I love Walton Ford’s watercolors. They combine the detail of an Audubon painting with a certain subversive humor that I find compelling. One of my favorites is titled, “The Witch of St. Kilda,” of the recently extinct Giant Auk. The story below, despite sounding rather fantastic and, given the fairly modern date, completely ridiculous, is entirely true.
The tale that comes down to us of the capture of [the now extinct great auk] in or about the year 1840 is a strange and a dark one. Although the year is not known with certainty, the month was July. Five men, wandering on the great rock of an island known as Stac-an-Armin, caught a large and plump bird asleep on a ledge [and] took it to their [shelter] where they confined it for three days. Apparently it used to make a great noise … . It opened its mouth when anyone came near it [and] nearly cut the rope with its bill. A storm arose, and that, together with the size of the bird, and the noise it made, caused them to think it was a witch. It was killed on the third day after it was caught, and McKinnon declares they were beating it for an hour or two [with] large stones before it was dead … .
-Errol Fuller, The Great Auk
The Witch of St. Kilda, by Walton Ford, 2005, watercolor, gouache, pencil, and ink on paper, 23 x 32 in.
