Canis lupus hominis

Portrait by Johannes Gerardus Keulemans

I remember learning as a very young child that polar bears do not hunt penguins. Penguins lives south of the Equator, while polar bears generally roam the Arctic Ocean and the margins of the continents on which it borders. The Polar bear’s range also includes areas south into the North Atlantic and North Pacific, but it is still a Northern Hemisphere species.

However, I have always wondered about the origin of the word penguin. It was only when I did some research on the etymology of this word that I was reconnected with an animal I had read about in Peter Matthiessen’s Wildlife in America and Farley Mowat’s Sea of Slaughter. It seems the term Penguin originally applied to a North Atlantic species of large black-and-white seabird that had also lost its ability to fly.

The original penguin was the Great Auk, a species of sea bird that lived all over the North Atlantic from Norway to Eastern Canada. Mowat suggests that their range also extended south to Florida, but the accepted range for the bird is as I’ve described. The birds nested on rocky islands that were generally inaccessible to Arctic foxes, wolves, and polar bears, but polar bears did prey on this species when they got a chance.

The word penguin, though, has two basic theories of its origin. One is that the word is derived from the Welsh pen gwyn, which means “white head.”  The great auk had large white spots on the top of its head, so it is possible that the animal got its name from that feature. Another theory suggests that the term comes from the bird’s small wings, calling it a “pin-wing,” with “pin” being short for pinioned.  Another theory suggests that it comes from a Latin word for fat– pinguis.

The word first appears in Richard Hakluyt’s letters and treatises on voyages, and he mentions rookeries of penguins in Newfoundland. This term was then transferred onto the black and white birds of the South Pole and other parts of the Southern Hemisphere. These birds were similarly large and similarly colored, although the great auk is actually an auk and is not closely related to these birds.

There are two other names for this bird. The Norse and their descendants called the bird a Geirfugl or “spear bird.” The English always called it a garefowl, which is derived from the Norse word. Farley Mowat calls them “spearbills.”

Now, what happened to the Great Auk? Shouldn’t we be seeing the great rookeries of these birds on the islands of the North Atlantic? Well, there’s a problem.

The Great Auk’s flesh and its eggs were great food source for seafarers traveling across the North Atlantic. Its pelt could be turned into a coat, because the skin was rather thick and the bird’s feathers insulated it as well as the thickest fur. Then a market developed for the bird’s meat and eggs, and then gentlemen naturalists wanted the eggs, because the bird was becoming rare and they wanted a piece of this rapidly disappearing species.

In fact, it was the collectors who finally did the bird in.  ‘The last population of these birds could be found at Geirfuglasker (“Great Auk Island”) and the nearby island of Eldey in Iceland. The egg collectors then drove them Geirfuglasker to Eldey, where their rookery was accessible to only one side. It was on Eldey that the last nesting pair and their egg met their demise at the hands of Jón Brandsson, Sigurður Ísleifsson, and Ketill Ketilsson. This is one rare instance in which we know the the names of the people who killed off the last of a species.

And those three men committed a great crime against nature for which there can be no recompense. These great sea birds are now lost to the ages, existing only as taxidermied speciemens and preserved eggs.

So when we tell our children that the penguin has nothing to fear from the polar bear, remember the long lost penguin of the North Atlantic that actually established its rookeries to avoid the Great White Bear.