Islands like Mauritius were home to far more than flowers until sailors arrived in the 1600s. (0838976)

BEING famous for becoming extinct is the worst possible epitaph, but the dodo is just that.

It is an A-lister among birds, subject of the avian equivalent of Hello! magazine, frequenter of the ornithological red carpet.

‘As dead as a dodo’ has to be the saddest saying relating to any creature, particularly in light of its native home, Mauritius, which was close to paradise on earth.

The story of its demise is a reflection of the worst human attitudes towards wildlife, many of which still exist today.

One account of the slaughter of dodos and other wildlife on the island berates the East India Company official who killed 40,000 tortoises to feed their livers to swine.

And it was the introduction of pigs to their Indian Ocean island home that finally saw the end of the dodo – no young were produced over a 30-year period as each clutch laid was devoured by swine until the last bird died.

The story began when Dutch sailors came across Mauritius in 1598 as part of the European colonisation of the world.

The island had water, food in the form of fruit, fish, uncountable giant tortoises, plentiful birds and a dugong or sea cow.

English, Portuguese and Dutch colonists used Indian Ocean islands such as Mauritius, Réunion and Madagascar as staging posts on their long journeys to and from India on the extremely lucrative spice trade.

Mauritius was dropped by the Dutch once their East India Company (the VOC) opened up a trading post at the Cape of Good Hope.

They used the island as a source of ebony and ambergris.

The English went east via St Helena, in the South Atlantic, and the Mozambique Channel calling at Mohéli and Anjouan in the Comoros Islands.

They used Mauritius, along with the French, on the return journey from the mid-17th century.

Livestock was commonly released on such islands in the hope that the cows, goats and pigs would multiply and provide food for subsequent landings.

Sadly, this was all too often the case and resulted in the mass extinction of plants, birds and animals in many places.

St Helena, for example, lost all its native vegetation under the assault of goats and became a denuded and barren volcanic mass.

Happily, a wonderful man called George Benjamin discovered a tiny but inaccessible valley high in the mountainous region of the island that had been left intact and the plants are now being propagated to re-clothe the island.

The first Dutch mariners to land in Mauritius found a recent shipwreck and it is thought that this had introduced rats onto the island.

Normally, these would have been enough to kill off the ground-nesting dodos, red-hens (a flightless rail), snakes and lizards.

Mauritius has land-crabs which also attack flightless creatures, however, and it is thought that having evolved to deal with those, dodos could cope with rats.

Crab-eating macaques were introduced along with pigs and it was these that did it for the dodo, although the men who landed hardly helped.

Dodos were good runners and on a hunt some effort was required to catch the first one. Making that scream resulted in others around coming to investigate, only to get bashed on the head.

The same technique had been used to catch big, meaty pink pigeons.

THE dodo has been adopted as the symbol of Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, set up in Jersey by Gerald Durrell. Other species in Mauritius have been saved as a result of its intervention. (Picture courtesy of James Morgan / Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, 0839233)

Dodos were seasonally fat and it is thought that unlike any other bird, they put on a great deal of weight when food was abundant for eight months a year and then starved for the other four.

It is this ability to fast that accounted for several being brought alive to Britain and Holland, where they subsequently died.

Parts of at least three birds are known from European museums, the most famous of which is a head and foot in Oxford University’s zoology museum.

In Mauritius they were frequently eaten, although sailors preferred the meat of dugong, which when boiled tasted like beef.

It is generally thought that the excesses taken by visiting mariners on tortoises, dugongs, dodos and other birds were simply because they knew no better.

This is not the case, however.

Antoine Boucher writing to his employers Compagnie Orientale des Indes (the COI) in 1710 complained that they had allowed ‘the greatest misfortune’ to fall on Mauritius.

‘You have cut the root and entirely destroyed this celestial manna that the Lord so liberally spread over all the island…

‘Some among you that I know very well have killed up to 40,000 land tortoises to fatten up just one of your pigs, making use solely of the livers of these tortoises, not thinking that the flesh of these animals was delicate enough as food for pigs, whereas among humans it passes for an exquisite dish.

‘This one item, sirs, cries to heaven for vengeance, and should make you subject to a just punishment from God.’

He went on to ask what had become of the ‘quantity prodigious and innumerable’ of  game which ‘darkened the sky’. They had not been eaten – it would have been impossible to eat all the game – but massacred by the thousand.

It was all too late for the dodo, however. The last record of a live bird was in 1662 when shipwrecked Dutch sailors led by Volkert Evertz (or Iversen) may have wiped out the last remaining group on Ile d’Ambre off the north-west coast of Mauritius.

The pink pigeon and Mauritius kestrel might have gone the same way – attempts to save them were all but given up by international conservation bodies in 1974 when Gerald Durrell took up the challenge.

Side-stepping bureaucracy, he set up captive breeding programmes in Mauritius and in Jersey, at the same time working to restore the habitat needed by these birds.

Although the conservation movement he founded uses the dodo as a logo, his everlasting memorial will be the wild pigeons and kestrels now seen easily in Mauritius.