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At some time during the Pleistocene age, a badly lost flock of pigeons landed on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. The pigeons prospered in this new environment where they lived undisturbed for so long that they lost their need and ability to fly. Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, they evolved into three-foot-tall, 50-pound birds much the size of a large turkey.
Mauritius was the only place in the world that had dodo birds. Since they had no need to flee from dangers or predators, and no need to fly, their body changed so they were no longer physically capable of flight. Without the capacity to fly, the Dodo could not extend its population to neighboring islands and was confined only to Mauritius.
In 1505 the Portuguese became the first people to set foot on Mauritius. The island quickly became a stop-over for ships engaged in the spice trade. Weighing in at 50 pounds, the Dodo bird was a welcome source of fresh meat for the sailors so large numbers of dodo birds were killed for food. (Some sources say the meat was delicious, other sources say it was tough and tasteless and not nearly as appetizing as other native birds on the island and yet other sources describe the Dodo meat as being nauseating and barely edible.)
The first settlers were the Dutch who used the island as a penal colony. Pigs and monkeys were brought to the island along with the convicts. Many of the ships that came to Mauritius also had rats aboard, some of which escaped onto the island and multiplied. Now there were humans and an assortment of creatures killing the Dodo bird for a food source. The Dodo birds had no experience of any types of predators before the arrival of settlers in the island. They were passive creatures even when approached by human visitors for the first time. So it was with lack of fear that those birds greeted the first settlers in 1598.
Deer, pigs, goats, chickens, dogs and cats were all introduced to the island, each making the once “peaceful and easy” life of the Dodo a real struggle. Slowly, the sanctuary that had sheltered the Dodo for millions of years was being destroyed, and the Dodo was getting rarer.
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