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Documentary, Extinct Complete Series Episode 4 - The Great Auk
#Documentary #Extinct
#Documentary #Extinct
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AnimalsTranscript
00:00Transcription by CastingWords
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01:29Transcription by CastingWords
01:39The creature they'd killed was called the Great Orc.
01:45This was the last confirmed sighting of the species, even though people went on searching for decades.
01:51Ironically, the Great Orc had been killed for the very people who most wanted to save it.
01:58For millions of years, the North Atlantic was home to one of the most remarkable seabirds ever, the Great Orc.
02:15A mere 250 years ago, you could see thousands of them in vast colonies.
02:23Now, they're all gone.
02:25Today, the only Great Orcs that remain gather dust in Victorian museum collections.
02:38Just 80 specimens.
02:41All dead.
02:42Stuffed.
02:43They date from the 19th century, when the Great Orc captured the public imagination.
02:52Its eggs changed hands for huge sums of money.
02:55It even became a brand name.
03:03Yet, despite the Victorian fascination with it, the bird was a mystery.
03:09Scientists were ignorant of how many there were, where it lived, how it lived, or how it had evolved, until it was too late.
03:17Even the penguin-like appearance of the Great Orc is deceptive.
03:27Ornithologist Errol Fuller has studied and collated every stuffed museum specimen known to exist.
03:34The Great Orc is a very interesting example of convergent evolution.
03:39It looks very much like a penguin, but in fact, it isn't.
03:43It's not related to the penguins at all.
03:45It's related to the birds that we call now gillimots, razorbills, even puffins.
03:50That's where its affinities lie.
03:52But it happens to look very much like a penguin, because it lived very much the same kind of life.
04:01The orc was larger than the average penguin, and it was a far superior killer.
04:09No penguin ever evolved such an effective weapon.
04:13A beak, long, sleek, and sharp enough to slice through prey in a single bite.
04:20And to chase its victims underwater, it was more agile than the penguin.
04:26At the top of the bird, the beak is compressed, so that that doesn't offer much water resistance.
04:32Then the bird is generally beautifully streamlined.
04:35This bird would have been superbly sleek and hydrodynamic, with very small wings,
04:42so they don't resist against the pull of the water.
04:46And when we get down towards the bottom, the feet are thrown very far back.
04:52All those things conspire to make this bird like a torpedo in the water.
05:07Gillimots and razorbills may be the orc's closest living relatives,
05:10but there's a crucial difference between them.
05:15This Gillimot has very long wings, and that tells us immediately that this is a bird of flight.
05:21The wings on the great orc are really very, very short,
05:24and you see that they couldn't possibly have enabled a bird of this size to take to the air.
05:29The orc and the guillemot were most alike, not in the air, but under the water.
05:37For biologist Donald Kroll, guillemots and orcs stand comparison with the ocean's most magnificent creatures.
05:46We think of sperm whales as being these amazing long-duration divers,
05:50and elephant seals, long-duration deep divers.
05:53But if you scale it to their body size,
05:55you're talking about an animal that weighs thousands of kilos versus a bird that weighs one kilo.
06:02So pound for pound, what these birds are doing is just absolutely astounding.
06:08They're the deepest and longest diving animals that have ever existed on Earth.
06:14And so pound for pound, the great orc might have even been a better diver.
06:17The orc's much reduced flipper-like wings now had less surface area,
06:26enabling the bird to power through water that's many times denser than air.
06:31But to dive so deep, it had paid a price.
06:34What these birds did is essentially, in an evolutionary sense, make the great sacrifice.
06:40They gave up the ability to fly in order to become the supreme divers, if you will.
06:47And so the great orcs were probably one of the best northern hemisphere divers that existed.
06:53And so it really was quite an amazing evolutionary transition.
06:57All this happened to make the great orc a devastating underwater predator.
07:05For over ten months of the year, the orc lived entirely in the open ocean,
07:11hunting schooling fish like capelin.
07:13But the flightlessness that made the great orc such a successful underwater hunter
07:29also made it uniquely vulnerable.
07:33On land, the bird was clumsy and highly at risk from any predator that could get near it.
07:39Its only defence was to live as far away from predators as possible.
07:43And that wasn't easy.
07:46The great orc, of course, was the northern hemisphere's last flightless seabird.
07:51And their flightlessness made them vulnerable on a number of levels.
07:55One is that they had to breed in areas where they could come ashore without having to fly ashore.
08:01So they had to be able to come ashore in some place where there was a beach.
08:04And that kind of limited where they could breed.
08:06There were precious few places the flightless great orc could have gone.
08:18Cliffs and rocky coastlines would have been out of their reach.
08:21Forty miles off Newfoundland, on the eastern coast of Canada, lie the Grand Banks.
08:31An area of shallows, with an archipelago of tiny islands and drifting icebergs close to where the Titanic went down.
08:39For millions of years, this was the orc's stronghold.
08:47Ecologist Bill Montavecchia searches for traces of the bird he knows he'll never find alive among the islands.
08:53You know, there's always been a bit of mystery about these birds and about these islands.
08:59I still look for them, you know.
09:01I mean, I know they're not there.
09:02I still look for them, right?
09:04I mean, because of that sort of presence of them having been here.
09:11Look at these islands here.
09:12They're flat.
09:13They're just like pancakes.
09:15And this is a perfect island for a flightless bird.
09:17This is the kind of island that great orc had to have.
09:21Isolated and uninhabited, the orc lived here and nowhere else along the North American coast, undisturbed for millennia.
09:30But 500 years ago, it suddenly came under attack.
09:34In here is a skull of a great orc that I dug on Funk Island.
09:39This is the beak.
09:43Quite incredible, powerful beak.
09:46This was all one piece that actually subsequently fragmented.
09:55There's a few cracks in the cranium of the bird here.
09:58It might have been where it was banged over the head.
10:01Out here, only one predator could have done this.
10:06Man.
10:11In the 16th century, explorers set off from all over Europe to cross the Atlantic in search of the New World.
10:18Frenchman Jack Cartier was one of them.
10:25After sailing for months across the Uncharted Ocean in search of the Northwest Passage, his ship came across these islands.
10:33For the half-starved crew, what they found here proved a godsend.
10:37The crews are stressed for protein, for food, six- to eight-week crossings of an Atlantic Ocean that's tough.
10:49You don't have a refrigerator.
10:52You've got dried meat.
10:55You've got salted meat.
10:56And you're lucky to be alive by the time you get to this side.
10:59So, Cartier is sailing over here.
11:02Up on the northeast coast, he finds this flat island covered with flightless birds.
11:08I mean, he couldn't have hit anything any better.
11:10For centuries, you know, this flat island really was the first fast food takeout in North America.
11:20Hunted for food, the great orc suddenly turned from predator to prey.
11:26Yet its extinction is no open and shut case.
11:29Ultimately, was man the scientist more to blame than man the hunter?
11:48The great orc was the only flightless seabird ever to exist in the northern hemisphere.
11:54Five hundred years ago, the flat islands off the coast of Newfoundland would have been covered with millions of them.
12:04Ecologist Bill Montavecchia knows that it had taken to the water so completely, only one thing brought the great orc to land.
12:17Sex.
12:18If they didn't have to, great orcs would never come to islands.
12:23And what compels them to come there is because they have to lay their eggs on solid land.
12:28It's also where they meet their mates and copulate and produce that egg in the first instance.
12:33For many seabirds, the huge population density of the colony is necessary for successful reproduction.
12:41Like guillemots, orcs may well have paired for life.
12:46As this female's breeding partner approaches, she wobbles and gurgles to greet him.
12:51He taps his beak against hers, and they preen each other.
12:57They linkubate the egg for about 40 days, taking turns to keep it warm, while the other one looks for food.
13:10The swap over is a painstaking business, and can be perilous.
13:19But not as perilous as what was about to happen.
13:25With the arrival of hungry sailors, the great orc had to cope with the threat that evolution had not prepared it for.
13:38Flightless and unable to escape, they made easy pickings.
13:42Thousands were slaughtered, summer after summer.
13:47Yet killing orcs for food was only the beginning of the end.
13:51We don't think that's why there are no great ox here today.
13:57We think it was a systematic killing that occurred in the 1700s, when crews of men went there to live there,
14:05to stay there, to slaughter these birds for a very specific reason.
14:12That reason was fashion.
14:14Two hundred years after Europeans first arrived, the killing changed gear,
14:19as hunters switched their attention from food, to feathers.
14:23Orc feathers were sold to make mattresses, and even became fashionable in ladies' hats.
14:30Thousands of birds were captured, killed, and dumped into cauldrons,
14:35where they were boiled just long enough to make their feathers easy to pluck.
14:39In the thin covering of soil on the islands, Bill has uncovered physical evidence of the carnage.
14:46Bill has uncovered physical evidence of the carnage.
14:47He's got some metal pieces and plates that were pieces of cauldrons,
14:53that perhaps were used to parboil the birds to get to the down underneath the waterproof feathers.
14:57Also, this hook, which I presume was a hook that would have, you know, maybe held the cauldron over a fire,
15:08where the birds could have been parboiled, you know?
15:12The oily, fatty birds were used as the fuel to keep the fires burning.
15:18And you can actually find these pieces of charcoal, and if you look really carefully,
15:22you can see where the feather shafts of the birds were.
15:26It was that real systematic, you know, over-killing of the animals.
15:33In 1785, Captain George Cartwright, adventurer and trapper, observed.
15:40It has been customary of late years for crews of men to live all summer on the island
15:45for the sole purpose of killing birds, for the sake of their feathers.
15:50The destruction which they have made is incredible.
15:53If a stop is not soon put to that practice, the whole breed will be diminished to almost nothing.
16:00And that's exactly what happened.
16:03By the 19th century, the vast colonies on the islands off Newfoundland had been completely destroyed.
16:09But the species survived. There was still hope. Across the Atlantic was one other refuge.
16:18The last great orcs off the fishing banks of Newfoundland were seen in the mid-19th century.
16:24But really, the species had ceased to breed there.
16:28And the only remaining breeding colony of the great orcs in the whole world was on a tiny island off the southwestern tip of Iceland.
16:43But it was about 26 miles from the mainland, so it was a dangerous procedure to go out there.
16:50Isolated from the threat of man, in Iceland it seemed the great orc had finally found a safe haven.
16:57And for hundreds of years, Icelandic folklore even helped protect this colony from humans, who were too scared to go there.
17:06This little island was invested with quite fearful stories.
17:11People had died going out there in the 1620s.
17:14There were stories going back to the 14th century of somebody who lived there and survived a winter.
17:22Refused to tell anybody how he'd survived.
17:25So the story grew up that he'd been looked after by the Hildafolk, who were these fairies and ghosts.
17:32These haunted islands protected the birds.
17:36But then nature, not man, dealt them another blow.
17:40In March 1830, an undersea volcano erupted.
17:49The orcs' refuge exploded and disappeared beneath the waves.
17:55But even the hand of nature couldn't drive the orc to total extinction.
17:59About 40 pairs survived the eruption.
18:03The birds had one other place that they could breed on, which they never had bred on,
18:09because it was 13 kilometres nearer to the mainland and not ideally suitable.
18:15But this was the one that they chose after 1830.
18:19The bird really didn't have much chance of survival once it had chosen a breeding site that was so near to the mainland.
18:27This last haven was Eldie.
18:30And the orcs sought refuge here just as scientific interest and sympathy for its plight was growing.
18:36Yet at this time the study of natural history meant collecting and classifying, pickling, preserving and stuffing.
18:45The rarer the orc became, the more sought after it was.
18:51This was the golden era of natural history collecting, when every gentleman worth his salt would feel the need to put together a large collection of natural history items.
19:05Stuffed animals, stuffed birds, birds' eggs.
19:09And at the same time, the great institutional museums of the world were becoming interested in natural history specimens.
19:16So the great orc, of course, in its declining years, corresponded with just these years when this great surge in natural history collecting was taking place.
19:28But in their enthusiasm for collecting, Victorian scientists neglected animal behaviour and failed to understand that with the loss of the orcs breeding colonies it was already on the very brink of extinction.
19:42Once the numbers fell below a certain level, even though that level may have been quite considerable, the bird was doomed.
19:49And we can almost test that, because if this had been a bird that could have lived in threes and fours, sixes and sevens, tens and twelves, it would still be among us today.
20:01Because it could have always found little lonely coves, lonely islands in the North Atlantic where just a few individuals could live.
20:09The fact that we don't find it today is proof, surely, of the fact that this was a bird that could only live in colonies of large numbers.
20:20This was a fatal misunderstanding.
20:23Because now, in their ignorance, Victorian scientists unwittingly pushed the great orc to its final extinction.
20:33On LD in 1844, the hunting trip was undertaken at the request of a keen Danish collector of rare birds and their eggs, Carl Seamson.
20:44One of dozens of dealers across Europe, he believed he was furthering the cause of scientific knowledge, as well as making a handsome profit.
20:52Birds like this one, and all the ones we see in museums, almost without exception, were caught on the island of LD.
21:03They were caught by an Icelandic fisherman who landed on the island with a certain amount of difficulty,
21:09actually approached the bird, grabbed it because it was so helpless on land, unlike in the water,
21:17probably wrang its neck there and then on LD, took it back to their fishing village, skinned it, ate the body,
21:26and then sold the skin for comparatively small amounts to traders in Reykjavik, who then sold them on to museums in Europe.
21:38By 1844, far from providing a refuge, LD was more like a prison, where the last remaining breeding pair of orcs awaited the inevitable.
21:51Even then, no one realised that the great orc was now extinct.
22:09It was confidently asserted that colonies thrived even further north in Arctic waters.
22:16Scientific interest continued unabated.
22:20It wasn't perhaps till a decade after the great orc actually became extinct that scientists went to Iceland seriously looking for it.
22:31And by then, of course, it was too late for them to find it.
22:35As the years went by, the very scarcity of the bird only managed to increase demand for dead specimens, driving prices higher and higher.
22:45It started off at amounts like £5, £10, but by, say, 1870, you'd have got £40 for a great orc. By 1900, you'd have got £350 for a great orc.
22:57Now, £350 was a huge sum of money at that time.
23:02Just to put it into context, you'd have probably been able to buy three or four houses with that amount of money.
23:11Orc mania ensured the bird was never more famous than the moment of its extinction.
23:18In the 1880s, novelist Charles Kingsley caricatured the bird standing on the All Alone Stone in his children's classic The Water Babies.
23:29The great orc had become a mythical creature.
23:33But the opportunity to experience it for real had been lost forever.
24:03Well it's probably mine been.
24:04The fragile creature.
24:05Bye G was like the always wanted to be.
24:08But anything was no less loその line or anything, must be aware.
24:13This came to life's perfect room still isn't you.
24:18Right?
24:19I think you really didn't realise the present part well.
24:23That's been hiddencca.
24:26Absolutely needs to know that it's all interrupted and through chat.
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