Dodos and their living relatives
Victoria Crowned Pigeon at London Zoo
Credit: Caleb Murray
The dodo is often thought of as the quintessential extinct animal: a large bird driven to its doom by its own stupidity. But, like many things, it’s not as simple as that.
The dodo belonged to an order of birds called Columbiformes, a group that includes pigeons and doves. This group includes the well-known rock dove or rock pigeon found in cities throughout the world, often seen perched on a power line or stealing food scraps in the park. Dodos lived on the island of Mauritius, a place with no natural predators and abundant food, which enabled the dodos to grow quite large, to a weight of around 50 pounds.
Because of their lack of natural predators, they had no fear of being eaten by other creatures, and this, combined with their large size, made them an easy source of abundant food for Portuguese colonists colonizing the island in the early 1500s. The stereotype of dodos as being lacking in intelligence is inaccurate; they had no natural reason to fear predation, and so they did not fear the colonists who sought to eat them. Additionally, the animals introduced by the colonists, such as rats and pigs, ate dodo eggs and competed with the dodos for food. The dodos, lacking defensive abilities due to their lack of natural predators, could not do much about this. They went extinct by 1681, and their lesser-known and less-documented closest relatives the Réunion solitaire and Rodrigues solitaire went extinct by 1790 for similar reasons.
There is some uncertainty about what exactly dodos looked like, so it’s probable that the art made by colonists overexagerrated certain features, such as the dodos’ plumpness, and thus that the stereotypical image of a dodo as an extremely plump creature is inaccurate. Though, like most pigeons, they certainly were at least somewhat plump. Even the updated images scientists have made of what dodos probably looked like still look somewhat goofy, but I think that the dodos’ sheer size would have made them a majestic sight to behold.
However, despite the extinction of the dodos and the solitaires, there are still birds alive today which can capture some of the majesty of the dodo. When I was at the London Zoo last summer, we stopped by a place called the Blackburn Pavilion, an indoor walking area filled with birds. While we were there, we saw several Victoria crowned pigeons, large birds which, along with the Nicobar pigeon, are some of the closest living relatives of the dodo.
Victoria Crowned Pigeon at London Zoo
Credit: Caleb Murray
Blue and purple are not colors often found in nature, but this beautiful bird doesn’t really seem to care about that. They also made a sort of low whooping sound, barely identifiable as having come from a bird. There were several of these at the Blackburn Pavilion and they were one of my favorite parts of the entire experience at the zoo. To see these two-foot-long birds wandering around a room designed to have an environment not too dissimilar to their natural habitat in the rainforests of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea was amazing. I imagine the way I felt in those moments was similar to how the colonists felt first seeing the dodos wandering around the rainforests of Mauritius all those years ago.
The dodos may be gone, unfairly slaughtered, but you can still see some of their beauty in some of their living relatives.
Sources:
“Victoria Crowned Pigeon.” Animalia.bio, animalia.bio/victoria-crowned-pigeon.
“What Did Dodo Birds Really Look like?” Getaway Magazine, 21 Aug. 2020, www.getaway.co.za/travel/nature-and-conservation/what-did-dodo-birds-really-look-like/.
“Dodo.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/animal/dodo-extinct-bird.
