The great auk is a powerful bird with a bone-chilling extinction story. It's getting a second life as a D&D monster. Get the great auk and two other extinct animals for your D&D campaign: https://store.magehandpress.com/products/book-of-extinction-preview

Episode transcript: https://scintilla.studio/monster-extinction-great-auk/

Guides:

Kieran Suckling, Executive Director and Founder of the Center for Biological Diversity

Tierra Curry, Senior Scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity

Stan Rachootin, Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at Mount Holyoke University

Appearing courtesy the Beneski Museum of Natural History, Amherst College

Like this stat block? Did I miss something? Let me know on Twitter: www.twitter.com/SparkOtter

"Extinction Theme" by Alexandre Miller, The Boy King of Idaho

The giant auk is sort of like a giant flightless puffin.

It's a very large bird it's three feet tall, black and white,

a very dramatically colored with a white eyepatch during, during part of the year.

It would molt and lose that layer, but had that white eyepatch during part of

the year, but with these very little wings on this tall body, and very

robust, strong looking creature, and this very powerful, stout, hooked beak.

In fact, some of the early names for it, were spearfish.

The Norse name for it was gejrfugl which means "spearfish".

Welcome to Making a Monster: Extinction.

This is the companion podcast to Book of Extinction, a monster manual of animals

lost to the natural world, but given a second life through Dungeons & Dragons.

Natural history is already a part of the DNA of fantasy games.

Many of our favorite monsters began as tall tales of exotic animals.

Bringing extinct species into D&D is the best way tabletop gamers can

honor their memory and move people toward action in the climate crisis

and accelerating mass extinction.

In this episode, we discover the great auk, the garefowl, what the

Intuit called isarukitsoq and the New Englanders called "The Wobble",

and turn it into a D&D monster.

If you want to follow along with this build, you can go to

scintilla.studio/extinction right now to download a digital preview of the book,

which includes a stat block for the real great auk as well as the magical version

we'll be creating at the end of the show.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

Take your time.

One note before we get started, I apologize in advance if I mispronounce

any words in this episode, especially those from native languages.

I have only seen them in print and not heard them spoken.

If you have correct pronunciations or other resources that would help

me as I try and get these right, please contact me using the link

in the show notes to let me know.

This episode has two guides to the natural world.

The first is Stan Rachootin, Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at Mount

Holyoke University, giving a tour of the Beneski Museum of Natural History.

The second is new to the show.

My name is Kieran Suckling, and I am the Executive Director

and founder of the Center for Biological Diversity, which is a endangered species

protection group that mostly works, here in the U.S., but also internationally.

And we try to save, all species, great and small from, from butterflies and

insects to polar bears and wolves, uh, keep them alive, and to end the mass

extinction crisis that's been sweeping over this planet for the last 500 years.

And we do that primarily through, litigation, uh, suing corporations that

are killing endangered species, but very often suing state and federal governments,

which are supposed to be enforcing laws to protect them, but often often fail.

So let's go back to a time before the eighth century, when the great

arch had populations in the millions and was an important cultural and

agricultural icon for native cultures in Newfoundland and Scandinavia.

The giant auk lived all around a lot of the Northern Hemisphere.

When nesting in, uh, Northwest Europe, they

nested in very large numbers.

So there would be like thousands of them covering, this rocky area together,

making a, you know, a cacophonous noise.

It did not fly because of its tiny wings but it was most at home in the water

and it would swim very rapidly, very agile, and would catch fish with this

powerful beak and, and consume them.

The great auk was perhaps the greatest seabird in the ocean

and the worst bird anywhere else.

They were flightless, they could run no faster than a human could walk,

and they could hardly climb at all.

The two months of the year great auk nesting pairs spent on land

to raise that year's single chick made them incredibly vulnerable.

The species survived by choosing nesting sites that were nearly impossible for

anything but a great auk to reach.

It was such a good swimmer that to get on land.

It would, it would live in these areas where, um, you know, rocks would sort

of drop straight into the water and getting up onto these rocks would

not be necessarily an easy thing to do with waves splashing, but it

could accelerate so fast through the water, it would just shoot out of the

water, and then land on, on the rocks.

And so very, you know, dramatic powerful animal, but we don't, uh come

across such large birds, very often.

And also birds that are so, so robust.

You know, you think it was delicate little birds and delicate little songs.

And this was a very robust creature.

But the intersection of that Venn diagram between habitable and

inaccessible shrank as warming seas pushed the creature farther and farther

north and human seafaring techniques became more and more advanced.

At first, the great auk could only be taken by the most committed hunters like

the native Beothuk people of Newfoundland.

The Beothuk invented a special crescent-shaped canoe to hunt great

auks on an island they called Apponath.

That same island would be called Funk Island by the European sailors

who reached it in the 16 hundreds.

Precisely because it lived in such remote areas.

It did not encounter humans very often.

It did not encounter mammalian predators very often.

They wouldn't be preyed upon by polar bears.

But so for that reason, it was not afraid of humans.

Uh, and this was ultimately it's, um, downfall, because humans could approach

them, capture them, kill them very easily, despite how big they were, because

they just had no, no fear of humans.

In fact, there's descriptions that people would, just pluck their feathers, that

they first were captured for feathers.

A lot of birds were.

The millinary business was huge at one point.

So feathers were collected mostly for women's hats, and imported to Europe,

America as well, but they would just pull the feathers out of the bird, um, without

necessarily even killing it at first.

And then it would die from exposure without the protection

of its, of its feathers.

Um, it was quite remarkable.

But sealers, people who hunted seals, found that these

were easier to hunt than seals.

Bash them over the head, vast amounts of fat, you could render

them very quickly and use the fat for all sorts of things and sell it.

And so their populations crashed a lot.

In 1794, a sailor on HMS Boston named Aaron Thomas

described how this was done.

If you come for their feathers, you do not give yourself the trouble of killing them.

But lay hold of one and pluck the best of their feathers.

You then turn the poor penguin to drift with his skin, half naked

and off to perish at his leisure.

This is not a very humane method, but it is the common practice.

While you abide on this island, you are in the constant practice of hard

cruelties, for you not only skin them alive, but you burn them alive

also to cook their bodies with.

You take a kettle with you into which you put a penguin or two,

you kindle a fire under it.

And this fire is absolutely made of the unfortunate penguins themselves.

Their bodies being oily soon, produce a flame.

There is no wood on the island.

Then as they were getting very, very rare at the beginning of the

19th century, there was a, you know, in terms of people's fascination with

natural history, a whole bunch of people all over Europe wanting to collect the

eggs of every single European bird.

And this was the rarest European bird.

And so "eggers" would go out to find giant auk eggs and sell

them for a vast amount of money.

And that put a lot of pressure on them.

And then, in fact, there was a whole monograph portraits of all the remaining

great auk eggs, you know, their, their eggs about this big, and they have some

brown, dark brown mottling on them.

they'd lay one egg at a time, very large brown mottled egg, um,

and then fiercely defend that, that egg,

And you wouldn't necessarily want a beautiful hand, hand

colored book of poor pictures of each egg, but there is, that book exists by

Alfred Newton of Cambridge University.

Um, yes, of course.

The last nesting colony of great auks lived on an island off the coast

of Iceland named Geirfujglasker,or Garefowl Rock, a five acre islet

at the end of a lava rock skerrie.

Geirfujglaskerwas protected by howling winds, rough seas, and inaccessible

terrain and seemed like it could be a permanent refuge for the auk.

In 1830, it blew up.

A volcanic eruption sank the island beneath the sea, causing the auks

to move to nearby Eldey Island

On June 3rd, 1844, a four-man expedition visited Eldey Island

to find the last living pair of auks for a foreign merchant.

One of them refused to make the landing in what he called "Satan's weather."

So three fishermen, Jón Brandsson, Sigurður Ísleifsson and Ketill

Ketilsson entered the island, caught and killed the last two

great auks, and smashed their egg.

We have Sigurður's firsthand account, given to great auk specialist,

John Wolley some years later:

" They walked slowly.

Jón Brandsson crept up with his arms The bird that Jón got went into a corner but

[mine] was going to the edge of the cliff.

[I] caught it close to the edge – a precipice many fathoms deep.

Its wings lay close to the sides – not hanging out.

I took him by the neck and he flapped his wings.

He made no cry.

I strangled him."

And that was the end of the great auk.

Usually at this point in the story, people get real quiet.

Of all the extinction stories I've heard and told over the course of

this project so far, this one makes people the most genuinely angry

and you're right to feel that way.

I've given talks before where I put up the pictures of an

extinct species and start telling their stories and people walk out of the room.

And I finally realized I can't just lead with that or be like, okay, here's all the

gloomy extinction statistics I have to be like, and here's what we can do about it.

And so for me, action is the antidote to despair.

That's Tierra Curry, senior scientist at the Center

for Biological Diversity.

I talk to people about extinction every day and

I take a lot of hope from the things that people are doing.

The Dungeons & Dragons community is exploring extinction now, like I talk to

elementary school students who are doing projects on climate change, or people

contact me asking for how to build a pollinator garden in their community.

There's so many good people out there doing so many creative things.

And because I do extinction outreach, I get to talk to people every day

who were doing something like from having bake sales, to writing songs,

to writing poetry, to painting murals, whatever it is, people

care and people are doing stuff.

And that, that gives me a lot of hope.

Here are two ways you can take action in the climate crisis.

First, donate to conservation through Book of Extinction.

Go to scintilla.studio/extinction, or follow the link in the

show notes to download the preview of Book of Extinction.

You can pay what you want for it, and whatever you pay will be

donated to conservation efforts to preserve endangered species,

habitat, and biodiversity.

I'm currently meeting with conservation organizations to select a project and

organize a grant, and you can follow this podcast or join my email list to

get the details as they are finalized.

I am

so excited about this.

You really don't know how excited I am about it, because it's like, it's a

whole community that is passionate and driven and probably like resourceful and

willing to dive into details on stuff.

And I can just see this community running with this and being like

we're going to end extinction is that could be the tipping point

in the D and D community like

extinction and extinction ends here.

Second, share these stories with the people you play games with

just telling people these animals existed and what they represent

begins to reverse the sliding scale of decreasing biodiversity by helping

people realize what we've already lost.

It matters how we portray these stories.

The choices we make in art can persist for decades or centuries to come.

There was one great auk that was a pet of the

king of Denmark and he made a little sort of pearl leash for it.

And he walked around with his auk on a leash and a portrait was painted of it.

And then other people as auks got, as the great auk got rarer and rarer,

would use that portrait and copy it.

And so many of the portraits of the wild great auk have a white ring around

its neck, which was actually a necklace that was put around the pet auk's neck.

Actually I want to say one more thing about the

great auk that's interesting.

So, its genus name is Pinguinnus, and it was found by Europeans course much

earlier by, uh, indigenous people, but, but it was found by Europeans much sooner

than penguins were ever discovered because they occur in Northwest Europe as well

as, um, Northwest, uh, North America.

And you know that's why we have this old Norse name for it.

But so it was the original penguin.

Penguins were not yet known.

So when penguins were later discovered by Europeans, they said, oh,

well this is a very similar bird.

And so we're going to call these ones penguins as well.

You tend to think the penguin would have the first name penguin and it would

go the other way, but it went, the other direction and it wasn't until

much later, uh, actually Carl Linnaeus, developing the original taxonomy

system, separated them, them out.

With all these birds there's very interesting stories of the names,

which goes back to the whole question of hybrids and monsters, because they

all start blending into one another.

There's not one of them that has some singular story of being what it is.

It's always, "well, we thought it was that, and it was related

to this and then its name changed and then someone heard the name

differently and every one of them.

And so consequently, they're all hybrid mythological beings

tied to other, other creatures.

So let's start with a great auk and let's make a monster.

We'll call it the ocean, master the undisputed king of the seas

for this creature to maintain its inaccessible habitat in a world

of magic where wizards can fly.

It has to have magic of its own, which means it cannot remain a beat.

Dungeons and dragons classifies monsters into 14 distinct types.

I hope Linnaeus shows us how influential such a system of

classification can be on our discourse.

I mean, that's a podcast for another time.

It's enough for now to say that creatures with the beast type interact with

the world in strictly physical ways.

No.

D and D beast has the ability to cast spells.

So the ocean master gets upgraded to a Celeste.

There's a suite of spells in dungeon, the dragons that changed

the very terrain you pass through.

Perfect for the ocean master, but which ones depends.

In my experience, terrain spells can take up to twice as long

to resolve as other spells.

So we'll limit the kit by setting the Monster's challenge rating at three,

this trims out some of the higher level spells like reverse gravity.

We can also remove a few that don't match the great ox of

original story plant growth.

Isn't the best choice for a bird that spent 10 months out of the year, floating

in the ocean in the final render, we have a small creature with a fearsome

beak attack and in eight spell cat.

Fog cloud Ray of frost, spike growth, call lightening control, water, ice storm,

and wall of stone with the ocean master in your campaign, you can replicate at

your table, the experience of navigating through treacherous, Icelandic, seas.

What does it look like to sail those waters?

What merchants offer would make it worth the danger and what would

have happened to the great arc?

If it had been able to control its habits.

Instead of the other way around special.

Thanks this episode to Fred Vienna and the Beneski museum of natural history

at Amherst college for contributing the recording of professor Richard he's to.

Thanks also to Karen suckling and Tiara Curry at the center

for biological diversity.

And thank you for listening to making a monster extinction.

If bringing D and D to conservation matters to you, please visit

scintilla.studio/extinction to download the book of extinction preview.

You can pay what you think it's worth, or you could just have it, but whatever

you pay through that page will be donated to conservation efforts to

preserve endangered species habitat.

And bio-diverse.

If you really like what I'm doing with this podcast, consider supporting

the show on Patrion patrons of making a monster, get access to a ton of

extras, including music, cut tape bonus episodes, and a master list of all the

stat blocks and discounts past guests have given to listeners of the show.

I'll see you next week with a brand new one.