The bird that couldn’t fly

In 1598, on a sojourn through the southwestern Indian Ocean, a fleet of Dutch ships made landfall on the unassuming isle of Mauritius, setting into motion one of natural history’s most unfortunate chapters. Here sailors made the first recorded discovery of a flightless bird as famous as it is misunderstood. They called it the dodoor, meaning sluggish or lazy, or perhaps its common name evolved from the Portuguese word doudo, which translates to simple or foolish. Today we call it the dodo, the poster-child of modern extinction.

The eventual disappearance of this bird is significant for a number of reasons, not least of which for its speed. The dodo had no natural predators on its lonely island, enjoying an evolutionary holiday of sorts where it was stripped of both fight and flight. In spite of their reportedly terrible taste, these birds were hunted by sailors with considerable ease, beaten to death with sticks by some accounts. But the true bane of the dodo wasn’t humanity; instead it was the stowaways we brought with us. Into this pristine island paradise we delivered rats, pigs, cats, dogs, goats, deer, even monkeys kept aboard as pets, devouring the dodo eggs and young raised on the forest floor and altering the local ecosystem beyond repair.

Only a few decades would separate our first dodo from our last, killed on the offshore islet Ile d’Ambre in 1662. There were unconfirmed sightings of this species afterward, such as one made by an escaped slave in 1674; it’s now believed the dodo persisted until 1690 or thereabouts, but extinction caught up eventually. And barely anyone took notice.

What museum specimens did exist at the time of this bird’s extinction were undervalued to the point of disappearing, with collectors and curators both discarding these historical treasures at the first signs of damage or decay. They did so confident that there would always be more dodos to replenish their losses, a falsehood rampant in the scientific community at the time. The idea that a species could disappear permanently wasn’t widely accepted back then. We were in a collective denial of sorts, assuring ourselves that out there, somewhere, more dodos must thrive. So in a very real way, this bizarre bird was society’s introduction to the concept of extinction, the death of an entire species for which there are no remedies.

For these reasons, there was very little left of the genuine dodo for posterity. For a long time we’ve pictured them as hunched, fat, awkward creatures as likely to waddle off a cliff as squawk. But these stereotypes are unfair to the true natives of Mauritius island. For one thing they were likely athletic animals, only portrayed as fat and lazy by those few birds shipped back to Europe for show, overfed and on display.

The frustrating lack of skeletons or first-hand paintings has left us uncertain what the dodo even looked like. Our latest research suggests they were large, perhaps 23 kg and plump, with grey feathers, white tails and yellow eyes. Their iconic beaks were altogether long, crooked and hooked, and they likely stood more upright than we’ve ever given them credit for. Their wings couldn’t lift them of course, left at their sides in a kind of evolutionary limbo. They were strange and wonderful creatures to be sure; some went as far as to call them grotesque, but that’s a matter of opinion.

I have a great fondness for this bird, because in so many ways its story encapsulates our struggle as human beings. Like so much of the natural world, Mauritius island and its inhabitants simply weren’t ready for us, and we destroyed them without meaning to. We watched them disappear in disbelief, unaware of our own strength or the dangers we brought with us. In this story we are naive, not evil, which is a strangely reassuring way to see ourselves. The dodo might be gone, but for whatever its worth, this bird’s brief brush with the human experience has made us a little more self aware.