Dodo was far from alone in extinction – study

AFP

File photo: One of only four specimen of an upper beak of the extinct Dodo bird is pictured in Port Louis after they were discovered at an apparent ‘mass grave’ of the extinct flightless bird on the Indian ocean island of Mauritius.

Cape Town – The unfortunate dodo may be the best known of bird species that have become extinct, but it was not alone.

Scientists now estimate that about 1 300 other bird species – well over 10 percent of all birds currently still in existence – were also driven to extinction on Pacific Islands in the evolutionary blink of an eye, following the arrival of the first people over the last 4 000 years or so.

This research by scientists from the Zoological Society of London and collaborators was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA this week.

The tropical Pacific Islands, such as Hawaii and Fiji, were among the last places on the globe to be colonised by Homo sapiens.

They were home to more 1 000 species of birds that went extinct soon after people arrived, mainly as a result of rampant hunting, but also through deforestation.

It has been long known that many bird species disappeared, but there were uncertainties about the actual scale and extent of the extinctions.

The Zoological Society of London scientists studied fossils from 41 Pacific islands and used new techniques to estimate how many other bird species had also disappeared without a trace, explained Professor Tim Blackburn, director of the society’s Institute of Zoology.

He said they had found that 160 species of non-passerine land birds – that is, non-perching birds, which generally have feet designed for specific functions, like webs to aid swimming – had gone extinct without a trace on these islands alone after the first humans arrived.

“If we take into account all the other islands in the tropical Pacific, as well as seabirds and songbirds, the total extinction toll is likely to have been around 1 300 bird species,” Blackburn said.

Extinct species lost include several species of moa-nalos, the large flightless waterfowl from Hawaii, and the 1.7m-tall New Caledonian Sylviornis, a relative of game birds like pheasants and grouse, only much heavier at around 30kg. – Cape Argus

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