EEP Crowned pigeon number 4

EEP STUDBOOK CROWNED PIGEONS PROLOGUE
Prologue
In the year 1598 AD, Portuguese sailors landing on the shores of the island of Mauritius
discovered a previously unknown species of bird, the Dodo. Having been isolated by its
island location from contact with humanity, the dodo greeted the new visitors with a childlike
innocence. The sailors mistook the gentle spirit of the dodo, and its lack of fear of the
new predators, as stupidity. They dubbed the bird ‘dodo’ (meaning something similar to a
simpleton in the Portuguese tongue). Many dodos were killed by the human visitors, and
those that survived man had to face the introduced animals. Dogs and pigs soon became
feral when introduced to the Mauritian ecosystem. By the year 1681, the last dodo had died,
and the world was left worse with its passing.
In 1627 Mauritius was visited by an English adventurer, Thomas Herbert. The island was
uninhabited by man, but there were a considerable number of weird looking, flightless birds,
possessing what Herbert describes as ‘a melancholic look’. James Greenway in “Extinct and
Vanishing Birds of the World” describes the dodo in these terms:
“A large and heavily built bird, the Dodo is thought to have weighed fifty pounds. Its plumage
was loose and wispy, more like the down of a chick than feathers, and was grey on the body,
whitish on the belly and dark on the thighs. Its huge hooked bill was grey at the base and
yellowish at the tip. Its tail is depicted as a clump of wispy white feathers positioned rather
high on the back. The yellowish wings are generally shown hanging rather loosely at the side,
quite inadequate for flight, they may have been used in fights with rivals. The Dodo’s very
large yellow feet had black claws”.
The Dodo (Raphus cucullatus) did not survive long after the first settlement of the Dutch in
Mauritius in 1638.Even though they described the bird as ‘walgvogel’ meaning ‘disgusting to
eat’ they certainly must have had fun clobbering the clumsy creatures that waddled up to
them only to be hit on the head with a stout staff. In fact the name Dodo comes from the Dutch
‘Dodars’ or ‘Dodoor’, meaning a sluggard or a stupid fool.
The extinction of the dodo, however, was probably due mainly to dogs, hogs and monkeys
which were introduced in to the island, and they had a particular weakness for the large,
single egg that the dodo laid. By 1681, the dodo had been totally wiped out. Thus it became
the first creature known to have become extinct due to the actions of man and other
predators, and the destruction of its habitat. Almost everything we know about the superficial
anatomy of this unique bird stems from a single picture, possibly painted from a live model,
by the noted fifteenth century animal painter, Roland Savery.
There are few museum remains of the dodo. There is a foot in the British museum, a cranium
in Copenhagen, and a foot and a head in Oxford. In 1866, a schoolteacher, Georg Clark,
discovered a large number of bones in a swamp in the south of the island of Mauritius. In
fact, in the area which now houses the airport. (Ironically, the home of the flightless bird is
now the meeting place of jet aircraft). The bones George Clark found were not enough to reconstitute
an entire dodo. However, a complete skeleton, made up of the remains of several
individuals, is to be found at Durban Museum.
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