A.J. Whiting, age 9, of Harrrisburg, Penn., for his question:

WHERE DOES THE AUK GO IN WINTER?

The auk is any one of several species of swimming and diving birds that live along northern seacoasts where they come each spring to nest on cliffs and ledges in huge colonies that may contain thousands of birds. Auks spend the winter at sea in the northern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Auks are poor fliers and are clumsy on land, but they dive well and swim rapidly underwater. When swimming, the use their wings as paddles and their feet as a rudder.

They live mainly on fish.

Each spring the female auk will lay one or two eggs on a bare rock or 1n a crevice on a cliff.

The great auk or garefowl was one of the world's most famous species. It is now extinct, however. About the size of a goose, it stood upright like the penguin. The great auk could not fly at all and was sometimes seen on the shores of New England and the British Isles. Hunters killed such large numbers of great auks for food and feathers that the species died out in the 1940s.