Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Dodo Bird

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

In 1598 the Dutch Empire acquired the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. There they found a short, fat, flightless bird that was only found on that island. The bird had absolutely no fear of humans, but perhaps it should have. In 1662, just 64 years later, the last known bird was sighted, and after that, the entire species went extinct. Learn more about the dodo bird and how it disappeared on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1598, the Dutch Empire acquired the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. There, they found a short, fat, flightless bird that was only found on that island. The bird had absolutely no fear of humans, but perhaps it should have. In 1662, just 64 years later, the last known bird was sighted, and after that, the entire species went extinct. Learn more about the Dodo Bird and how it disappeared on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Audible.com. My audiobook recommendation today is The End of the World, volcanic apocalypses, lethal oceans, and our quest to understand Earth's past mass extinctions

by Peter Brannon. Our world has ended five times. It's been broiled, frozen, poison gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids. In the end of the world, Peter Brannon dives into deep time, exploring Earth's past dead ends, and the process offers us a glimpse of our possible future.

Part road trip, part history, and part cautionary tale, the end of the world takes us on a tour of the ways our planet has clawed itself back from the grave and casts our future in a completely new light. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and two free audiobooks by going to audibletrial.com slash everything everywhere, or by clicking on the link in the show notes. The story of the dodo, scientifically known as the Raffas Cucalatus, is one that has found its way into our language via phrases such as being dumb as a dodo, which supposedly reflected on the intelligence of the bird. Likewise, something could go the way of the dodo, which means to

disappear or to go extinct. The story of the dodo takes place on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Mauritius didn't have any native inhabitants before it was discovered by Arab and European explorers in the early 16th century. Neither the Arabs nor the Portuguese who first encountered the island bothered to inhabit it. No one really saw any value in the island, and the first recorded accounts of Mauritius didn't have any mentions of the dodo bird. The Dutch finally settled on the island in 1598, almost 100 years after it was first discovered. Their original intent was to use the island for provisioning ships that were traveling between the Dutch East Indies, aka Indonesia, and the Netherlands. Ships would stop and get fresh food and water for the rest of their journey.

It was then that the dodo was first mentioned. The dodo was a relatively large flightless bird. It stood about three feet or one meter tall, and an adult male weighed around 21 kilograms or 40. pounds. It's in the same family as the pigeon, and its closest living relative is the Nicar Pigeon, which lives in the Nicar-Illans off of India. The very first sailors on the island were reported to have hunted the Dodo for food. They were extremely easy to hunt as they had absolutely no fear of humans. Because they lived on only this one island, and the island had no predators, they really had no fear of anything. Hunting them consisted of walking up to him with a club

and a whacking him on the head. This behavior is where the Dodo developed its reputation for being stupid. However, the Dodo wasn't stupid. It just never evolved to have to deal with predators. The behavior of the Dodo really wasn't any different than any other species, such as the penguin, who also never had to deal with predators. The word Dodo probably comes from the Dutch word Dodar's, which is a bird with feathers on its backside.

The Dodo was interesting to a lot of people. It led people to begin to raise questions about, about how a fat, flightless bird was on such a remote island and how it got there, because it didn't fly, and it didn't swim. The British merchant Peter Mundy wrote in his journal after a visit to the island, quote, Of these two sorts of fowl aforementioned, for aught we yet know not any to be found out of this island,

which lieth about 100 leagues from St. Lawrence. A question may be demanded, how they should be here and not elsewhere, being so far from other land and can neither fly nor swim. whither by mixture of kinds producing strange and monstrous forms, or the nature of the climate, air and earth in all things the first shapes in long time or how. To translate his 16th century English, he wondered how such a bird was located there, and nowhere else, when it couldn't fly or swim.

This question of how such a bird got there took place 200 years before Darwin. Live dodo birds were actually shipped to several places around the world as gifts. It isn't known how many were sent or how many survived the journey, but researchers have estimated, based on surviving samples and documents, that as many as 11 dodos made it to locations outside of Mauritius. There was one seen in London, two in India, and one in Prague. The last surviving Dodo in captivity was believed to have been in Nagasaki, Japan. The popular myth surrounding the disappearance of the Dodo is that it was hunted to extinction for food.

This is not true. It is true the bird was hunted, especially by the first. for sailors to arrive on the island who were looking for food. However, the dodo wasn't actually that tasty. Once a settlement was established on the island, they weren't hunted as much. The population of Mauritius was never more than about 50 people. An archaeological excavation of an early settlement found no dodo bones amongst all the animal bones which they found.

Most scientists now think that the real culprit was a combination of non-native species and deforestation. Pigs were brought to the island, and rats also got. loose. The Dodo only laid one egg at a time, and what like happened on so many islands, and here I'll refer to my episode on rat eradication, they often ate the eggs of birds. Moreover, the Dutch discovered the value of tropical timber on the island, and began cutting down the forests, which was the habitat of the Dodo. Between the pigs and the rats and the deforestation, that was what probably did in the Dodo. It's also been theorized that the

Dodo wasn't a robust species to begin with. Given its location on only one island, it probably never had a large population to begin with. This is the case with most species, which are endemic to a single island. The last verified Dodo sighting occurred in 1662. Volkert Everitz of the Dutch ship Arnhem reported capturing some birds on a small islet off of the main island. Another report given secondhand from an escaped slave on the island claims to have seen one in 1674. The estimated date of the last dodo would have been between the years of 1688 and 1715. As I mentioned before, there were live dodo ships all over the world. Unfortunately, in the 17th century, museums weren't really great at preserving specimens. The concept of species extinction really

wasn't even a thing until the late 18th century. The preserved remains of dodos that were kept in European museums were mostly lost over time. Today, there are only a few examples left from the dodo sent to Europe. There are a dried head and foot in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, a skull in the University of Copenhagen's Zoological Museum, and an upper jaw in the National Museum of Prague. That's it. Oxford supposedly had a full-mounted dodo, but they burned at around 1755 because it was in such a state of decay. The aforementioned head and foot are all that remain. In 1863, a trove of dodo bones was found in a swamp in southern Mauritius. From these bones, they were able to cobble together a skeleton of a dodo with bones

from multiple birds. In 1904, a complete skeleton of a single dodo was found in a cave, which is the only complete dodo skeleton in existence. In 1848, Hugh Edwin Strickland and Alexander Gordon Meville published a monograph titled The Dodo and Its Kindred, which revived interest in the dodo, and brought it back into the popular consciousness. This accumulated in the mention of the bird in Lewis Carol's book, Alice's Adventure in Wonderland. Despite the extinction of the bird, there has been talk of reviving the species. Researchers are currently working on completing a genomic sequence of the dodo, using the last remaining DNA fragments of the bird, as well as using the genome of its closest living relative, the Nicobar Pigeon. While reviving extinct species isn't yet in the realm of

possibility, with a full genome, it might be possible at some point in the near future. Today, the dodo is on the coat of arms for the nation of Mauritius, as well as appearing on their currency. Despite being long extinct, it is still one of the iconic symbols of the island. The plate of the dodo was probably best summed up by the poet Hilarbelic, who wrote in his 1896 book, The Bad Child's Book of Bees, quote, The dodo used to walk around and take the sun in air. The sun yet warms his native ground. The dodo is not there.

The voice which used to squawk and speak is now forever dumb, yet you may see his bones and beak, all in the museum. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com. There is content only available to supporters, merchandise, and even opportunities for a show producer credit. If you know someone you think would enjoy the show, please share it with them. Also remember, if you leave a five-star review, I'll read your review on the show.

Hmm, that's odd. I thought that would be big news. You thought what would be big news? Well, there seems to be an absence of a certain ornithological piece. A headline regarding mass awareness of a certain avian variety. What are you talking about? Oh, have you not heard? It was my understanding that everyone had heard.

Heard what? Brian Don't!