Why Are There No Penguins in the Arctic? The Sad History of the Great Auk

When people talk about penguins, the first place that comes to mind is certainly Antarctica. So why are there no penguins in the Arctic, which is also a polar region? Below, the Tuliu.com editor takes you into this sad past

1. The Arctic once had penguins

Rewind time 1000 years, and if you had asked back then why the Arctic had no penguins, people would probably have replied in confusion, “The Arctic does have penguins.” That's right, at that time, the Arctic did have penguins! That clumsy bird with a white belly and black outer coat was called the “great penguin,” also known as the “great auk.”

2. Why are there no penguins in the Arctic

But by the 16th century, when the Age of Discovery arrived, explorers crossed the ocean and came to the islands off Newfoundland where the Arctic penguins lived, and the disaster for these “great auks” (explorers initially called the Arctic penguins “great auks”) began.

The French explorer Jacques Cartier wrote these words in his diary in 1543: “These great auks are so fat that they are simply wonderful. In less than half an hour, we caught enough of these birds to fill two small boats, and they lay almost motionless like stones. Besides eating their fresh meat directly, we also salted five or six barrels of these birds on each boat.”

The Arctic penguins, which had lived peacefully with humans for thousands of years, suffered a sudden massacre.

Soon, the explorers who had seized the homeland of the indigenous people of Newfoundland under the pretext of “civilization and enlightenment” discovered that the Arctic penguin's light and warm feathers could also be made into down pillows and mattresses, and even fashionable women's hats, so they hunted and killed them even more widely. They built pens out of stones, drove the Arctic penguins in groups into them and killed them, and scalded off their feathers in boiling pots.

The ecologist Bill Montevecchi later found strong physical evidence of these activities in the area: “We found some metal fragments, possibly pieces of a large pot used to cook great auks (Arctic penguins), because only in this way could the down beneath the waterproof feathers be removed. In addition, this seabird with a very thick layer of fat was also used as fuel for fires. In fact, on careful observation, you will find that these pieces of charcoal are often mixed with charred great auk feather shafts. You know, this was indeed an organized large-scale massacre.”

The Age of Discovery opened the curtain on a new era. Humanity was immersed in the great joy of conquering nature, and no one could hear the mournful cries of the seabirds. At that time, a craze for “collecting specimens” appeared in Western society. People who prided themselves on being gentlemen wanted to own large quantities of natural collections, and major museums around the world also developed a strong interest in biological specimens. So, just when the Arctic penguins urgently needed to rest and recover, humans began hunting them down for yet another reason. Finally, on July 3, 1844, a tragedy occurred: the last pair of Arctic penguins was killed while incubating eggs

On the Arctic continent, the figures of these great auks could no longer be seen from then on. From then on, the Arctic had no penguins