WARRAH
When was it declared extinct?
The last known warrah was assassinated in 1876.
Where did it spend its time?
This carnivore was previously only known from the Falkland Islands.
(Warrah—The only large land mammal on the windswept archipelago in the South Atlantic was the Falkland Island fox, or warrah.)
The Falkland Islands are a small archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean that is remote and devoid of trees. These islands are a harsh environment, ravaged by constant winds and terrible winter storms. Although the Falkland Islands provide a safe haven for marine animals such as penguins, seals, and sea lions, very few land animals have managed to survive on this barren, oceanic outpost. Th e only mammals known from the Falkland Islands are a small species of mouse and a mysterious dog, the warrah, which also goes by the names of "Falkland Island fox" and "Antarctic wolf.
Mammal experts disagree about whether the animal was a fox or a wolf. According to contemporary accounts of the living animal as well as stuffed skins, this carnivore possessed wolf and fox characteristics. An adult warrah was about twice the size of a red fox (1.6 m long), with a large, wolfish head, but it was only about 60 cm tall at the shoulder due to its short legs. It had a thickly furred tail, unlike a wolf, and it excavated dens in the sandy soil of the coastal dunes like a fox. Apart from mice, the land of the Falkland Islands provides very little prey for the warrah, but it is possible that insect larvae and pupae played an important role in its diet. Although the interior of the Falkland Islands is deficient in carnivore food, the coast is a plentiful source of nutrition at certain times of the year. Many marine animals, including seals, sea lions, penguins, and a variety of flying seabirds, use the islands. When these animals were raising their young, the warrah must have had a good time, and it most likely stole eggs, nestlings, adult birds, and even young pinnipeds. The warrah travelled along well-worn paths that must have been made by generations of the animals accessing their feeding grounds via the shortest possible route. Although the warrah thrived in the southern spring and summer, the autumn and winter were likely harsh, and some accounts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries report that the living animals appeared starved and thin.
Regardless of its wintertime depravities, the warrah appears to have been a successful species that was quite numerous on the two main islands of the Falkland group in the absence of competition. With the arrival of humans, this monopoly came to an end. Visitors to the Falkland Islands were initially terrified of the warrah because it would wade into the water to meet an approaching boat. This was not an aggressive act, but rather one of curiosity. The warrah had most likely never seen humans and thus had never learned to be afraid of them, which contributed to the extinction of this fascinating dog.
Although the Falkland Islands are a harsh environment, certain breeds of hardy sheep were well suited to the conditions and were introduced to the islands to lay the groundwork for the first human colonies. The sheep thrived on the islands, and as humanity tightened its grip on the Falkland Islands, the warrah was regarded as a threat that needed to be eradicated. The warrah, like all dogs, was an opportunistic feeder, and it undoubtedly fed on the introduced sheep and lambs that nibbled the Falkland Island grass, but islanders, in their ignorance, thought the warrah was a vampire who killed sheep and lambs to suck their blood, only eating meat in times of desperation. Horror myths can be very persuasive, especially on a group of small islands where news travels quickly and livelihoods are at stake. To appease the populace, the Falkland Islands' colonial government imposed a bounty on the warrah, and fur hunters quickly moved in to collect handsome rewards for delivering the pelts of dead animals.
With a land area roughly the size of Connecticut, the Falkland Islands could never have supported large numbers of warrah. Even before the human invasion, the warrah population was probably only a few thousand people, so it is not surprising that hunting quickly led to the extinction of this animal. Hunting was easy because the warrah was so gentle; all the hunter needed was a piece of meat and a knife. When the animal approached, he held out the piece of meat and stabbed it with the knife. Other hunters used rifles or poison to kill the warrah, but by the 1860s, the warrah was extremely rare.
A live warrah arrived in London Zoo in 1868 after being transported on a ship with a slew of other exotic animals, the majority of which died during the voyage. The warrah survived for several years in the zoo, far from home, but it was one of the last of its species. The onslaught of the sheep farmers and hunters in the South Atlantic was too much for the poor warrah, and in 1876, the last known animal was killed at Shallow Bay in the Hill Cove Canyon.
• The origins of the warrah are unknown. Did it evolve on the Falkland Islands, where it survived as a relic from before the last glaciation, when the islands were forested and home to a variety of other land animals? Were the warrah's ancestors brought to the islands as pets by South American Indians? Did warrah ancestors walk thousands of years ago to the Falkland Islands when sea levels were much lower? Unfortunately, the answers to these questions died with the warrah, and the canine's presence in the South Atlantic remains a zoological mystery.
• During his time on the Beagle, Charles Darwin saw the warrah and realized that the species would not survive long in the face of human persecution. In reality, the warrah was extinct during Darwin's lifetime.
• It was once widely believed that wolves sucked their prey's blood, which led to their persecution wherever they were found.
GREAT AUK
When was it declared extinct?
The last pair of great auks was killed in 1844, though the bird was spotted again in 1852 on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
Where did it spend its time?
The great auk was a Northern Atlantic bird that frequented islands off the coasts of Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and northern Europe.
(Overzealous hunting wiped out the Great Auk, the largest of the auks.)
There is a long list of recently extinct bird species, and flightless birds feature prominently—hard hit by the spread of humans to the far reaches of the globe. These birds were frequently giants of their kind, and the great auk, as its name implies, was no exception. The great auk, the Northern Hemisphere's penguin, was a large bird that stood around 75 cm tall and weighed about 5 kg when fully grown. The great auk, like the other auk species, had glossy black plumage on its back and head, with a white underside. A white patch of plumage was visible in front of each eye.
Although the great auk's wings were short and stubby, they were very effective underwater, where they would whirr away to propel the animal forward very quickly through this dense medium. The great auk, like all auks and unrelated penguins, was very maneuverable underwater, and it would chase shoals of fi sh at high speed, capturing unlucky individuals in its beak. The great auk hunted fi sh up to about 20 cm long, including species like Atlantic menhaden and capelin, according to remains of its food found off the coast of Newfoundland.
The grace and ease with which the great auk sliced through the water was not mirrored in how it moved around on land. It was built for swimming, and on land it was a clumsy animal, waddling around like the larger penguin species. Because its feet were so far back on its body, it shuffled around and may have used hops or sliding on its belly to get around small obstacles. The great auk's ungainliness on land was undeniably one of its characteristics.
One of its flaws was how easily it could be caught.
Birds, no matter how well adapted to aquatic life they are, are always bound to the land. They must return to land in order to lay their eggs and raise their young. The great auks used low-lying islands to mate and lay their eggs during the breeding season. The female great auk laid only one egg per season, directly onto bare rock. The egg was quite large, weighing approximately 330 g. Every egg in the breeding colony was slightly different in pattern so that parents could easily identify their own developing youngster. The parents most likely fed the hatchling regurgitated fish collected during frequent fishing trips, and the young grew quickly on this diet rich in proteins and fats. They had no choice because summer in these northern climes is extremely short, and if the young had not grown sufficiently to take to the sea when the harsh conditions of winter descended, they would have perished.
The great auk's life was difficult, and it became even more difficult when they attracted the attention of humans. Europeans quickly realized that the great auk was a treasure trove of oil, meat, and feathers. Their awkwardness on land, combined with the necessity of forming dense breeding colonies on low-lying islands, made them easy prey for Atlantic mariners. Sailors armed with clubs would land on the breeding islands and wreak havoc on the nesting birds, dispatching them with head blows. There are stories of great auks being herded up the gangplanks of waiting ships and driven into crudely constructed stone pens to facilitate the slaughter. When the birds were killed, they were sometimes doused in boiling water to help remove their feathers. The skinned bodies were then processed for their oil and meat. The oil was stored and transported back to European cities, where it was used as lamp fuel, while the bird's feathers and down were used to stuff pillows. The slaughter was ruthless, and because breeding pairs of great auks could only lay one egg per year, the species was doomed. The populations of great auks off the coast of Norway were known to be extinct by 1300. By 1800, the great auk's last large stronghold, Funk Island, had been targeted by hunters, and the bird was effectively on its way to extinction. The inaccessible island of Geirfuglasker off the coast of Iceland was the last true refuge for this bird; however, the island was inundated with water during a volcanic eruption and an earthquake. The survivors flew to the island of Eldey, near the tip of Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula, where the last breeding pair was killed on July 3, 1844, by two Icelanders. The last great auk pair was killed while brooding an egg, and the last egg laid by a great auk was smashed. Lonely great auks may have scoured the North Atlantic looking for others of their kind after one was spotted around the Grand Banks in 1852, but their efforts were futile, and they, too, perished along with the rest of their species.
• The great auk was one of several species of giant, flightless auks that lived in the Atlantic. Except for the great auk, all of them became extinct several thousand years ago.
• The great auk's resemblance to Southern Hemisphere penguins in both appearance and lifestyle is an excellent example of convergent evolution, the phenomenon in which two unrelated species come to resemble each other as a result of having to adapt to similar environments.
• Bones discovered at archaeological sites in Florida indicate that the great auk may have migrated south during the winter to avoid the worst of the weather. Many great auk remains can be found in museums around the world. There are numerous skins, eggs, and bones, many of which have been used to create stuffed reconstructions. Complete skeletons of the great auk, on the other hand, are extremely rare, with only a few known to exist. The eyes and internal organs of the two last known great auks were removed and formaldehyde preserved. These poignant reminders of the extinction of this fascinating animal can be found in Denmark's Zoological Museum.
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