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The hammer price of this egg of the long-extinct Great Auk has sold for 44,800 Euros ( £37,331) at a Christie's auction in Paris. This was above the guide price of £25,000-£33,000. It is not known if the successful bidder was an individual, a museum or some other organisation.
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| Great Snipe - the marsh-loving species as depicted in John Gould's The Birds of Great Britain (1873) |
FOUR Lincolnshire 'sightings' are among the 52 records deemed 'not proven' after having been submitted by hopeful birders to a committee of British Birds journal for possible inclusion in the 2025 Rarities List.
They are:
* Kentish Plover: Wolla Bank, May 21.
* Great Snipe: Saltfleetby-Theddlethorpe dunes, April 22.
* Audouin’s Gull: Whisby Nature Park, Lincoln, June 14.
* Booted Eagle: Manby Wetlands, April 30.
The other 'non-proven' inclusions - from locations around Britain - are detailed in a report compiled by Paul R. French, Andrew Holden and others for the recently-published November edition of British Birds.
Because they are designated 'not proven' does not mean that the identifications were wrong - just that the evidence was insufficient to warrant official recognition.
Object of desire - the egg that will be sold later this week in Paris
A RARE opportunity has arisen to buy the egg of a bird that has long been extinct - the Great Auk.
Known as the 'Tomkinson Egg', after a previous owner, John Whitaker Tomkinson, it is being offered by the Paris branch of auction house Christie's at an online sale which concludes at 2pm on Thursday November 5.
The egg is believed to have been laid around the year 1800.
The notes in the catalogue state: "For more than 200 years, eggs of the extinct Great Auk have been regarded as one of the great treasures of natural history.
" In the Victorian era, the obsession with these eggs was so immense that the histories of all known eggs were sought out and recorded in rigorous detail.
"Comprehensive lists were made featuring the owners of each egg and the prices realised when the eggs were sold and resold again.
"Today, almost all recognized Auk eggs can be found in museum collections from which they are unlikely ever to be released.
"Thus, this is a rare opportunity to acquire a gorgeous and celebrated example of a Great Auk egg."
The notes continue: "The Great Auk was a flightless, aquatic bird measuring approximately 2½ feet tall and weighing on average 11 pounds.
"With a black body and white underbelly, its appearance fell somewhere between that of a puffin and a penguin.
"When hunting, the Great Auk employed its hooked beak and powerful swimming stroke to stalk fish and crustaceans.
"Native to the cold waters of the North Atlantic, its range extended westward to the coasts of Newfoundland, Maine, Massachusetts, and even as far south as Florida, and eastward to Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and the islands off the coast of Scotland, namely Orkney and St Kilda.
"During the winter months, they were known to go as far east as Norway and Denmark, and skeletal remains have been found as far south as Madeira and Morocco.
"Great Auk pairs mated for life, laying a single egg per breeding season – usually May or early June – on small islands with rocky coastlines.
"Their longitudinal, pear-shaped eggs were well adapted to roll in tight circles, greatly reducing the chance of falling off of a cliff edge.
"Parents would take turns incubating the egg, all while benefitting from the protection of dense social colonies and few natural predators.
"Historical records indicate that Great Auks showed no innate fear of humans, and this – coupled with their slow and awkward movement on land – greatly increased their vulnerability to extinction as Europeans exploited the species for its flesh, eggs, and down feathers which were used to make pillows and bedding.
"With a population once estimated to number in the millions, and despite increasing conservation efforts, by the early 19th century the population had grown too small to sustain itself.
"On June 3, 1844, the last known breeding pair of Great Auks were killed by a group of seafarers on Eldey Island, off the coast of Iceland, one of whom smashed the pair’s egg under his boot.
"Despite the probable sighting of a solitary Great Auk off the coast of Newfoundland in 1852, without any breeding pairs remaining, this once-prolific animal was fated to join the ranks of other recently extinct avian species whose numbers dwindled largely due to human activity, including the Dodo, the Elephant Bird and the Passenger Pigeon.
"As such, this incredibly rare Great Auk egg stands as a poignant reminder of humanity’s responsibility for environmental conservation and stewardship.
"Because of this tragic history, Great Auk eggs are exceedingly rare, and even more so in private hands.
"Thanks to the efforts of passionate 19th and 20th century ornithologists and oologists including William Yarrell himself, William Chapman Hewitson, Robert Champley, Symington Grieve, Louis d’Hamonville, Alfred Newton, Edward Bidwell, as well as Paule Marie Louise and John Whitaker Tomkinson, the surviving specimens of Great Auk skins and eggs, including the present example, are well documented in the literature."
Christie's have estimated a hammer price of between 30,00 and 40,000 Euros (£25,000-£33,000).
This looks realistic because as of 5pm today, two potential buyers have entered the fray, with the highest bid, to date, being 26,000 Euros (£22,000).
The pre-sale estimate for this six-volume 1891 set of Morris's British Birds is that they will fetch between £150 and £200 when they go under the hammer as Lot 164 at the sale to be conducted by Dominic Winter auction house at their sale to be held at Cirencester in Gloucestershire on Wednesday November 4.
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| The last Slender-billed Curlew - photographed by Chris Gomersall - before the species was declared extinct |
ALTHOUGH he could not have known it at the time, Chris Gomersall's encounter with a Slender-billed Curlew on a marshland in North Africa was an historic moment not only in his own career but also in ornithological history.
The many photographs he took of the bird 31 years ago are almost certainly the last before the species went globally extinct - and was officially confirmed as such in November 2024.
At the October meeting of Grimsby RSPB Group, Chris described how he came to be within 45 metres of the bird that fateful day in February,1995.
It was early morning, and he had been taken by a Moroccan bird guide to the Moulay-Bouselham lagoon - adjacent to a strawberry field - at Merja Zerga, south of Agadir in Morocco.
The previous day the duo and one other had been out in a boat looking unsuccessfully for one or more examples of the bird.
That following morning, some playful and inquisitive children were also present, and the guide, Hassan, kept them diverted to allow Chris to study the rare wader undisturbed after it was distantly spotted on the edge of the lagoon.
"So as not to disturb it, I crept head down through a growth of lupins until I had reached a good vantage point," he told his audience. "At first, it was quite distant, but, as it grew in confidence, it gradually came to within 45 metres.
"I spent the next 90 or so minutes observing the bird as I worked my way through more than four rolls of film."
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| Chris Gomersall - he crept through lupins to secure his momentous photographs |
Chris revealed that he had not been in Morocco specifically to look for the Slender-billed Curlew.
As a staff photographer/researcher with the RSPB, he had been on an assignment to study the Northern Bald Ibis.
While he was delighted at his encounter with the vanishingly rare curlew, he could not have known that the species' ultimate fate was extinction.
It was fortunate that he kept most of the photographs - many of which he showed in his Grimsby presentation - when he could easily have thrown all but one or two away.
What he reckons to be his best photograph of the bird has now become well-known featuring on the cover of British Birds journal and even the high-circulation French daily newspaper, Le Monde .
As far as he is aware, Hassan is still working as a guide at the same place, but he himself his never been back.
Given the fate of the species, Chris' photograph is unique.
This would cease to be the case if the bird was ever to turn up anew, for instance, in its breeding grounds in Siberia or again wintering in North Africa.
Even so, Chris says no one would be more delighted than he if it were to be rediscovered.
During his fascinating talk, Chris outlined the history of Slender-billed Curlew research, both before and since he took his famous photograph, referring to earlier photographs, including ones by Richard Porter, Yemen in 1984, and by the dedicated French conservation pioneer, Michel Brosselin, who tragically lost his life, aged 43, when he was trampled by a bull on his wife's farm.
Then there was the controversial bird spotted at Druridge Bay in Northumberland in early May 1998. This was thought to be the first and only British record of the species.
However, following an in-depth review of photographs and descriptions, the 'identification'- was subsequently deemed 'not proven'.
Some 15 years later, to the disappointment of many who had travelled to twitch it, Slender-billed Curlew was removed from the British List.
Experts decreed that the bird in question was most likely to have been a juvenile Eurasian Curlew.
During his talk, Chris also described his examination of a collection of of skins of dead Slender-billed Curlews that are held at the National History Museum's ornithological library in Tring, Hertfordshire.
He went on to the case of the stuffed bird that, in April last year, sold for £5,000 - more than 10 times the guide price - at Tennants auction house in Leyburn, North Yorkshire.
He also spoke of a University of Munster project which involved analysing minute chemical food and water traces taken from the feathers of museum skins to see whether they could reveal the former breeding locations of Slender-billed Curlews.
The write-up subsequently published in the journal Bird Conservation International indicated that the place to look for any surviving breeding birds were the steppes of northern Kazakhstan and southern Russia.
But when, in the late 1990s, researchers from Glasgow University went to investigate, no birds were found.
The Slender-billed Curlew was once relatively common, so why its demise?
Could it have been largely due to Nikita Kruschev who, as president of the Soviet Union between 1958 and 1964, decreed that vast tracts of the birds' marshy breeding grounds in Russia and elsewhere should be drained to make way for vegetable and cereal crops?
In naming Kruschev, Chris was not pointing the finger of blame. He noted that prioritisation of food production has long been a policy of governments across the world, including our own.
Has he ever been back to that lagoon in Morocco, if only for old time's sake?
No, but, as far as Chris is aware, Hassan is still working as a guide at the same place - and doubtless hoping against hope that he might one day again see a Slender-billed Curlew?
See also: www.Grimsbynews.blogspot.com
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| The stuffed specimen that sold for £5,000 at a Yorkshire auction in April 2025 |
