122 INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 
them. The delicious flavor of game-birds, and the skill im- 
plied in the various arts of the sportsman who devotes himself 
to fowling, make them favorite objects of the chase, while the 
beauty of their plumage, as a military and feminine decora- 
tion, threatens to involve the sacrifice of the last survivor of 
many once numerous species. Thus far, but few birds de- 
scribed by ancient or modern naturalists are known to have 
become absolutely extinct, though there are some cases in which 
they are ascertained to have utterly disappeared from the face 
of the earth in very recent times. The most familiar instances 
are those of the dodo, a large bird peculiar to the Mauritius or 
Isle of France, exterminated about the year 1690, and now 
known only by more or less fragmentary skeletons, and the 
solitary, which inhabited the islands of Bourbon and Rodriguez, 
but has not been seen for more than a century. A parrot and 
some other birds of the Norfolk Island group are said to have 
lately become extinct. The wingless auk, Alcea umpennis, a 
bird remarkable for its excessive fatness, was very abundant 
two or three hundred years ago in the Faroe Islands, and on 
the whole Scandinavian seaboard. The early voyagers found 
either the same or a closely allied species, in immense num- 
bers, on all the coasts and islands of Newfoundland. The 
value of its flesh and its oil made it one of the most important 
resources of the inhabitants of those sterile regions, and it was 
naturally an object of keen pursuit. It is supposed to be 
now completely extinct, and few museums can show even its 
skeleton. 
There seems to be strong reason to believe that modern 
civilization is guiltless of one or two sins of extermination 
which have been committed in recent ages. New Zealand 
formerly possessed several species of dinornis, one of which, 
called moa by the islanders, was larger than the ostrich. The 
condition in which the bones of these birds have been found 
and the traditions of the natives concur to prove that, though 
the aborigines had probably extirpated them before the dis- 
covery of New Zealand by the whites, they still existed ata 
