一个星球,一次实验(3)

Being flightless, it nested on the ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey for pigs, dogs, and monkeys brought to the island by outsiders. It was probably extinct by 1683 and was most certainly gone by 1693.

Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see its like again. We know nothing of its reproductive habits and diet, where it ranged, what sounds it made in tranquility or alarm.

We don't possess a single dodo egg. From beginning to end our acquaintance with animate dodos lasted just seventy years.

That is a breathtakingly scanty period though it must be said that by this point in our history we did have thousands of years of practice behind us in the matter of irreversible eliminations.

Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, in often astonishingly large numbers.

In America, thirty genera of large animals-some very large indeed-disappeared practically at a stroke after the arrival of modern humans on the continent between ten and twenty thousand years ago. Altogether North and South America between them lost about three quarters of their big animals

once man the hunter arrived with his flint-headed spears and keen organizational capabilities. Europe and Asia, where the animals had had longer to evolve a useful wariness of humans,

lost between a third and a half of their big creatures. Australia, for exactly the opposite reasons, lost no less than 95 percent.