“The Last Dodo” may very well have been a single lonely chick or egg somewhere in the jungle, that a scurrying rat came upon and decided to feast unaware that he or she, after a million years’ journey, was the last, the very last of them all. The gentle trusting dodos paid the ultimate price.

But there was no way to hide the nests and chicks from the pigs and the rats. It’s small consolation, but it is known that many of their hunters were bloodied by the dodo’s enormous hooked beak, in perhaps what was their last act of defiance. Many even became more cautious of human hunters, and adapted their behavior. If it weren’t for these marauding animals, the dodo may have been able to survive the onslaught of just the sailors and settlers hunting them on the 800 square miles of Mauritius. Even those that had nested in remote places, soon had their young chicks or eggs consumed by the invaders. The dodo as a species didn’t have a chance at that point, and they were doomed. None of the nests were safe from foraging wild pigs and a multitude of newly introduced rats. It didn’t take long for the production of new baby dodo chicks to take a very steep decline. The dodo bird disappeared so quickly off the face of Earth 300 years ago that it has become the poster bird for extinction: Perhaps you've heard the popular expression 'as dead as a dodo. When sailors arrived in the sixteenth century they found that the dodo was very easy to. The mother dodo would only lay one egg per season. Reasons for extinction: The dodo only lived on one island - Mauritius. They actually sealed the fate of the dodo by eating all the dodo eggs they could find that were all on the ground in the simple unprotected dodo nests. Cats were brought as working “pets.” So pigs and rats flourished in the wild, as they also had no natural enemies there. Sailors always had a way of letting pigs or goats escape on various islands they visited. There were never any rats on the island until they came with the ships and came ashore. Yes, many were collected by the Dutch sailors and settlers, but there was something else that had a larger impact on their eventual extinction, invasive animals that the sailors brought with them on their ships namely, rats, cats and pigs that went feral.

One can only imagine what they were thinking when the tall two-legged visitors began massacring them. Fearless curiosity, rather than stupidity, is a more fitting description of their behavior. They were just trusting of humans because they’d never seen any other animal that was able to hurt them in any way.

This in itself is a very sad story, since there was nothing “stupid” about the dodo (as they are infamously but wrongly known). Yes, the sailors hunted down many of the trusting birds simply by walking up to them and picking them up or using a machete on them.

Dodo bird extinction