Why Did the Dodo Go Extinct? What Really Happened

A bird with no defenses

The dodo evolved on Mauritius, a remote volcanic island in the Indian Ocean, over several million years without any ground predators. There were no native cats, dogs, pigs, monkeys or rats, and no people. In that safe world the dodo’s pigeon ancestors grew large, lost the ability to fly and probably laid only a single egg at a time on the ground.

These traits made perfect sense on a predator-free island but left the dodo badly exposed when new animals arrived. A ground nest with a single egg is easy prey, and a large bird that breeds slowly cannot quickly replace its losses. Dodos also had no instinctive fear of large animals, so they did not run or hide from people.

When did people reach Mauritius?

Arab sailors probably knew of Mauritius in the Middle Ages, and Portuguese ships visited in the early 16th century, but neither settled the island and no records of dodos from them are known. In 1598 a Dutch fleet anchored there, named the island after Prince Maurice of Nassau, and left the first written descriptions of the dodo.

For the next decades Mauritius was a regular stop for ships of the Dutch East India Company, which took on water, firewood, ebony timber and fresh meat. The Dutch set up a small settlement in 1638, abandoned it in 1658, returned in 1664 and finally left in 1710. Even at its peak, the settlement had only a few dozen people.

Hunting: part of the story, not all of it

Sailors’ journals describe catching dodos easily and eating them, sometimes in large numbers. One ship’s crew in 1602 is recorded taking 24 or 25 birds, salting the meat for the voyage. But many sailors disliked the taste, calling it tough and greasy, and preferred the island’s pigeons and parrots.

Archaeologists have found little direct evidence of large-scale hunting. With fewer than about 50 people on Mauritius at any time in the 17th century, hunting alone would have struggled to wipe out a bird spread across an island of 1,860 square km (720 square miles). Most researchers now see hunting as one pressure among several.

Introduced animals: the main culprit

Ships brought animals that stayed. Pigs were let loose to provide food for future visitors, and they bred quickly in the forests, rooting up the ground and eating eggs, chicks and fallen fruit. Crab-eating macaques, introduced from Southeast Asia, raided nests in the trees and on the ground. Rats, cats and dogs arrived as well.

Most experts now think pigs and macaques did the greatest harm, by destroying nests and competing for the fruit the dodo depended on. Rats may have mattered less, because dodos had already lived alongside native land crabs that would have tested any unguarded nest. Some researchers argue that wild pigs may have finished off the last dodos while the island was temporarily abandoned between 1658 and 1664.

Introduced animals are still a serious problem on Mauritius today. Macaques, rats and feral pigs threaten surviving native birds, and conservation workers use predator control and forest restoration to protect them.

Forest clearing and a dodo already in trouble

Settlers cut down Mauritius’s lowland forests for ebony timber and farmland, removing the fruit trees that dodos fed on. Early accounts suggest dodos were most common in the drier coastal forests of the south and west, so the loss of these areas hit them hard.

The dodo may also have been less widespread than once thought. Excavations at the Mare aux Songes marsh show that large numbers of animals, including many dodos and giant tortoises, died there during a severe drought about 4,200 years ago. A bird that had already survived droughts, cyclones and volcanic eruptions was resilient, but a small or patchy population would have been especially vulnerable to the sudden arrival of people and their animals.

When was the last dodo seen?

The last widely accepted sighting was in 1662. Volkert Evertsz, a sailor shipwrecked on Mauritius, described catching dodos on a small islet offshore, probably Amber Island. When one bird cried out, the others came running to help it and were caught as well.

Reports continued into the 1680s, but by then the name “dodo” seems to have passed to the red rail, another flightless Mauritian bird that settlers also ate. In 2003, biologists David Roberts and Andrew Solow used a statistical method on sighting records and estimated an extinction date of around 1690, while noting uncertainty. The IUCN Red List accepts 1662 as the last reliable record. Either way, the dodo was almost certainly gone by 1700, roughly a century after its discovery.

Why the dodo still matters

The dodo’s disappearance was barely noticed at the time, and by the 19th century some scientists doubted it had ever existed. Its rediscovery through bones from Mauritius made it a powerful lesson: people could wipe out a species, quickly and almost by accident.

Many other island species have shared the same fate, from the moas of New Zealand to many Hawaiian honeycreepers, often through the same mix of introduced predators and habitat loss. You can see later losses in our list of recently extinct animals, and read about attempts to reverse the dodo’s fate in Could the dodo be brought back?