Dodo Bird

In louis carroll's Alice in Wonderland, a fictional Dodo bird leads a “caucus race” in which everybody wins a prize. The real Dodo, first discovered on the then-uninhabited island of Mauritius in the 1500s by Dutch and Portuguese sailors, was a loser in the race of survival. Flightless, large, and never exposed to human hunters, the Dodo bird would often haplessly approach European hunters. Because the meat of the Dodo was allegedly distasteful, the Dutch called the bird Walgvogel, meaning “bad tasting bird,” and the birds were quickly hunted to extinction. The last reliable sighting of the bird was in 1663. A stuffed Dodo bird was sent to Oxford University's Ashmolean museum, but was partially destroyed by a fire in 1755. A discovery in 2005 of Dodo bird bones has added new information about the shape and DNA of the bird.

The Dodo is a symbol of extinction and the uneasy interaction between humanity and the environment. The fact that Mauritius was pristine wilderness, untouched by any human contact, made the animals of Mauritius particularly susceptible to human hunting, and to the nonnative animals that were inevitably introduced by human visitors. The volcanic island of Mauritius is located far off the eastern shore of Madagascar, far from most shipping lanes and—before the 16th century—hundreds of kilometers away from human habitation. There is some evidence that Arab traders could have known about the island, but it was in every sense a separate natural world. This small island, a beautiful emerald in the clear waters of the Indian Ocean, has recently become a tourist paradise and is now home to some two million diverse human inhabitants. Although [Page 475]the Dodo is gone, rare and fragile populations of island birds like the famous pink pigeon maintain a precarious hold in cramped aviaries and on the remotest mountaintops of Mauritius. Although Dodo in Portuguese means “dumb,” perhaps the label is best reserved for those who fail to appreciate the lesson of its extinction.