Ask just about anyone in the ABA Area about extinct birds, and their mind will leap to the Passenger Pigeon. Ask a birder, and they will add to the list the Carolina Parakeet and the Heath Hen. With a little prodding, the best-informed of us may come up with the Labrador Duck or the Dusky Seaside Sparrow—and only then are we likely to recall the giant unflighted alcid of the North Atlantic, the Great Auk.

It is different in Europe. Only one European bird species has been entirely exterminated in the historical period, and that bird, the Great Auk, carries on its flightless shoulders all the weight of memory that in the U.S. is spread across so many other species that have slipped into the abyss of extinction. To call it an obsession rather trivializes the phenomenon, but there is no denying the genuine emotional hold the auk continues to maintain on European birders and conservationists, as the tally of books, essays, paintings, and scientific studies emanating from the Old World shows.

Now come two more of those books, one of them an award-winning novel, the other a novel approach to the historiography of the Great Auk. Different as they are in form and in tone, both consider not just the extermination of the Atlantic Ocean’s largest alcid but the very idea of extinction itself.

Michael McCarthy’s Fergus, on the strength of which he was granted the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s 2023 Creative Writing Award, is a rich and sprawling—not to say long—Bildungsroman. We meet the protagonist, Miles Bonnici, at the beginning of what he himself tells us is destined to be a glorious scientific career. Unfortunately (but necessarily for the progress of the narrative), Miles suffers a Lucky Jim–like fall, though without the comedy that runs through that book: The hotshot academic succumbs to drink and depression when his relationship with his New Zealand girlfriend goes awry, and the remainder of the book recounts his recovery and transformation into a very different sort of scientist.

Miles’s human shortcomings are many, but they are most starkly drawn on the first visit he and Jenny, the New Zealander, pay to the seabird stacks of fictional Skarholm. Jenny, experiencing the abundance of a bird island for the first time, sees it as exuberantly full of life, while Miles describes the scene as full of data. It takes a catastrophe for Miles to begin his transformation, in the course of which he and Jenny are inducted into the secret of a Scottish island owned by a sinister entrepreneur. In a dramatic echo of the volcanic explosion that destroyed the island of Geirfuglasker in 1830, the conflagration of a rogue oil tanker eventually kills the mysterious island’s most carefully guarded inhabitants—the last tiny relic population of Great Auks.

The great narrative sweep of Fergus allows McCarthy to explore a number of important topics in the politics and, for want of a better word, philosophy of zoological science. Most signally, the book poses acute questions about how we should respond to the fact of anthropogenic extinction: How much intervention is permitted, and how much is necessary? North American readers will be forcefully reminded of the stories of the California Condor—spared, thus far, the ultimate fate of the auk, thanks to decades of painstaking human effort—and, unfortunately, of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow, whose extinction came about in what still seem the most sordid circumstances possible.

Gísli Pálsson’s Last of Its Kind is a sober, nonfiction account of the history of the Great Auk’s extermination. The great innovation and the great value of this book (wonderfully translated from the Icelandic by Anna Yates) is not the new historical details it adduces, though, but rather in its exploitation of a “new old” source for those details, the unpublished report compiled 175 years ago by John Walley and held now in the manuscript collection of Cambridge University.

By 1858, ornithologists had come to suspect that the Great Auk was, if not yet extinct, soon to shuffle off its mortal coil as a species. In that year, Wolley and Alfred Newton paid a visit to Iceland to learn what they could from the surviving eyewitnesses of the final encounters with the auk there—and perhaps to find auks of their own. Their interviews, most of them conducted with the aid of an interpreter and memorialized by Wolley in a set of notebooks entitled The Garefowl Book, led them to not just witnesses but actual participants in what the visiting Englishmen were forced to conclude were the deaths of the last or nearly last of the Great Auk kind.

Quoting liberally from the notebooks, Pálsson adds considerable depth and detail to the scant précis Newton and Wolley published in the Ibis in 1861. More than that, though, he paints a compelling, even haunting, picture of the intersection between the lives of the human and of the avian inhabitants of remotest Iceland. Thanks to Wolley’s conscientious and vivid notetaking, we see the informants’ imitations of the birds’ waddling gait and swaying head movements—and we watch as they show Newton and Wolley the best techniques for strangling an auk. We meet the women who were charged with preparing the birds, at first using the dense plumage for pillows and then, as the species grew ever scarcer, carefully skinning and stuffing specimens for greedy collectors. As moving as the story of the auk’s final years is, Pálsson’s most impressive and most memorable contribution here is the anthropological one, right down to the ways the descendants of earlier hunters dealt socially and psychologically with the ornitho-sins of their fathers.

It is a fascinating exposition, and Pálsson discovers in it the birth of a new idea in science and conservation, the notion of anthropogenic extinction. By the mid-nineteenth century, he writes, and certainly after the 1859 publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the concept of extinction was widely accepted. Alfred Newton’s study of the demise of the Great Auk, according to Pálsson, led him to the conviction that not just the blind forces of nature but the intentional actions of humans could push a species over the edge for all time. That recognition, founded ultimately on conversations with the Icelanders who had known the auk, would lead necessarily to a new assessment of the human place in nature. Like Miles Bonnici, we find ourselves confronted with the fact of our responsibility for—and to—a world that we have irrevocably diminished.