On the 3rd of July, 1844 a group of fishermen killed two large, flightless seabirds on the shores of Eldey Island, southwest of Reykjavik. These birds, and their single incubating egg, were the last of their kind. As one of the men stepped down on that last egg, the Great Auk was, in a momentary misstep, extinct. The auk family survives today most famously in puffins, but also auklets, murres, murrelets and the guillemot.
There is a long history of writing seabirds which both precedes and proceeds this date. Coleridge’s albatross is at the centre of his ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, bringing about the crew’s cursed fate; Emily Dickinson’s ‘Hope’ is the ‘thing with feathers’ which makes its home ‘on the strangest Sea’; and W.S. Merwin’s reference to the Great Auk one hundred and twenty-three years after this event becomes a harbinger for a ‘Coming Extinction’.
image by Antonia Glucksman
Poetic waterbirds are especially reached for by poets, such as Ted Hughes’ post-Crow curlews in ‘Remains of Elmet’, ‘a wet footed god of the horizons’, or Derek Walcott’s ‘White Egret’s, which stand in for the ‘pen’s beak’ with which Walcott writes his final book. These birds serve their poets well as symbol. But what can poetry do for our seabirds?
The recent RSPB Seabirds Count shows that 11 of the 21 seabird species declined since the year 2000, with birds such as puffins and the common gull seeing especially high losses. Writing seabirds is, for Genevieve Carver, a new, poetry-infused ornithological method for documenting and preserving these birds. Her new bookling Birds / Humans / Machines / Dolphins features (in the section titled ‘Birds’) a sequence which takes the fulmar as its ornithological occupation, inspired by the arts-science collaboration of Genevieve and the team on Eynhallow.
Genevieve’s poetic evocations of the fulmar are most salient in the sequence ‘Postcards from a Fulmar’, described by Max Porter as ‘such an interesting and surprising hybrid, which manages to be deeply funny and very sad at the same time, an unusual feat in both science writing and poetry, even more unusual when the two are blended’.
Birds / Humans / Machines / Dolphins by Genevieve Carver is out now and available here.
This Seabirds article was written by Elliot Ruff