Memorializing the Great Auk

JOE BATT’S ARM – On July 25, tourists and residents of Fogo Island, celebrated the installation of a new memorial on Joe Batt's Point.

Artist Todd McGrain, began the “Lost Bird Project” around eight years ago. He was inspired by a book titled, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” by Christopher Cokinos. The book archives the history of various birds whose populations were severely decreased for diverse reason, and eventually become extinct.

“As a sculpture, the way I go about learning is by making sculptures. So, I started working on models and memorials and that evolved from there,” said Mr. McGrain.

So far, there are five birds in “The Lost Bird Project” collection, this includes, the Labrador Duck, Carolina Parakeet, Heath Hen, Passenger Pigeon and the Great Auk.

Mr. McGrain and his team have travelled around the world placing his cast bronze sculptures in some of the last known places where the birds existed. The Labrador Duck memorial for example, is found in Almeria, New York. The Carolina Parakeet sculpture is found in Okeechobee, Florida and one of the Great Auk sculptures is now located on Fogo Island.

“The Great Auk was just an incredible bird,” said Mr. McGrain. “I think for me, out of all the birds that I’ve been working on, it’s the most compelling partly because it’s the most kind of spectacular bird with its behaviour.”

“It was flightless but it was just a dominant predator in the ocean. It was just a fantastic swimmer and it was perfectly adapted to its environment. The bird was a beautiful, wonderful creature that caught my imagination and the reasons for its decline are really fascinating because they have such resonance today.”

Unlike the other birds in Mr. McGrain’s collection, the Great Auk memorial will be located in two places – Fogo Island and Iceland.

The reasoning behind this is the controversy over where the last Great Auk was actually located. There is historic evidence in an old journal of a seaman who recorded that a friend of his also a crew member of the ship, shot a Great Auk in 1852. However, the last two birds killed in Iceland were shot by some bird collectors who kept the specimen. This evidence is obviously much more definite as they have the specimens to study. But, they could not ignore the evidence found in the journal.

It is because of this they have decided to place a memorial in both locations.

“We felt compelled to put a sculpture on Fogo Island because we were just so taken with the place. We were out look for ‘the’ place and we really found two beautiful places in Iceland and on Fogo Island. Then we just made the decision to go ahead with two instillations,” said Mr. McGrain.

He explained that it was difficult to say the number of hours he put into his sculptures. To give an estimate, Mr. McGrain spent six months in Rome, Italy studying some of the best Great Auk specimens left in the world. He would create drawings and make small clay models of the bird. He then spent about another year turning his clay models into the cast bronze memorial that elegantly stands on Joe Batt’s Point today.

One of the main purposes of the Lost Bird Project is to keep the memory of the birds alive in lingering in the cultural dialogue. They have found that many places where the birds were once immensely populated, have forgotten about the species and are often even unaware of their past existence. Mr. McGrain and his team felt it was their job to bring this issue to the spotlight.

“When we have done this project in other places, we felt a real urgency for that and while I feel very compelled to keep the story of the great auk alive, I must say that Fogo Island in general is a place where the past is present in everything that we’ve seen,” said Mr. McGrain. “The way people make boats, the way they prepare their food and the way they collect their berries, the stories people tell and in general the sort of love of the island that people have is a love that stretches across generations. Due to that, the idea of adding another historic element that can bridge the past is such a natural fit and we were all really touched and self-privileged to be able to do that in Fogo Island.”