Cena Reeran, age 11, of Mesa, Arizona, for her question:

What kind of birds are auks?

The members of this family are sea going birds, spry in the water and fast on the wing. The auks are friendly characters and assorted cousins enjoy life together in large crowds. Sad to say, one of the auk clan, the biggest, was too friendly and trusting toward man. He is now extinct.

The family  name of the auks is Alcidae, a scientific term derived from a Scandinavian word for a swan or kingfisher. The auks are not related to these birds, :... but in the water they are just as graceful as a swan and even more skillful. At one time, they were called penguins, but later this name was adopted by still another bird family. In the Northern Hemisphere, the auks play a role similar to that of the penguins of the Southern Hemisphere. The auks    except the great auk which could not    can fly, while penguins cannot.

A troup of razor billed auks basking• on a rocky seacoast looks for all the world li;.. a gathering of small penguins. The vests of their immaculate dinner suits are gleaming white. Their heads, backs and bills are satiny black. Like penguins, they sit up straight on their stubby, widely spaced legs, while carrying on gossipy conver¬sations. And, like penguins, they are more interested in than afraid of human visitors.

There are 22 existing alcid birds of the auk family and many species throng  together, especially in the nesting; season. The largest stands about 17 inches high, which is as tall as the smallest penguins. The smallest is the neat little dovekie auk, no taller than a robin. Most alcids wear well tailored tuxedos. But the comical puffin enlivens the family color scheme of basic black and white. This huge headed auk wears scarlet hose and a giant sized bill of red and orange.

In the air, the auks flap their stubby wings fast and furiously. A troup of assorted cousins swoop along above the waves like hurtling bullets. Then they hit the water with a series of noisy splashes. Some swoop up and land again like stones pitched to skim and skip over the surface. Some dive immediately, using their wings to continue with an underwater flying motion. The family banquet includes a variety of smallish fish, crustaceans from the seabed and perhaps small helpings of plankton.

The sea going auks migrate southward in winter, some as far as the Mediterranean In summer, they return to their ancestral nesting grounds far north in the Atlantic and Pacific. Here they take shore leaves on ocean cliffs and lonely isles. Each species in the group occupies its own rocky ledge, leaving; the highest ledge to the comical puffins. The puffin parents scoop out a burrow and produce two eggs. Other auk parents tend their one precious egg on a bleak, rocky ledge. All the alcid bird babies are fed on partly digested food from the crops of their parents.

The great auk adds a tragic note to the alcid story. These giants of the family stood 30 inches tall and in the early 1800's, thousands of them nested on their four islands in the northern Atlantic. In 1830, the two islands near Iceland were wiped out by volcanic eruptions, along; with their colonies of great auks. The rest were plundered by whalers and sealers for their fatty oil and their feathers. In the next ten shameful years, they, too, were wiped out. The last great auk departed in 1844 and the world will never see his like again.