the 3 6 separate pieces. In a marvellous reversal of the fate of most eggs, Graham was able to put Humpty together again. The finished article is exquisite, and I feel sure that its owner, whoever it is, must be delighted.”
“There was so much I wanted to know: who is the owner? How did they get the egg? How much had they paid to acquire it? How much had Graham been paid for his extraordinary repair work?”