ISLAND CONSERVATION SOCIETY-The book of the decade |09 June 2008
Written by Anthony Cheke and illustrated by Julian Hume, Lost Land of the Dodo traces the ecological history of the Mascarenes, those islands so near and yet so far from Seychelles.
This is a landmark book. We need something similar to tell the story of Seychelles. Meanwhile, this book should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in our region and indeed anyone who cares about the dramatic effects of humanity upon the fate of our planet. In other words everybody!
Anthony Cheke tells the story of the destruction of the Mascarenes environment as never before with thoroughness and scientific rigour. Yet at the same time Lost land of the Dodo is highly readable and entertaining. Why are we so stupefied by the Dodo and not by the equally extinct Keel-scaled Boa, Cheke asks? His answer is that at the end of the day, while the snakes might be even more remarkable they are still, well, snakes. The Dodo is more impressive, being large, incongruous, a bit cuddly-looking, readily cartoonable and thoroughly dead! Why do WWF have an adorable Panda as their symbol? Let’s face it, a vanishing snail or endangered rodent would hardly have the same appeal.
Travel to the Mascarenes today and it feels a little like home from home. A bit like Seychelles but with a few foreign bits added on. But the parts that feel most familiar are almost entirely due to human influence. There are mynas and fodies, the people speak Creole (well, some of them), many place names have a familiar ring and at least in Mauritius, even the cars drive on the left. A few hundred years ago the islands were very different places. Yet there were several points of similarity now less evident. The Mascarenes had flightless rails and tortoises were so common that one early traveller described how it was possible to walk on their backs for 100 steps without touching the ground.
In Seychelles we still have flightless rails and tortoises, albeit thanks solely to the inaccessibility of Aldabra. Indeed Seychelles has lost comparatively few species. There was the famous Poulble of course and the Seychelles Parakeet, both of which had relatives in the Mascarenes (also extinct and both beautifully illustrated in Lost Land of the Dodo). But most of the original Seychelles flora and fauna is with us today. That has less to do with a wiser custodianship of the environment than sheer luck. When the first twenty-two pioneers departed from Mauritius to settle on St Anne, the island from whence they sailed had already been irreversibly damaged. The Dodo had long gone along with many other native creatures and the Mascarenes were already effectively an ecological ruin.
It is astonishing to read how quickly so much damage was done by so few people. In 1674, Governor Hugo of Mauritius interviewed Simon, a slave recaptured after 11 years on the run in the forest. How often, asked Hugo, had Simon seen a Dodo? Just twice, was the reply. The Dutch had only established a small settlement in 1638 but by the time they left in 1710 all ground nesting birds had been destroyed. Meanwhile on Reunion, a French settlement was established in 1663 but within a few years the flightless Solitaire and several other endemic birds together with the giant tortoise were all gone. Ducks and geese, said to be abundant in 1687, were extinct by the end of the century. When Darwin visited Mauritius in 1836, he saw none of the tortoises that had fascinated him in the Galapagos. In fact, he saw no native animals whatsoever.
The lessons of the tragic consequences of short-term exploitation of the environment are as true today as they were in the early years of European exploration of the Indian Ocean. Except today we have no excuse. The early European explorers had not the slightest concept of ecology. The fruits of the environment appeared to be inexhaustible and they believed they had a God-given right to take as they pleased. Older and wiser, the human race is beginning to awaken to the realisation that the world is fragile. Seychelles and the Mascarenes are worlds in miniature and Lost Land of the Dodo is a poignant reminder of how we ignore the vulnerability of planet Earth at our peril.
The Island Conservation Society promotes the conservation and restoration of island ecosystems.
Some of the illustrations found in the book: (from up to down) The Rodrigues giant tortoise and Blue Rail, the Mauritius Broad-billed parrot and Echo Parakeet and the Oiseau Bleu (Photos of paintings courtesy Julian Hume)
By Adrian Skerrett