Dodo - Extinct Birds

Dodo

Raphus cucullatus

Engraving from
Jacob Cornelius-zoon
van Neck's Het
Tweede Boeck
(Amsterdam, 1601).
About 1638, as I walked London streets, I saw the picture of a strange fowle hung out upon a clothe and myselfe with one or two more then in company went in to see it. It was kept in a chamber, and was a great fowle somewhat bigger than the largest Turky Cock, and so legged and footed, but stouter and thicker and of a more erect shape, coloured before like the breast of a young cock fesan, and on the back of dunn or dearc colour. The keeper called it a Dodo, and in the ende of a chymney in the chamber there lay a heape of large pebble stones, whereof hee gave it many in our sight, some as big as nutmegs and the keeper told us that she eats them (conducing to digestion), and though I remember not how far the keeper was questioned therein, yet I am confident that afterwards shee cast them all again.

John Tenniel's illustration for
Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland
(London, 1865).

With these words the English theologian and historian Sir Hamon L'Estrange introduced readers of his memoirs to the Dodo of Mauritius, the bird with a name whose oringinal meaning is obscure but a name which has now become virtually a synonym for extinction. As far as extinct creatures are concerned, only dinosuars can match dodos for celebrity; and not only does the peculiar name stick in the mind, the bird's extraordinary appearance - made vividly familiar even to children through Sir John Tenniel's remarkable illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland - leaves an indelible impression.

The Dodo head preserved in the Ashmolean Musuem, Oxford.
Lithograph from H.E. Strickland and A.G. Melville'sThe Dodo and its Kindred(London, 1848).
The particular individual that Sir Hamon saw - some 350 years ago - seems to have had an interesting subsequent history. Several quite fanciful ideas have been put forward concerning it (Hachisuka, 1953) but in all probability the bird was finally stuffed and took a place in the illustrious musem established by John Tradescant, naturalist and gardener to Charles II, in Lambeth, London. The stuffed creature and the rest of Tradescant's collection passed in 1659 from this museum to that of Elias Ashmole at Oxford. One of Ashmole's statutes - number eight - reads: 'That as any particular grows old and perishing the keeper may remove it into one of the closets or other repository; and some other to be substituted.'

In 1755 the Dodo was examined, found wanting in certain aspects and - presumably under statute eight - was ordered out for destruction.........

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That is an excerpt from the book 'Extinct Birds' by Errol Fuller.

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