Essay, Research Paper: The Extinction Of The Dodo

The Dodo bird is one of the most famous recently extinct animals. Its story is also another sad tale of human interference. The Dodo bird was a mystery to many of the people who lived in the same time period as it. Its existence was sometimes even considered a myth. Nevertheless, historians and scientists have been able to piece together sketchy accounts of the history, anatomy, and life of the Dodo using information found in documents written by travelers, fossils found in the Dodo's former habitats, drawings a paintings of the Dodo bird, and other things coupled with old folklore and tales of the elusive bird.

In its time, the Dodo bird resided mainly on the island of Mauritius. Even though the Dodo lived on two other islands, Reunion and Rodriguez, it is most commonly known to have lived on Mauritius. These islands are located about 500 miles east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. It just happens that this places all three of them on important ocean trade routes. This led to humans discovering the island, which only could've contributed to the extinction of the Dodo bird. There were three different species of Dodo bird, each living on one of the three islands. The Dodo that lived on Mauritius (Raphus cucullatus), the Reunion Dodo (Raphus solitarius), and the Rodriguez Dodo (Pezophaps solitaria), lived in peace until about 1507 when they were discovered by the Portugese. Before that time, the Dodos lived care-free because there were no large predators on the islands to kill them. They started to disappear when humans started to populate the islands. With the humans, came dogs and other pets and animals that started to kill the Dodo. Rats that had escaped from ships contributed a lot to the death of the Dodo. The rats grew in numbers over a short time and started to eat Dodos and Dodo eggs. To add to the Dodo's problems, humans discovered that the Dodo could be easily killed and eaten. Humans also started to eat Dodo eggs they found and aquired a taste for them. This led humans to acquire a taste for Dodo eggs and Dodo meat, and they started to hunt Dodos a search for Dodo eggs often. After years and years of living without predators, the Dodo, not surprisingly, was unfit to handle this much of an attacking force. The Dodo wasn't very careful, and not very good at hiding itself, since it never had a reason to learn to hide itself or be careful before humans came into the picture. To contribute to its problems, the bird was said to be quite curious and friendly with people. It was so tame it would see someone and just waddle right up to examine them…only to meet the business end of a club or a sword. This is where the belief began that Dodos weren't intelligent. That wasn't true though, the Dodo was just friendly. But with humans and dogs and rats killing Dodos and destroying Dodo eggs, it's obvious that the extinction of the Dodo was inevitable.

The common image of a Dodo is a fat, sluggish, dumb-looking, awkward bird. This image of the Dodo can be credited in part to Jan Savery, who painted a picture of the Dodo in the 1600's. The picture is of a large, flightless, cuddly bird. Even though this is basically untrue about most Dodo's, it was true for the Dodos Savery had seen. Those Dodos had been shipped from the Dodo's native islands to Europe and on the way fed food that made the Dodo overweight and awkward. In contrast to Savery's painting, recent scientific research has created a new image of the Dodo. A new, better, smarter, and more efficient Dodo has been modeled by this research. In fact, Dr.Andrew Kitchener has contructed two life-size models of the Dodo. One can be found in the Oxford University Museum, and the other can be found in the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. These models were built based on facts about the Dodo and bones found in the Mare aux Songes swamp located in southeast Mauritius. This came about in September of 1865 when Gaston de Bissy ordered his employees to dig up a marsh on his estate so he could use the mold for fertilizer. This excavation uncovered a Tibia, part of another Tibia, and a broken Tarsus. Even though a lot of the Dodo's image changed, some of it stayed the same throughout the research. The Dodo is still believed to have had large, strong, yellow feet along with a sharp, hooked bill. It supposedly weighed about fifty pounds and had small, useless wings. According to recent scientific research, the Dodo was about as large as a full grown Turkey. The Dodo residing on Mauritius is believed to have had blue-grayish feathers with short curly feathers on its tail. It supposedly had no feathers on its face or head or neck. The Reunion Dodo was very similar, but is said to have been more whitish in color than the Mauritius Dodo. The Rodriguez Dodo was about the same size as the others, but it was a brownish color and had a shorter, unhooked bill. It was also said to have had a hard, knob-like formation on each wing that could be used for defense.

The Dodo, in its prime, had a very stable lifestyle. It was a herbivore, so it would seek out plants, mainly seeds and bark, to eat. This was no problem because the Dodo lived in forest areas, where there was an abundance of seeds, bark, and other plants to feast on. It would use its sharp, hooked beak to crack and pry open seeds and to scrape bark off of trees. Like many other birds, the Dodo's digestive tract wasn't really enough to be able to digest some of the harder foods it ate, like bark. This explains why scientists have found different pebbles and rocks in fossils and skeletons of the Dodo. The Dodo must've had an instinct to swallow small rocks and pebbles. The objects would then lie in the Dodo's stomach and when it ate, its stomach would churn, and the rocks would move around, helping to grind up the food. The Dodo's beak also came into play in its lifestyle when it needed a defensive weapon. Looking at drawings and paintings and other recreations of the Dodo bird, I know that I would surely be scared of that sharp beak. It didn't have to use it much though, because there were very few, if any, large predators residing on any of the three islands inhabited by Dodos at the time. When it came time for a Dodo to mate, it would choose its partner and mate. Finding a partner wasn't hard, because at the time Dodos were plentiful on the islands. After it mated, the two Dodos were very close. Both partners would build the nest out of heaps of dry grass and palm leaves. When she was ready, the female would lay the egg in a clean spot on the nest. She would only lay one egg. It was white, and about the same size as a goose egg. Unlike a lot of birds, both Dodos would alternately incubate the egg. The incubation process of the Dodo egg is about seven weeks. During this period, both Dodos helped to protect the egg. They would chase off any animal that ventured near the Dodo's nest. After the egg hatches, both partners would continue to protect their offspring during its vulnerable young stages. Both Dodos would feed it and care for it until it was prepared to go out on its own.

The Dodo lived unscathed for hundreds of years. It carried out everything its instincts told it to with no problem. This may sound great, but this led later generations of them to become even more innocent and unprepared for dangerous predators, especially humans. The Dodo became fearless, not even knowing what fear was. It became unattentive and completely oblivious to things going on around it. When humans were introduced to the three islands in the 1500's, the Dodos had no idea of the danger that they were in. Judging from accounts made of human/dodo interaction, there seems to have been a mutual fascination in some cases. Some travelers who have written about seeing the Dodo quote them as "fascinating birds" and "rare oddities". They write of how the strange bird is very friendly and tame and how it just comes right up to greet them. Other travelers and sailors only viewed the Dodo as an idiotic, awkward bird and just killed and ate them without any further observation. Some other travelers captured them for study, or just for fun. They would bring them back to their homes and showcase them to the public back home who had never seen this type of bird. This is how the Dodo got its image of being fat and dumb. People who owned the Dodo had no idea what to feed it, and they would feed it too much of the wrong things during the trip back home and while they owned it. Being held captive, the Dodo would gain weight from overfeeding and lack of movement. Its owner would show it to people, and they got the general idea that the Dodo was a fat, worthless bird. Sadly, after this fascination of the Dodo from the common traveler died off, they started to just kill the Dodo for food or for souvenirs or whatever other purpose you'd use it for. The only people interested enough in the Dodo bird to not kill it were naturalists and scientists. Unfortunately, there were a lot more common travelers going to the three islands at that time. This may not have been such a big problem if humans wouldn't have started making their homes on the islands. The Dodo bird couldn't handle all the competition and started to die off quickly. If only they had been able to hold out a few hundred more years, or if humans hadn't found the island so early, we might still have Dodos wandering around today. There could even be one waddling around in your backyard right now if it wasn't for human interference. Because of the ignorance of humans, none of us will ever see a Dodo bird in the flesh. We can take guesses at what it looked like, but we will never see a Dodo living as it did back in its time. All we can do is draw our own conclusions from scientific research, fossil evidence, and writings, drawings, and other accounts of the Dodo. Raphus cucullatus (the Mauritius Dodo) became extinct by 1681. Pezophaps solitaria (the Rodriguez Dodo) died out around 1800. Raphus solitarius (the Reunion Dodo) disappeared around 1750.

This all is just another sad story of endangerment and extinction that can be credited to humankind. Since the dawn of time, man has brutally pushed and shoved animals out of their natural habitat and killed whole species of animals off for their own purposes or enjoyment. The Dodo wasn't keeping those traders, sailors, and travelers from living on or exploring the island. The Dodo did nothing at all to humans. For some reason, the people back then just were fascinated by the bird and felt the need to ship it off to places foreign to the bird where it couldn't survive. They felt the urge to kill it and stuff it so they could have an authentic Dodo on their mantelpiece to show off to guests. They thought it necessary to eat the Dodo and the Dodos eggs, even though there
obviously were plenty of plants to eat on the island.
Now, because of this, if we ever want to see a Dodo again, we'll have to rely on highly controversial processes, like DNA engineering. According to my sources, this is a possibility or will become a possibility in the near future. Who knows how much resistance that idea will get though. It sounds like a good idea to me. After doing this report, I want to meet a real Dodo. I want to touch an actual Dodo bird and see what the big fascination was. But the more I think about it, I really don't think we've come that far as people. If we found some new, exciting species of bird on some remote island today, I'm sure we would capture it and ship it off to our families. I'm sure someone would come up with the bright idea of killing it and marketing its meat. I'm pretty certain that it wouldn't become extinct so fast, but after everyone got tired of hearing about the new animal, the only people left to really care about its existence would be naturalists and scientists, just like it was back then. We would just end up treating it like we treat all of our other rare and endangered species. We would destroy its habitat for our own purposes, we would kill it for our own purposes, and we would generally destroy it for our own purposes. It all bleeds down to greed and selfishness - the American way. We would find some mineral or fuel or precious gem in its habitat where we would mine and drill and excavate and dig and destroy so some guy can make a billion dollars and buy another house made of pure gold. Then when we had gone too far with killing them and destroying their homes, we would take a few males and females of the species, shove them in a zoo, write their name on the endangered species list, and forget about them. Of course, naturalist organizations would fight for the species, but you know they wouldn't be able to stand up to Mr. Mineral billionaire or Mr. Oil driller. So I guess we really haven't come that far at all in our morals and attitudes towards animals and how to treat them. Just like what happened to the Dodo, we continue to destroy the habitats of our endangered and rare species. We continue to skin them for their fur because it makes us look good and its soft. We continue to kill them because they're a delicacy. We continue to murder them for their tusks and horns so we can have good-looking jewelry.

Maybe…hopefully…someday we will all realize the fault in our own ways. Someday we will realize what we've done and what we continue to do to the place where we all must live. Someday we will all see that whatever we do to the Earth, we have to live with for the rest of time. Someday the little lightbulb above all of our heads will flicker on and everyone on Earth will simultaneously say "Ooooooohhhhh man!" For some reason, I'm not waiting for that to happen, because I have a feeling that it never will.

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