Going the way of the dodo
Closing the case on the dodo, throwing it away, burning it, losing it and covering it in rubble.
It is 1598 on a remote, uninhabited isle in the Indian Ocean, not that time has any meaning in this place where the wind, blown in from a sea storm to the east, whispers across the sand of the tropical beaches and ripples along a lake into the trees of the jungle forest above. As the sun sets and the air cools, all manner of creature settles in for the night, bird song ceases and the flutter and chirp of bats fills the air. Tomorrow five ships, driven in by the tempest and worn and weary from thousands of miles of travel across the ocean, will land on the south-eastern shore. Life on the remote island will change forever. But that is tomorrow.
In this age of extinction there is no better time to consider the effects of human intervention on the lives, and deaths, of those who inhabit this earth with us. The big hitters in the extinction game will probably always be the dinosaurs: a group of reptiles which were undeniably visually extremely cool with a level of fame aided in no small way by how they departed via a big meteor hitting the earth; an event so momentous in scale it is difficult to imagine outside a movie directed by Peter Jackson, and actually quite a cool way to go out too. However, if there is one close competitor it must be the dodo, a status not bad for this portly pigeon. Though unlike the big lizards (birds?), which were wiped out when a big rock from space got up close and personal with the Gulf of Mexico, the dodo’s fate is sadder, guiltier, and certainly less inevitable.
You see, aside from cataclysmic cosmological events, dinosaurs had a no fault extinction far removed from human intervention, but in the words of ecologist Stuart L. Pimm: ‘The dodo did not go extinct, Humanity bludgeoned it into oblivion’. This is more or less factually accurate.
Let’s build a victim profile. The dodo was a flightless bird native to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. The first written account of the bird appears in 1598, when the Dutch landed their ships in what is now the bay of Grand Port, but it was inevitable that both the Arab and Portuguese ships who had previously visited the island in the middle ages and early 16th century in turn must have encountered the animal.
Though now the poster child for human-adjacent extinction, when dodos actually walked the earth they were an unusual but certainly not a valuable commodity. In the 16th century, ‘exotic’ birds were carted off to become pets, or were sold for their feathers. There are certainly accounts of a few dodos being transported around, for example King Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor from the House of Habsburg, probably had one at some point in his menagerie, because there's a painting of one in his menagerie. Mind you, there’s also a painting of a dodo’s head on a lobster's body by the same artist, so it’s hardly make or break evidence, and it is uncertain whether this was a living animal or a taxidermy mount. Regardless, the bird was never transported in great numbers like other rare avians, and most contemporary depictions come from natural histories or travelogues.
Perhaps this is an aesthetic prejudice. The dodo as we know it today derives entirely from historic images (no complete material remains of a dodo survive at all, but we’ll get to that later), and those images are not flattering. Fat and stubby, a flamingo-style beak with large nostrils and unpleasant dull grey feathers, in pictures the birds are always posed for a side-on view and stare at you through one piercing eye with a blankness that nonetheless conveys contempt. But maybe we deserve that.
Early depictions of the dodo from sailors and travellers who saw the bird in person show it as having long legs and a large but proportioned body. The first pictorial depiction in 1601 shows a bird not too dissimilar to an emu. But this was to change in 1626. The Dutch golden age artist Roleant Savery first encountered the dodo in Prague and his many depictions of the bird made him perhaps the most influential dodo painter in history, at least until John Tennial in the 19th century. It was Savery who painted the dodo in Rodolf II’s menageries in the 17th century, and his depiction of the fluffy little thing is now the standard accepted image of this long extinct bird, despite early depictions and more recent scientific evidence suggesting differences in the bird's appearance (not so fluffy, not so fat). The round body of the dodo suggests perhaps Savery was painting from a taxidermy model which has been overstuffed, but later artists soon turned to the Dutchman’s depictions as inspiration for their own and the image stuck.
It is said that Louis Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) saw Savery’s depictions on display in Oxford and was inspired to include the bird in his own work. Therefore the image of the dodo was once again popularised in the 18th century by Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The story featured the animal briefly, illustrated holding a snazzy cane, in a passage where the bird suggests a Caucus race, a made up game where participants run around a bit in whatever direction and shape they fancy, and no one really wins. This cameo, along with Tennial’s drawing, revitalised popular and scientific interest at the time but reinforced the dodo’s exaggerated image once again.
Despite looks, it's possible that if dodos had value it was as an image or description for natural historians, depicted as often as it was in their journals. The dodo’s flightlessness was a novel concept for Europeans at the time and not fitting within the taxonomy of the natural world as it was understood back then, so even the concept of a dodo was valuable. The image and description of the dodo and red rail (also an extinct flightless bird from Mauritius) was so defiant to the norm that it arguably provided an opportunity to natural historians to rethink their categorisation and scientific understanding of the natural world. It was the existence of the dodo and the red rail that caused the merchant and traveller Peter Mundy to muse in the 16th century that:
‘A question may bee demaunded how they should bee here and Not elcewhere, beeing soe Farer From other land and can Neither fly or swymme; whither by Mixture off kindes producing straunge and Monstrous formes, or the Nature of the Climate, ayer and earth in alltring the First shapes in long tyme, or how.’
Charles Darwin would revisit this train of thought over 200 years later.
Certainly the vast majority of Eurpoeans would never get the chance to study a dodo up close. Few of the birds made it to Europe, alive or dead. Remember when I said dodos were often brought up in travelogues? For good reason. Sadly it seems that a dodo’s primary value was as a provision, salted like a Walkers crisp for the long sea voyages. Perhaps this popularity was partly due to the amount of meat each bird provided, allegedly just one easily provided sustenance for 25 men. Though the birds may have been on the ships bound west, by design they wouldn't have lasted the journey. Only the legs, head and beak survived the feasting. I wonder why.
So I know what you’re thinking. God, those dodo’s must have tasted delicious! No. Reports suggest it was hard to chew, difficult to swallow, and greasy. The dodo was likely to have been eaten because it was easy to catch, the same reason I will probably have an instant noodle pot tonight instead of making tacos like I planned to. Having evolved on Mauritius with no natural predators, the dodo had no reason to fear the human visitors. Ironically, this was a consequence of the bird being at the top of its food chain before the arrival of colonists in the 1600’s. It also couldn't fly, a real asset for its new predators. You might imagine that after an unrelentingly long sea voyage, the Dutch saw a plump, helpless bird and immediately thought of dinner. As such, this is the most commonly cited cause of the dodo’s extinction.
That wasn’t all however, for when the Dutch arrived in Mauritius, they also bought their diseases, their pets, and their pets’ diseases. Pigs, cats, rats and crab-eating macaques also wrought havoc on the local animal population (you would be surprised how many species have been brought to heel by the introduction of cats - pigs of course will eat anything), destroying the dodo’s ground nests and committing accidental biological warfare by introducing new germs into the ecology even before their masters could come running out of the bushes with a knife. So total was their destruction that the only remaining terrestrial mammal left on Mauritius today is the greater mascarene flying fox, which itself is critically endangered.
It would be remiss to not acknowledge that the dodo was already rare as a species only native to Mauritius. Certainly island species’ represent a large proportion of ‘recent’ extinctions, due to their relatively small population size in comparison to their mainland compatriots. Dodos may have even been localised to one part of Mauritius, indicating an even smaller starting population. In just a hundred years human intervention was enough to do them in, consistent hunting and the ecological consequences of invasive species dwindled the population to unsustainable levels and sightings of the dodo began to taper off in the late 17th century, then eventually stopped altogether.
The last known sighting of an alive dodo occurred around 1698, but the last known sighting of (all of) a not-alive dodo was 1755, when the stuffed specimen kept in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford was chucked and burnt, ostensibly to avoid spreading pests to other specimens. Only the head and a foot survive, having been saved from the fire at the last minute by a canny curator, or so the story goes. Elsewhere other material remains were going missing; a foot held by the British Museum was lost, as was a specimen held by the Dutch professor Pieter Pauw, among others. While several museums across Europe listed a stuffed dodo as part of their collection, none have survived into the 21st century, either having been disposed of or rotted away.
It certainly didn’t help that almost immediately the bird was mythologised after death. French settlers in Mauritius in the late 17th century saw no sign of dodos (unsurprising - since they were at that point extinct) and dismissed the drawings as a fanciful exaggeration by the Dutch. That no living specimens existed in Europe only helped this view. This vacuum also allowed the fanciful version of the dodo, almost certainly not an accurate representation of the bird, to fester and solidify. Only in the 19th century as pieces in various museum collections that hadn’t been misplaced began to be examined, inspired in some part by the popularity of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, did scientific evidence prove that the dodo really did exist, though its representation has not changed.
Furthermore, the world in which the dodo lived in Mauritius is also gone, as the island nation was colonised by the Dutch, French and English, it became more developed and much of the natural habitat was lost. Once home to an astonishingly diverse array of unique flora and fauna for such a small land mass thanks to its unique terrain, you would be hard pressed to find any native plants or animals today. Only two percent of the native forest survives. Furthermore, in the mid-19th century the Mare aux Songes Swamp, once a lake home to a large population of dodos and where over 300 fossilised remains of the bird have been found, was filled with rubble to prevent the spread of malaria. This area, unique in the world as one of the only places to find dodos, was only uncovered in 2005, and since then has partially been paved over for an airport runway. In totality this incidental Stalin-era erasure of our hapless bird is almost funny in its thoroughness.
Today the dodo is represented in natural history museums as a historical miscommunication. Any stuffed ‘specimens’ on display are fictions, made from the feathers of other birds and modelled only on a head, a foot, and if created post-2005, fragmented animal bones found in a swamp. A victim first of human intervention and then overwhelming misinterpretation. Even the parts of it based on material remains are flawed: science suggests that the nostrils of the animal, always large in models and drawings, would have been smaller in life as they were partially covered by living tissue, like our own.
So the dodo is remembered through imperfect depictions and descriptions, and always through the lens of its own demise; in some ways a second extinction for the bird, a final indignity. Now dodos live on colloquially as a byword for that which is obsolete, stupid or unpopular.
This would never have happened to the dinosaurs.