454 
THE DODO . 
of the nether yellowish, both sharp-pointed and crooked. Its gape, huge wide, as being 
naturally very voracious. Its body is fat and round, covered with soft gray feathers after the 
manner of an ostrich’s; in each side, instead of hard wing-feathers or quills, it is furnished 
with small soft-feathered wings, of a yellowish ash color ; and behind, the rump, instead of 
a tail, is adorned with five small curled feathers of the same color. It has yellow legs, thick, 
but very short ; four toes in each foot ; solid, long, as it were scaly, armed with strong black 
claws. 
“ It is a slow-paced and stupid bird, and which easily becomes a prey to the fowlers. The 
flesh, especially of the breast, is fat, esculent, and so copious that three or four Dodos will 
sometimes suffice to fill one hundred seamen’ s bellies. If they be old, or not well boiled, they 
are of difficult concoction, and are salted and stored up for provision of victual. There are 
found in their stomachs stones of an ash color, of divers figures and magnitudes, yet not bred 
there, as the common people and seamen fancy, but swallowed by the bird ; as though by this 
mark also nature would manifest that these fowls are of the ostrich kind, in that they swallow 
any hard things though they do not digest them.” 
Other travellers, such as Legnat and De Bry, agree with Bontius in his description of the 
bird, and coincide in his opinion of the excellence of its flesh ; but one writer, Mr. T. Herbert, 
who visited the Mauritius about 1625, differs greatly in his estimation of the value of the Dodo 
as an article of food. In his book of travels, which is perhaps the quaintest and raciest to be 
found among such literature, he speaks as follows of this bird : — 
“The Dodo, a bird the Dutch call Walghvogel, or Dod Eersen ; her body is round and 
fat, which occasions the slow pace, or that her corpulencie, and so great as few of them weigh 
less than fifty pound : meat it is with some, but better to the eye than stomach, such as only 
a strong appetite can vanquish. . . . It is of a melancholy visage, as sensible of nature’s 
injury in framing so massie a body to be directed by complimental wings, such, indeed, as are 
unable to hoise her from the ground, serving only to rank her among birds. Her traine, three 
small plumes, short and improportionable, her legs suiting to her body, her pounces sharpe, 
her aq>petite strong and greedy. Stones and iron are digested ; which description will better 
be conceived in her representation.” 
So plentiful were the Dodos at one time, and so easily were they killed, that the sailors 
were in the habit of slaying the birds merely for the sake of the stones in their stomachs, these 
being found very efficacious in sharpening their clasp-knives. The nest of the Dodo was a 
mere heap of fallen leaves gathered together on the ground, and the bird laid but one large 
egg. The weight of one full-grown Dodo was said to be between forty and fifty pounds. The 
color of the plumage was a grayish-brown in the adult males, not unlike that of the ostrich, 
while the plumage of the females was of a paler hue. 
/ 
✓ 
