Grounded Lollipops

A North Greenland Eskimo would undoubtedly cry "Taku!" in loud surprise were he to see a canary come falling from the sky. No less startled were New Yorkers one day last week to find lying exhausted in their streets some black & white, thick-beaked birds they had never seen before. Not since 1908 had such a bird appeared in the city, and it had arrived on shipboard. Most finders promptly called or hurried to the Bronx Zoo, learned the fallen strangers were little auks, cousins of the least auklet and the extinct great auk. Winging southward from their Arctic loomeries,they had been blown inland by a 65-m. p. h. gale.

The last storm-tossed shower was at Boston in 1871. Only 20 recorded times in the past 40 years has the bird been found inland. Looking somewhat like a dove-sized penguin, the little auk is helpless on land. It feeds chiefly on a type of water bug found only at sea, needs the impetus of a wave to get into the air. Of nearly 100 picked up in New York's metropolitan area last week, only four survived.

The same storms that blew little auks into New York killed thousands elsewhere along the Atlantic Coast. The Eskimos of Greenland. Spitsbergen and Franz Josef Land may well miss them, for the little auk is a staple of their food supply, "Eskimo lollipops" as Curator Robert Cushman Murphy of the American Museum of Natural History calls them. In Greenland the Eskimos will beg the Goddess Nivikkaa, sitting at the bottom of the sea, to lift her lamp and let the little auks come up again.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.