Kevin Goodine, age 10, of New Brunswick,Canada, for his question:

When did the last great auk die?

The last great auk departed from this world 127 years ago. These large flightless birds will never live on the earth again. When any creature becomes extinct, nature cannot ever bring it back again. For countless ages, enormous colonies of great auks enjoyed life on many rocky, wind swept islands of the North Atlantic. There they fished for food and raised their hungry chicks.

Then man the hunter discovered that the great auks had useful fat and feathers. Seal hunters arid whale hunters stopped by the islands and herded the helpless, rather clumsy birds into corrals. They slaughtered them, stripped their feathers and cooked the fat from their bodies in boiling cauldrons. The mindless slaughter started in the 1550s. Nobody counted or cared how many great auks were killed    or how few were left. The end came quite suddenly. The last of the great auks perished in 1844. Let's hope that man, the mindless hunter, comes to his senses before it's too late to save other creatures from extinction