Lying to the west of the coast of Devon, England, shut off from outside sometimes for days on end by blankets of fog and swirls of grey rain cloud, is lonely Lundy - Isle of Puffins. This enormous, flat-topped, block of granite rises for some 122m (400 ft) above the treacherous currents that surrond it, the towering cliffs and rocky ledges providing shelter for thousands of seabirds. Here, in or about the year 1835, a resident saw two birds the like of which he had never before set eyes upon. What they were will forever remain something of a mystery, but the man's claim was to have glimpsed the King and Queen of the Razorbill Murres standing 'up bold like'.

Skeleton and skull of a Great Auk together with the much smaller skull of a guillemot. Lithograph by E.A. Smith from the 'Transactions of the Zoological Society of London, Vol.5 (1865)".

Razorbills (Alca torda), with their curious beaks and starkly defined plumage of black and white, are birds with which inhabitants of Lundy could hardly be unfamiliar. Individuals belonging to just one particular species might seem monarchs among them and of these creatures such a description is perfect. By the time of this encounter, the species in question had become so rare that to those who dwelt close to the rocky stacks and cliffs that line the shores of the North Atlantic, it was little more than myth passed on here and there in folktale and legend. These people spoke of the Garefowl, a murre so gigantic it was unable to fly, carring a beak huge enough to make the bill of its smaller relative, the Razorbill, seem quite modest in comparison.

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As the Garefowl passed into legend among the people of the North, the Greak Auk was fast acquiring an almost legendary reputation among skin and egg collectors.

That is an excerpt from the book 'Extinct Birds' by Errol Fuller

Author Errol Fuller, is at the moment writing an in dept book about this curous bird, which will be published in the middle of next year (1997). To get your name on the lisit for the first edition, please write to the author himself...

Errol Fuller,
65 Springfield Road,
Southborough,
KENT,
England.