Who killed the great auk?

"The disappearance of the Great Auk ignited the public imagination and it became the stuff of legend. More importantly, its plight keenly interested a number of great Victorian ornithologists who were to cause some of the very first legislation on seabird protection to be enacted." "Jeremy Gaskell pieces together all the important historical data and argues that the extinction of the Great Auk was inextricably bound up with the prevailing social, economic, and political conditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." "Who Killed the Great Auk? takes us on a tour of some of the wildest and most remote communities on earth. We travel with Audubon to Labrador, sail to the remote Scottish island of St. Kilda, experience the hardship of life in the Newfoundland colonies, and follow the peregrinations of intrepid naturalists as they put to sea in search of the very last of the Great Auks."--Jacket.