2017-03-25 08:05:36
Four centuries ago, the first sailors to visit Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean described a bird with white plumage and black wingtips and tail. Between 1613 and 1708 only a dozen testimonies were collected about this bird, which was supposed to be related to the Maurician dodo and the Rodrigues solitaire.
The first mention of the Réunion solitaire comes from the logbook of the English ship Pearl, dated March 27, 1613:
“…a kind of bird with the corpulence of a turkey, very fat, and with wings so short that it cannot fly; it is white, and it is not wild, like all the birds on this island, since none of them have hitherto been bothered or frightened by shots. Our men beat them down with sticks and stones. Ten men killed enough to feed forty people a day.”
In 1619, the Dutch captain Willem Ysbrandtszoon Bontekoe observes a similar bird, which he mistakes for a dodo:
“There were also dodos, which had small wings, and far from being able to fly, they were so fat that they could hardly walk, and when they tried to run, they dragged their rumps along the ground.”
Bontekoe is the only one who calls the Reunion bird a dodo. But Bontekoe was shipwrecked and lost all his belongings soon after visiting Réunion, so his diary, which was not published until 1646, must have been written after his return to Holland seven years later; perhaps the memories of him were distorted by stories and illustrations of the dodo that he could find in Europe.
It was the French priest Barthélemy Carré, in 1667, who first picked up the solitary name of Réunion:
“I have seen in that place a species of bird that I have not seen anywhere else. It is what the inhabitants call solitary because indeed it loves solitude and only likes the most remote places. Two or more have never been seen together; he is always alone. It would look rather like a turkey if it didn’t have taller legs. The beauty of its plumage is a pleasure to see. It is of a changing color pulling yellow. Its meat is exquisite; It is the best dish in that country, and it could delight our tables. We wanted to keep two of these birds to send them to France and to be presented to His Majesty. But as soon as they were embarked they died of melancholy, not wanting to eat or drink.
Between 1669 and 1672, a gentleman named Dubois visited the island. In the report he wrote about his trip he talks about the lonely:
“Solitaires: these birds are called that because they always go alone. They are fat as a fat goose and have white plumage, black at the tip of the wings and tail. On the tail, there are ostrich-like feathers. They have a long neck and beak like woodcocks, but thicker, legs and feet like turkeys. As it flies very little, it is caught on the run. It is one of the best game pieces on the island.”
It seems that in 1704 the loners were still abundant, but they have taken refuge in the mountains of the island, still uninhabited. However, the latest mention of the bird dates from 1708. In 1802, the naturalist Bory de Saint-Vincent explored the island for five months in search of the solitaire, but could not find it. In the 1820s, the French governor of the island, Louis Henri de Saulces de Freycinet, was only able to gather testimony from an old slave who claimed that the bird existed when his father was a child.
At the end of the century XVIII, the influential French naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon, wrote that the dodo inhabited Mauritius and Réunion. In 1848, the English naturalist Hugh Edwin Strickland, in his book The Dodo and its Kindred, concluded that the Réunion solitaire was a different species from the Mauritius dodo and the Rodrigues solitaire. That same year, the Belgian ornithologist Edmond de Sélys Longchamps created the genus Apterornis for him, and named it Apterornis solitarius. But the English paleontologist Richard Owen had already used the name Apterornis for an extinct bird from New Zealand, and the French ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte (Napoleon’s nephew) coined a new name in 1854: Ornithaptera borbonica, not for the Bourbon dynasty, but because Bourbon had been the name of the island until the French Revolution. Although that same year, the German ornithologist Hermann Schlegel placed the Réunion solitaire in the same genus as the dodo and named it Didus apterornis, although in his reconstruction of the bird, faithfully following the descriptions of the time, it looked more like a stork than to a dodo.
In 1856 a painting appeared in England, of supposed Persian origin, representing a white dodo among other birds; it was later discovered that its true author was the 18th century Dutch painter XVII Pieter Withos. The English ornithologist John Gould suggested that the white dodo in the painting was a Réunion solitaire, and his proposal was accepted by many of his contemporaries. At the same time, other similar paintings from the same period, works by Pieter Holsteyn II, were discovered in the Netherlands. But the beak of the white dodos depicted in all these paintings is short and blunt, while eyewitness descriptions attributed the Réunion solitaire with a long, thin beak. To explain the contradiction, the English ornithologist Alfred Newton argued that the paintings represented a specimen that had been brought to Holland alive, whose beak had been trimmed to prevent it from injuring people. The imaginative explanations did not end here: according to the Dutch zoologist Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans, the discrepancies between the paintings and the descriptions were due to the fact that the former represented a female, while the latter referred to males, and it was a dimorphic species. . And British zoologist Lionel Walter Rothschild claimed that the wings in the paintings were yellow, not black, because they represented an albino specimen.
Although fossil remains of dodos were never found on Réunion Island, until the 1980s the prevailing opinion was that a species of dodo had lived there. But between 1974 and 1994 excavations were carried out in caves in the west of the island that brought to light the remains of what was initially identified as a stork. The bones indicated that the bird had been eaten by early settlers. In 1987, paleontologist Cécile Mourer-Chauviré and veterinarian François Moutou, both French, described other subfossil remains under the name Borbonibis latipes, the big-footed Bourbon ibis, and related them to the South African bald ibis. At the suggestion of British ornithologist Anthony Cheke, in 1995 the two authors reassigned the species to the Old World ibis genus Threskiornis and recovered the specific name solitarius from Sélys Longchamps, noting that descriptions of the Réunion solitaire more closely matched the appearance and behavior of an ibis than with those of a dodo; especially after the discovery, in 1994, of a fragment of an ibis jaw that was shorter and straighter than in current species. Furthermore, the fossils indicated that ibis had been abundant in some places, and it would have been strange if no contemporary had mentioned them. In 1994 it was shown that the original remains, attributed to a stork, also belonged to the same species of ibis.
How did the ibis get to Réunion? Réunion is a very young island, only about three million years old. In addition, any species that had colonized the island by then would have been wiped out by the eruption of the Snow Pit, between 300,000 and 180,000 years ago. So the ibis, like the current species on the island, must be descendants of the animals that recolonized it from Africa or Madagascar after the eruption. By then, the dodos of Mauritius and the solitaires of Rodrigues had long since lost the ability to fly; that is why there were never dodos in Réunion. Three hundred thousand years is a very short time for a bird to lose the ability to fly; this agrees with the testimonies that affirm that the Réunion solitaire flew little.
The Réunion solitaire was an ibis very similar to the sacred ibis of Africa, from which it differed by its shorter and straighter beak, its larger head, its more robust body, its shorter and thicker legs, and its wings, shorter. The Réunion ibis measured about two feet or two, like the sacred ibis, but weighed almost twice as much, about three kilos. The wings were short, but not stunted, and allowed it to make short flights. Although it probably nested on the ground. It also fed on the ground, mainly on worms and other invertebrates. It is supposed that he originally lived in the wetlands of the island, but the pressure to which he was subjected by hunting and by animals introduced by humans, cats, rats and pigs, led him to take refuge in the mountainous areas, and finally to become extinct at the beginning of the century XVIII.
(German Fernandez, 03/2017)
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