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Showing posts with the label Figaro's Aria

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE GREAT AUK?

I was reminiscing recently about the great time I had on Mauritius a decade and a half ago, and whether I would want to include this island on my around the world trip.  This is where the Dodo became extinct.  Like how wrong we were in remembering the origin of Thanksgiving , my memory of how this bird got extinct apparently is faulty.  I recall something like sailors hunted them down because they were so easy to catch, with good meat and useful feathers.  More recent research indicates that the plump bird you see in drawings were those of well-fed pets.  The wild dodo was leaner with a terrible tasting flesh, and difficult to find because they lived  in impenetrable rainforests.  What happened was that humans brought rats and domesticated animals.  They killed this specie off. Anyone remember where you last saw this bird?  Turns out that the Dodo and and its remains disappeared several times.  First they became extinct in 1662.  Till today, even though at one time there were millions