Birds and Birding's Guide to:

Watching THE PLOVER-LIKE BIRDS

THE GULLS AND THEIR ALLIES

THE DODO AND SOLITAIRE

Dodo Description

For a better idea of the appearance of the Dodo we are indebted to the pictures of Roelandt Savary and his nephew John, Dutch artists of the first half of the seventeenth century, from whose paintings we gather that the Dodo was a heavy-bodied, short-legged bird, with disproportionately large head and huge, formidable-looking hooked bill.

The body was sparingly clad in loose feathers, the wing-feathers alone being stiff, the tail resembling a small feather duster. The general color, as noted by De Bry, was gray, and the wings and tail yellowish or dirty white. The bird, so Cause tells us, laid a single egg”the size of a halfpenny roll, in a nest made of herbs heaped together,”the somewhat indefinite size ascribed to the eggs being qualified later on by comparison with that of the Great White Pelican, which it was said to resemble in size. Not being acquainted with mankind, the birds of Mauritius, like those of other uninhabited islands, were at first extremely tame, but the Dodo seems to have been not only unsuspicious but stupid into the bargain, a fact that rendered its extermination all the easier.

Although the discoverers of the bird seem to have thought poorly of its gastronomic qualities, the next vessel to reach this isle of plenty made sad havoc with the unfortunate Dodos. This was the ship of one William van West Zannen, who stopped there in 1601. He writes that”The Dodos, with their round sterns (for they are well fattened), were also obliged to turn tail; everything that could move was in bustle; the fish which had lived in peace for many a year were pursued into the deepest pool.”One day Zannen's crew took twenty-four Dodos, on another twenty,”so large and heavy that they could not eat any two of them for dinner..”

Other Dutch ships followed in Van Zannen's wake, feasting on tortoise and Dodo, and, salting down a store, departed, leaving the ranks of the Dodos sadly depleted. The last notice of the living Dodo occurs in”A coppey of Mr. Benj. Harvy's Journal when he was chief mate of the Shippe Berkley Castle,”which shows that he was in Mauritius in 1681 and saw”Dodos, whose-flesh is very hard.”In 1693, a little less than a century after its discovery, the bird seems to have become extinct, for Leguat, the careful describer of the Solitaire, makes no mention of the Dodo.

Shortly after the Dodo became extinct the Dutch, who had so far been the occupants of Mauritius, left the island, and in 1715 the French took possession only to give place to the English in 1810, one result of these various changes being that all knowledge of the quaint and curious bird was so utterly lost as not even to live in tradition, while; the few specimens preserved in museums were so little known that some naturalists became skeptical as to the previous existence of such a bird as the Dodo. But these doubts were set at rest when, in 1866, Mr. George Clark of Mauritius succeeded in obtaining a considerable series of bones from the bottom of a small marsh, known as the Mare aux Songes, lying about a quarter of a mile from the sea.

At the beginning of the last century this marsh, as well as the land immediately about it, was still covered with large trees whose fruits had doubtless formerly served the Dodo for food, and in this spot the bird seemed to have lived and died in peace, and curiously enough this is the only place in Mauritius where its bones have been brought to light. Of specimens other than the bones there are only a few fragments, a head and foot in the Ashmolean collection at Oxford, a foot in the British Museum, and a head in the Museum at Copenhagen are all that remain.

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