The Dodo Blog

Funny sign placed in some place in Nimes, France. It’s a pity that the sign “No Dodos” is redundant no matter were it was. Sigh. Uploaded by Mr Hyde.

BBC h2g2 article – The Dodo – an Extinct Bird:

In the age of exploration man discovered wonderful creatures on every beach on which he landed. One of the creatures they found was the Dodo. We never found out what the bird was good for, as in our attempts to exploit them we managed to kill them all. This is a sad story; let’s not let it happen again.

The Dodo

The bird was known by the common name ‘Dodo’, plural either ‘Dodos’ or ‘Dodoes’, alternative name ‘Dronte’. Perhaps the name is derived from:

* Dod-aarsen: stupid ass
* Dodors: from dot-ors, meaning tuft of feathers-tail
* Dodars: silly birds
* Dodoor: sluggard

Also used were:

* Walgvogel or Walghvogel: nauseating bird (these are all Dutch- and German-based names)
* Doudo or Doudou: foolish and simple, simpleton (as the Portuguese and Spanish visitors called them) [...]

How to Prepare a Dodo for Dinner

Trying to find the perfect recipe we killed the last bird.

1. Pluck the feathers.
2. Put it in a water-filled pan and let it boil for a day – or two for older birds.
3. Then use a sharp knife to get some of the meat from the bones.
4. Serve with some fruits (mango) to make it taste like something. Keep a few toothpicks to clean your teeth after every bite.
5. Instead of only eating the flesh, you can also make a nice soup with the boiling water.
6. Give the remainder (probably most of the animal) to the dogs.

What else to serve these hungry, hardworking sailors?

If not eaten, dodos were just happy running or staggering around their island4. With their specialised long, crooked, and hooked beak, they ate fruits, seeds or nuts. Dodos seemed to eat stones and rocks as well, and perhaps some fruits de mer5. They did not have any natural enemies. The nests in which they laid their eggs were just clearings on the ground that were covered with grass. The female dodo laid a single, big egg hidden deep in the forest. She would use her large beak to defend herself and her chick.

Dodo dinner? Well, the records show dodos didn’t taste like chicken, so the dodo dinner looks more a joke that a real recipe (the description too). Anyway, there are more about dodos in the article.

What is a dodo according to Classic Encyclopedia, based on the 11th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (pub. 1911):

DODO (from the Portuguese Doudo, a simpleton), a large bird formerly inhabiting the island of Mauritius, but now extinct – the Didus ineptus of Linnaeus. When, in 1507, the Portuguese discovered the island which we now know as Mauritius they named it Ilha do from a notion that it must be the island of that name mentioned by Pliny; but most authors have insisted that it was known to the seamen of that nation as Ilha do Cisne- perhaps but a corruption of Cerne, and brought about by their finding it stocked with large fowls, which, though not aquatic, they likened to swans, the most familiar to them of bulky birds. In 1598 the Dutch, under Van Neck, took possession of the island and renamed it Mauritius. A narrative of this voyage was published in 1601, if not earlier, and has been often reprinted. Here we have birds spoken of as big as swans or bigger, with large heads, no wings, and a tail consisting of a few curly feathers. The Dutch called them Walgvogels (the word is variously spelled), i.e. nauseous birds, either because no cooking made them palatable, or because this island-paradise afforded an abundance of fare so much superior. De Bry gives two admirably quaint prints of the doings of the Hollanders, and in one of them the Walgvogel appears, being the earliest published representation of its unwieldy form, with a footnote stating that the voyagers brought an example alive to Holland. Among the company there was a draughtsman, and from a sketch of his, Clusius, a few years after, gave a figure of the bird, which he vaguely called “Gallinaceus Gallus peregrines,” but described rather fully. Meanwhile two other Dutch fleets had visited Mauritius. One of them had rather an accomplished artist on board, and his drawings fortunately still exist (see article Bird). Of the other a journal kept by one of the skippers was subsequently published.

This in the main corroborates what has been before said of the birds, but adds the curious fact that they were now called by some Dodaarsen and by others Dronten. 1 Henceforth Dutch narrators, though several times mentioning the bird, fail to supply any important fact in its history. Their navigators, however, were not idle, and found work for their naturalists and painters. Clusius says that in 1605 he saw at Pauw’s House in Leyden a dodo’s foot, 2 which he minutely describes. In a copy of Clusius’s work in the high school of Utrecht is pasted an original drawing by Van de Venne superscribed “Vera effigies huius avis Walghvogel (quae & a nautis Dodaers propter foedam posterioris partis crassitiem nuncupatur), qualis viva Amsterodamum perlata est ex insula Mauritii. Anno M.DC.XXVI.” Now a good many paintings of the dodo drawn from life by Roelandt Savery

(1576-1639) exist; and the paintings by him at Berlin and Vienna – dated 1626 and 1628 – as 1 The etymology of these names has been much discussed. That of the latter, which has generally been adopted by German and French authorities, seems to defy investigation, but the former has been shown by Prof. Schlegel (Versl. en Mededeel. K. Akad. Wetensch. ii. pp. 255 et seq.) to be the homely name of the dabchick or little grebe (Podiceps minor), of which the Dutchmen were reminded by the round stern and tail diminished to a tuft that characterized the dodo. The same learned authority suggests that dodo is a corruption of Dodaars, but, as will presently be seen, we herein think him mistaken.

And that is just the first part of the article. The image used to illustrated is the Solitaire of Rodriguez (Pezophaps solitarius), from Leguat’s figure, and that’s the reason:

The dodo is said to have inhabited forests and to have laid one large white egg on a mass of grass. Besides man, hogs and other imported animals seem to have exterminated it. But the dodo is not the only member of its family that has vanished. The little island which has successively borne the name of Mascaregnas, England’s Forest, Bourbon and Reunion, and lies to the southward of Mauritius, had also an allied bird, now dead and gone. Of this not a relic has been – handled by any naturalist. The latest description of it, by Du Bois in 1674, is very meagre, while Bontekoe (1646) gave a figure, apparently intended to represent it. It was originally called the “solitaire,” but this name was also applied to Pezophaps solitarius of Rodriguez by the Huguenot exile Leguat, who described and figured it about 1691.

The solitaire, Didus solitarius of Gmelin, referred by Strickland to a district genus Pezophaps, is supposed to have lingered in the 3 E. Newton and H. Gadow, Trans. Zool. Soc. xiii. (1893) island of Rodriguez until about 1761. Leguat l has given a delightful description of its quaint habits. The male stood about 2 ft. 9 in. high; its colour was brownish grey, that of its mate more inclined to brown, with a whitish breast. The wings were rudimentary, the tail very small, almost hidden, and the thigh feathers were thick and curled “like shells.” A round mass of bone, “as big as a musket ball,” was developed on the wings of the males, and they used it as a weapon of offence while they whirled themselves about twenty or thirty times in four or five minutes, making a noise with their pinions like a rattle. The mien was fierce and the walk stately, the birds living singly or in pairs. The nest was a heap of palm leaves a foot high, and contained a single large egg which was incubated by both parents. The food consisted of seeds and leaves, and the birds aided digestion by swallowing large stones; these were used by the FIG. 3. – Skeleton of a male Solitaire, Pezophaps solitarius, Museum of Zoology, Cambridge.

Cute Dodo bird ornament statues found on eBay:

Democratic Party Dodo Seal – New Democratic Party Seal. I think that’s funnier for Americans.

This page has pretty nice collection of scanned images of bank notes of Mauritius, aka, dodo money. And where are the dodos on those notes? They are in the Coat of arms of Mauritius, that appear in some notes, and, they also appear a watermark in the new notes (or I’m hallucinating with all those dodos). Here are nine samples bank notes images:

The excellent site Pib’s Virtual Stamp Collections has a very nice collections of Dodo Stamps. Here are some of the dodo stamps of his collection:

The first ever dodo bones, a fascinating story: A team of Mauritian and European experts are about to dig up Mare aux Songes. George Clark was the first to discover dodo bones on the same site some 140 years ago by Alan Grihault.

During his spare time Clark had made numerous attempts at finding remains of the Dodo. Around 1860, Dr. Philip Ayres requested Clark to join him in a search for bones at the Fort Hendrick site, but they found nothing. Clark was puzzled by the fact that the Natural History Society had been unlucky in their constant search for bones. He believed that the best places look in were the alluvial deposits found in the mouth of rivers.

Since he was teaching in Mahébourg, he concentrated his efforts in the south-eastern part of the island. On his map, he noticed three rivers running into the sea, forming a marshy delta in an area close to where the airport is now located. He assumed that if any bones had been washed away by these rivers, they would be deposited in the mud of the delta.

During the 1860s, the first railway lines were being constructed in Mauritius, and George Clark extended his search area along railway excavations between Curepipe and Mahébourg. [..]

It must have been an exciting moment when he recorded the following in his Journal:

“Shortly before the completion of the railway [19th October 1865] I was walking along the embankment one morning when I noticed some Coolies removing peat soil from a small morass (…) I stopped and examined them as they appeared to belong to birds and we had always been on the lookout for bones of the(…) Dodo. So I filled my pocket with the most promising ones for further examination.

A Mr Clarke, the Government schoolmaster of Mahébourg, had Professor Owen’s book on the Dodo so I took the bones to him for comparison (…) The result showed that many of the bones undoubtedly belonged to the Dodo.”

Update: unfortunately the article from Lexpress is gone.

More proves that I’m not having hallucinations about the popularity of dodos: Dodos in popular culture – The Dodo’s significance as one of the best-known extinct animals and its singular appearance has led to its widespread use in literature and popular culture. The article has some examples of dodos in literature, comics, movies, television, music and games. I’m going try to find all those stuff later. Below, two covers of Dodos are forever by Dick King Smith

Update: unfortunatly the article “Dodos in popular culture” was removed from Wikipedia. I should had made a copy of it.

Hello and welcome to the dodo blog! This is a blog about dodos in the news, science, culture, art, history, biology, books, media and their influence in the modern culture. Why dodos? Among the extinct animals, the dodos are the most popular, they are icons, they are symbols, they are very famous, they are almost super-stars! But they are much better than super-stars: dodos don’t get drunk and fight with reports, dodos don’t use weird clothes that are going to be next tendency in fashion, dodos don’t make scandals and appear in the first page of a tabloid, dodos don’t expend their money with drugs or illegal substances, dodos don’t make stupid comments. Well, actually they don’t do anything more, because… they are dead. Extinct!

Poor little stupid and dead birds. I think that they deserve more love and that is one of the reasons of this blog. I created it to keep their memory alive, to keep alive the awful and massive power of the human being of destroy the nature, to share the dodo history, to show how popular they are nowadays, to show what people are saying about them and where you can find them. This is a homage blog to dodos.

However, if you never heard about them and have no idea about the Mauritius Islands, don’t worry, this is your lucky day. Wikipedia has a great Dodo article: the history, etymology, the sad end, other interesting information and pictures – of reconstructed Mauritius Dodos at museums. And what the hack the word dodo means? Nobody is sure about it:

The origin of the word “Dodo” is one of controversy. It is related to the Dutch word “dodaars” (referring to the feathers on its buttocks) the name of the little Grebe or Dabchick in the Dutch language. Probably not entirely because they shared a similar physical appearance (apart from the feathers on the buttocks), but because the dodo, like the little Grebe, couldn’t walk very well, making it an easy prey for Dutch sailors. Others believe it’s related to the archaic Portuguese word “doudo” meaning fool or simpleton. Yet another possibility, as author David Quammen has noted in his book “Song of the Dodo”, “that ‘dodo’ was an onomatopoeic approximation of the bird’s own call, a two-note pigeony sound like ‘doo-doo’.”

But how are we going to know now, since they killed all of them in less than one century? I’m still pissed angry about this, since the day I discovered that my changes to see a real dodo were zero. Anyway, back to the dodos, the dodo is the “star” of the article about extinct birds at Wikipedia and the Coat of arms of Mauritius has a dodo! (I’m not sure if those are good things, very sad or good but sad.) And, if you don’t know yet, Mauritius was the place that dodos lived before the Dutch discover how good they could it be as food.

Be prepare for a lot of images of dodos, a plenty of links and all the other information that I can find. All the links, suggestions and comments are welcome: feel free to do it and post any commens. My name is Bibi and I’m a dodo.