Recent posts about the Adventure Series reminded me of this thread. Jack's yearning to find a great auk struck a chord with me when I first read
The Island of Adventure, aged nine, and I longed for him to stumble upon a whole colony of them in a later book. I notice that Enid Blyton capitalises the name of that bird - "Great Auk" - yet doesn't do that for other birds in the same story: "There were plenty of big razorbills with their curiously-shaped beaks, plenty of skuas, gulls, cormorants and other birds." I always used to capitalise "Great Auk" simply because Enid Blyton did, but not all books or websites do likewise (though some do), so I now use small letters just as I would for "robin", "blue tit", etc.
I've mentioned before that there's a stuffed great auk in the Natural History Museum in London. It used to be in a section with other stuffed birds - I've seen it there a few times and would linger by it, gazing at it and thinking of
The Island of Adventure. Looking at the museum's website, I see that the great auk has now been moved to a different part of the building (The Treasures, Cadogan Gallery) along with 21 other exhibits. It's possible to vote online for your favourite of the 22 treasures so I've just voted for the great auk as a tribute to Enid Blyton (and Jack Trent!) even though I like some of the other items very much too, such as the dodo skeleton, Guy the gorilla, William Smith's ammonites,
The Birds of America by John James Audubon and Charles Darwin's
On the Origin of Species:
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/coll ... index.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;