an auk on the wild side (or the great auk protest of some year or another)
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Auks are a species of sea bird, much like a puffin, or a penguin, except that they are quite extinct, a state which it shares with other birds such as the dodo, and also a few non-birds, but that's neither here nor there. These are some of the facts*
about the auks as they lived, when they were alive.
First off, much like the puffins and the penguins, the auks used to swim around catching fish, subsequently eating them*. Though graceful and pretty speedy movers underwater, auks were somewhat* cumbersome on land, which suited them fine, as they spent most of their time in said water catching said fish.
Second, the only time they would ever actually go on land* was to mate, which, being so horrendously unsuited for land travel*, was terrifically funny to watch (this angered them, and if you'd been caught watching them, they would probably have run after you, which wasn't much of a threat).
Third, when they did mate, it was always in the same nesting place as they were hatched from, which had been given such names as "Auk sex rock", "Rock that is entirely different from Auk sex rock, but used for the same purpose", and perhaps the least popular "Rock where nosy humans like to watch us auks flounder about while trying to mate"* (discluding "Aw geez, we suck on land rock", which was just ridiculously hard to get around on, moreso than the others).
Now that the basics of auk-ness have been explained, we can venture into why all the auks are dead*. The auks are dead because people hunted them for their skin, feathers, and oil. This all started some time ago, and after awhile, the auks started noticing that there weren't as many of them, and that this was due to them being killed off for the various body parts mentioned above. This, they thought, would not stand, and so they did the only thing they could think of, they protested. The auks made up auk chants, and squauked them out everywhere they went, standing up for their right to live. This, as you might have guessed, backfired, and led the hunters right to them*. Before they could be finished off, though, there was time enough for one final auk folk hero to arise*, and it's name was, well, nothing, auks didn't usually have names, but OH, what an auk this was! The auk poets, had they not all been killed(or had there indeed been any auk poets to begin with), would surely have written mass epics about it. It seems that this one auk, this grand hero of all auks to come*, this sea bird who ate fish, was just a slight better than the rest at walking on land*. For this it was famous among auks, up until it died, and they died, and now they're dead.
