410 



The Plover-like Birds 



Walchvogel were "bigger than our Swans, with large heads, half of which is 

 covered with skin like a hood. These birds want wings, in place of which are 

 three or four feathers of a gray color." 



For a better idea of the appearance of the Dodo we are indebted to the pictures 

 of Roelandt Savary and his nephew John, Dutch artists of the first half of the 

 seventeenth century, from whose paintings we gather that the Dodo was a 

 heavy-bodied, short-legged bird, with disproportionately large head and huge, 



FIG. 139. Dodo, or Dronte, Didus ineptus. Facsimile of Piso's figure, made in 1658. 



formidable-looking hooked bill. The body was sparingly clad in loose feathers, 

 the wing-feathers alone being stiff, the tail resembling a small feather duster. 

 The general color, as noted by De Bry, was gray, and the wings and tail yellowish 

 or dirty white. The bird, so Cause tells us, laid a single egg "the size of a half- 

 penny roll, in a nest made of herbs heaped together," the somewhat indefinite 

 size ascribed to the eggs being qualified later on by comparison with that of the 

 Great White Pelican, which it was said to resemble in size. Not being acquainted 

 with mankind, the birds of Mauritius, like those of other uninhabited islands, 

 were at first extremely tame, but the Dodo seems to have been not only unsus- 

 picious but stupid into the bargain, a fact that rendered its extermination all the 

 easier. 



