DALE DRINNON: The Great Auk and the Greater Auk

In this case there is something of a muddle to clean up, with the case of a well-known extinction at the hand of humans that might not have been so complete, conflation of an unusual cryptid ordinarily lumped in with a larger but widely reported cryptid category, and a very obscure connection to a generally uncirculated piece of local folklore from a far-distant place that provides the substantiation to an otherwise daft idea.

In this case the more widely known cryptid is called the Boobrie, which has made the migration to several Fantasy role-playing games (as have several other legendary creatures).

There is a section about it in the book In Search of Lake Monsters by Peter Costello (1974) and several sources consider it to be a form of Water Horse based on assumption alone. Costello speaks of it on page 134. In this case it was like a great northern diver (loon) with an extra white stripe on its head and neck, the back being otherwise dark, but with a white breast.

In the quoted sighting from the 1860s the neck was two feet eleven inches long and the circumference was two feet (meaning about eight inches thick). The beak was seventeen inches long and hooked at the end. It had large black webbed feet with claws and it was rumoured to bellow like a bull and eat lambs and otters.

The Wikipedia and Answers.com entries on the Boobrie are not very informative: they state that:

The boobrie is a mythical water bird of Scottish Highlands folklore. It is said to be similar to a great northern diver, but with white markings and the ability to roar.

The creature is the metamorphosed form of the each uisge [Wikipedia questions this as unverified] and haunts lochs and salt wells. The Boobrie is a fabulous giant water-bird who haunts the lakes and salt-wells of Argyllshire (now Strathclyde). It has webbed feet and a harsh voice, and is capable of gobbling up sheep and cattle.

I noticed the change from otters to cattle in the last statement.

One of the things that featured in Boobrie reports was the allegation that it went ashore and left huge three-toed tracks: for that reason I had asked Ivan Sanderson in a letter sent before he died if he thought it was a type of Three-toes.

I received no reply but in fact he did die very shortly after that, and I suspect that would have been what he thought anyway.

I subsequently made the suggestion that a type of Great Auk blown up twice the ordinary dimensions would match the dimensions of the Boobrie's head and neck pretty exactly, and that it would be the closest to the description of the beak as long and thick with something of a hook at the end.


That is where the matter was left for several years until it came up again at the Frontiers of Zoology group, and then there was a corroborating matter of a similar Inuit legendary creature from around Alaska, said to be an amphibious seabird as large as a man, black on the back and white in front, and said to be the lover of Sedna, controller of the creatures in the sea (there is also a Thunderbird form for the legendary bird in question, but that is a separate matter).

I found a mention of the legend in the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (1959, I own a copy), but better still, at that point in the search I found actual depictions of the unknown bird in question (the sculpture shown here was the best one)

During the Age of Mammals and about the time that there actually were giant penguins such as Sanderson mentions, there were other swimming birds at least as large in the North Pacific: these were related to cormorants and are called Plotopterids. Very meagre fossil evidence also suggsts that there was a similarly large great auk in the Atlantic at the same time. In this case I think the testimonial evidence does indicate that there was such a thing as a Greater Auk, of about twice the dimensions of the more usual Great Auk, much rarer but exterminated in Scotland at about the same time the last Great Auk reports were being recorded there. About the size of a Plotopterid or a giant Penguin, and some of them persisted on the far end of the Arctic Ocean, around Alaska. Whether there are any left there (or indeed if there are still any Great Auks remaining in the same general area) is another matter that is unresolved because the testimonial evidence in more recent decades is negligible.

[Note: the Boobrie illustration I used was from a FRPG site and I chose it as the best among several candidates. I have amended it very slightly in order to restore the actually-reported hooked end to the bill, but I have left the original artist's name on it. If the artist has any complaints about my doing that, the decision was mine alone and done for the sole purpose of bringing the illustration more in line with tradition. The other illustrations I saw were all wading-bird Diatrymas, which is specifically NOT what was being described]