2025 Patreon Print Recap 11/12: Dodo and Red Rail
Reduction relief print for Patreon members November 2025
Both the Dodo, Raphus cucullatus, and the Red Rail, Aphanapteryx bonasia, were flightless birds that were endemic to the Mascarene island of Mauritius, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The Dodo was the first of the two to go extinct around 1662, and the Red Rail followed soon after around 1693. A few of the later reported sightings of the Dodo are now understood to be a misidentification of a Red Rail, leading to a lot of gray area in the actual date of the Dodo's extinction.
It's been widely said that the reason for the Dodo's extinction was overhunting by humans, but this is actually not as big as a factor as the environmental changes humans brought with settlement. The human population on Mauritius never exceeded 50 people in the 17th century, but they destroyed forest habitats and introduced other animals, including dogs, pigs, cats, rats, and crab-eating macaques, which plundered nests and competed for the limited food resources. The impact of the introduced animals on the Dodo and Red Rail populations, especially the pigs and macaques, is today considered more severe than that of hunting.
The last claimed sighting of a Dodo was in 1688. However, British ornithologist Alfred Newton pointed out in 1868 that the name "Dodo" might have been passed on to the Red Rail after extinction. Some descriptions after 1662 clearly used the name Dodo when describing a Red Rail, therefore making the 1662 sighting by Dutch mariner Volkert Evertsz the last credible sighting of the Dodo. There was a settlement hiatus on Mauritius between 1658 and 1664, and it's believed that feral pigs caused the extinction of the Dodos in this time. When settlers returned to the island, they were expecting to see large, flightless birds, and the Red Rails were the only species seen that fit that description, hence the confusion in identity.
While the last sighting of the Dodo is unclear, the last sighting of the Red Rail was in 1693 by French traveler François Leguat. The birds had already become rare due to the same threats that killed the Dodos, but when cats were introduced to the island in the 1680s, the Red Rails were guaranteed demise. Being inquisitive and fearless, the Red Rail would have been easy prey for cats, and was thereby driven to extinction.
