THERE’S SOMETHING OF A PERVERSE PRIDE IN THE dodo on Mauritius. As you arrive, the stamp on your passport bears its distinct outline. The island’s gift shops are stacked with cuddly dodo toys to take home as souvenirs.
Thanks to the dodo, there’s probably no other country on earth so strongly associated with extinction as Mauritius. This tropical island paradise, formed around 10 million years ago by 23 volcanoes along a fault line between India and Madagascar, was uninhabited by humans until the 16th century. And then, in 1598, the Dutch claimed it.
This sealed the dodo’s fate. A large, flightless bird endemic to the island, the dodo was superbly adapted to an environment where food was plentiful and predators absent. But sailors and the invasive species they introduced hunted it, raided its nests and destroyed its habitat. By 1662, it was no more.
It wasn’t just the dodo that suffered as a result of human colonisation though. Following the settlement by the Dutch, then the French and, in 1810, the British, much of the island’s diversity was gone. Vast forests of ebony trees were destroyed, replaced by sugar cane, which would eventually all but
