“Der fluglose Alk”: Johann Friedrich Naumann’s 1844 account of Pinguinus impennis (great auk)

Abstract

This study examines the contribution of Johann Friedrich Naumann (1780–1857) to knowledge of the biology of Pinguinus impennis (great auk; “der fluglose Alk/ the flightless auk”), written for his natural history of German birds, Naturgeschichte der Vögel Deutschlands (1820–1844) and published in the twelfth and final volume in 1844, the year in which the great auk is generally accepted to have become extinct. Naumann, a farmer in a rural area of central Germany, never saw a live great auk, yet by careful examination of the literature, correspondence and conversations with other ornithologists, together with the examination of at least nine skins and three eggs, he produced an extraordinarily accurate and perceptive account of the bird. In the winter of 1830–1831, Naumann obtained his own great auk specimen – a bird in summer plumage – through Johann Heinrich Frank, one of several natural history dealers responsible for importing great auk specimens from Iceland to Denmark and Germany in the 1830s. Naumann noted several differences between the great auk and the smaller but morphologically similar Alca torda (razorbill), and suggested that the two species represented separate genera. Despite the plethora of publications relating to the great auk following its extinction, it is remarkable that Naumann’s exceptional account should have been almost entirely overlooked.