9 February: The Dodo

On this date in 1507, Pereira discovered Santa Appolionia Island, later named Reunion. Here, he thought he saw a Dodo bird. In fact, he'd probably confused it with a different bird as the dodo was only native to Mauritius. However, it's a good enough time as any to present some facts about the dodo. It became extinct over 300 years ago, and was possibly the first animal to die out as a result of human activity. Here are 10 things you might not know about these birds.

1. The word dodo either derives from the old Portuguese word dondo, meaning idiot or fool, or the Dutch word dodaars, meaning a fat behind, in reference to its tail feathers. At one time there were over 70 names for the bird including Didus ineptus, meaning inept dodo, the scientific name given to it by Carl Linneaus, although the scientific name that was officially adopted in 1760 was Raphus cucullatus, meaning "hooded bustard."
2. What did they look like? One of the first recorded mentions of the dodo was in the journal of Vice Admiral Wybran van Warwijck who described them as being larger than a Swan with three or four Black feathers where their wings should be, and ash coloured tail feathers.
3. While the Dutch settlers on Mauritius did eat them, the dodo wasn't the first choice of meal for many. Van Warwijck recorded that the meat was tough unless it was cooked for a long time and then it was fairly tasteless, except for the belly meat. The Dutch called it walghvodel, meaning "tasteless bird" because its meat was so tough and lost its flavour after lengthy cooking.
4. As many as 17 dodos might have been shipped to Europe. Not many of them survived the journey but one of the ones which did ended up in London where it was put on show as a public attraction and was seen by a writer named Hamon L'Estrange, who was told by its keeper that it ate stones to aid its digestion. Our images of them largely come from such specimens, which would have been well fed, which leads scientists to believe that in the wild, they wouldn't have been as fat and awkward as we tend to think. They probably wouldn't have had large necks or breasts, because they didn't fly and wouldn't need well-muscled breasts.
5. Dodos are thought to have been loyal to their mates and to lay one egg at a time in nests on the ground. As well as the eggs being an easy meal for the predators introduced by the settlers, such as Rats, this meant the rate of reproduction was too slow to keep the species alive.
6. The Natural History Museum at Oxford University had the only complete specimen of a dodo skeleton back in the 1700s - but they burned it because it had decayed. They didn't know it was the only one in the world. They kept the head and a foot, however.
7. What they had was sufficient to extract some DNA, so that in the 21st century scientists were able to use it to ascertain that the dodo was a distant relative of the Pigeon. The closest relative of the dodo alive today is the Nicobar pigeon.
8. Although it couldn't fly, studies of its leg bones suggest the dodo could run quite fast, and it's also thought to have used its large beak to defend itself or fight off other dodos encroaching on their territory.
9. We can't know for sure what they used to eat, but the best guess of today's scientists is that they ate fallen fruit, nuts, seeds, bulbs and roots, and possibly shellfish. Since some of them did survive long sea voyages, they probably weren't too fussy about what they ate.
10. The dodo lives on, however, in language and literature. We describe things as being "as dead as a dodo" and has appeared in several works of fiction. Before it went extinct it was often used as a symbol for exotic lands, and of gluttony, because they appeared to be fat. Possibly the most famous dodo appeared in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It's thought that not only did Carroll visit the Oxford museum with the girl who inspired Alice to see the dodo remains which were once there, but he might have identified with it, since his real name was Dodgson and he had a stutter, so might have referred to himself as "Do-do-dodgson".

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