Who Killed the Great Auk?

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, 2000 - Nature - 227 pages
"Who Killed the Great Auk? takes us on a tour of some of the wildest and most remote communities on earth. We travel with Audubon to Labrador, sail to the remote Scottish island of St. Kilda, experience the hardship of life in the Newfoundland colonies, and follow the peregrinations of intrepid naturalists as they put to sea in search of the very last of the Great Auks."--Jacket.
 

Contents

List of illustrations x
11
The Icelandic bird skerries
17
Travels with Audubon in Labrador
31
Westward ho
41
A visit to Funk Island
49
Books of authority
61
Wild foulis biggand the Great Auk on St Kilda
75
The Newfoundland
85
Mercenary and cruel
107
The old wisdom of the Faeroe Islands
117
In search of the Great Auk
125
Last appearances
139
The natural history of the Great Auk
151
a pressing need
165
An Act of Parliament
177
Copyright

Uncouth regions
95

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2000)

Jeremy A. Gaskell, c/o A M Gaskell, Lyndale, Luxborough, Watchet, Somerset, TA23 0SJ impennis44@hotmail.com Jeremy Gaskell's interest in the Great Auk dates from his teens, when he first planned a visit to its traditional breeding grounds in Iceland. An active ornithologist, he has travelled as far afield as Thailand, and has also acquired extensive knowledge of the birds of the Middle East. He is the author of a number of articles and academic papers on subjects as diverse as the early history of British ornithology, and seabird identification. In 1998 he broadcast a history of the Great Auk on the BBC World Service.

Bibliographic information