Penguins on Rockabill?

 

Rockabill and the famous roseate terns. Photo Aidan Arnold

Aside from the incredible photo above, (I'd have run for shelter and not bothered with the camera!) this piece has only a vague connection to lighthouses, for which I apologise here and now. However, outside the lighthouse, there is very little newsworthy information published about the twin islands of The Rock and Bill and this, I feel, is a peculiar piece which deserves  at least a few lines somewhere!

The source of this item is one sentence from an article from page 2 of Saunders's Newsletter of 26th January 1856. Written after the announcement that a lighthouse would be built on Rockabill, the piece throws a spotlight on the island and why the new edifice will be such a boon to the local area in north county Dublin. After talking about Rockabill being 'remarkably free from fogs' and hitherto scarcely visited, it then goes on to talk about its birdlife.

Myriads of birds, including the penguin, solan goose, Arctic tern, black duck, sea-parrots, divers and a variety of gulls, make Rockabill their habitual resort, and thence spread themselves along the coast, writes 'a correspondent'.

The little-known Lightkeeper penguins of Punta Arenas in the Straits of Magellan. Photo Gerry Feehan

Okay, to get the housekeeping out of the way, the solan goose is an old name for the gannet, that evil-looking bird that only a mother could love; a sea-parrot is an old name for a puffin; and it is interesting that there is not a roseate tern in sight.

But of course, one is naturally drawn to the penguin, completely disorientated in the northern hemisphere, huddling together against the cold, easterly wind that can cut you in two on the east coast and sliding down moss-covered rocks and dreaming of the snow of the Weddell Sea. WTF? Has global warming really increased that far in the past 170 years that the views out to Skerries and Balbriggan are just hazy black-and-white pictures in an Adelie's folk-memory?

I jest of course. Penguins, as we know them today, have never frequented the balmy tropical paradise of Dublin. A quick trawl through that font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, reveals that the Great Auk, in its day, was known as a penguin. But, reading further, this fact throws up further questions to which I have no answers.

The Great Auk

The Great Auk, says Wicky, was a flightless fowl and the last of the species pinguinus. It first appeared 400,000 years ago and became extinct in the mid-nineteenth century. It is not related to the penguins of the southern hemisphere, who were so named by early Antarctic explorers due to their similarity to the penguin (Great Auk).

However, Wicky says the last Great Auk in Britain was killed off St Kilda in 1840 and the last in Europe on Eldey (Iceland) in 1844. Worldwide, the species was gone by 1852.

So, were they really on Rockabill in the mid-1850s? Or was 'a correspondent' simply using an outdated version of Wikipedia to compile the information for his or her article?

Or maybe they're still there, in hiding, plotting a comeback to rival Troy Sea-Parrott's hat-trick against Hungary last year...

One of the last two Great Auks killed on Eldey in 1844, now in the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels