Why UP should be indebted to Dodo!

In the wonderland of Nature – 2

-Vagish K Jha

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is an all-time favourite for kids and all those who love being the one at any age, like me. I am particularly fond of the sequence of Caucus races. It is about a boating expedition on 4 July 1862 when Alice’s Adventures were first told. The author himself was Alice. The others were represented by birds – the Lory was Lorina Liddell, the Eaglet was Edith Liddell, the Dodo was Dodgson, and the Duck was Rev. Robinson Duckworth. They all swam merrily. After the swim, in order to get dry the Dodo proposed that everyone run a Caucus race. The best part of the deal is that the participants can run in patterns of any shape, starting, and leaving off whenever they like. And so, in this race everyone wins.

Alice distributes comfits from her pocket to all as prizes, at the end of the race. However, Alice runs out of the prize for herself. The Dodo inquires what else she has in her pocket. She has only a thimble, a small metal or plastic cap worn to protect the finger while sewing. The Dodo requests it from her and then awards it to Alice as her prize.

Lewis Carroll was not just a writer. He was also a mathematician, logician, and a photographer. And Lewis Carroll was not his real name. His name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. There is another interesting twist to the reality. The Dodo is a caricature of the author himself. But why did he choose dodo for this? A popular, though unsubstantiated, belief is that Dodgson chose the particular animal to represent himself because of his stammer. He would ‘accidentally’ introduce himself as “Do-do-dodgs!

This may be doubtful. But what remains true is the fact Lewis Carroll immortalized this bird, which is one of the most recent species known to have been driven to extinction through human activity. Dodo was widely regarded as mythical by European scientists in the nineteenth century. The story of selective amnesia about recognizing the very existence of dodo has largely to do with frequent change of colonial powers occupying Mauritius during 17^th century and beyond. The rise of dodo from the ashes of collective memory as an icon of human-caused extinction is another long and often contentious story. But the fact that Lewis Carroll gave this creature a celebrated status posthumously is beyond doubt. [1]Before we are ‘dead as Dodo’, we also need to ask as to how Dodos died for ever and became extinct?

It may be interesting to know that Dodo is not a mythical character. It was a flightless bird from Mauritius and the adjacent islands. The Dodo was about 1 meter tall and may have weighed 10–18 kg in the wild. Dodo was hunted to extinction.

In the early sixteenth century the island became a stopover for ships engaged in the spice trade. The Dodo bird was a source of fresh meat for the sailors. The story goes on to recount how rats and pigs aboard the ships escaped onto the island and helped complete the destruction of the dodo bird eggs in the ground nests.

1648 engraving showing the killing of dodos (centre left, depicted as penguin-like) and other animals now extinct from Mauritius [2]

The dodo (Raphuscucullatus L.) was last sighted as late as in 1662 according to a report by nature magazine. It was last reported by Volkert Evertsz on an islet off Mauritius. By this time, the dodo had become extremely rare – the previous sighting having been 24 years earlier — but the species probably persisted unseen beyond this date.[3] The dodo’s appearance in life is evidenced only by drawings, paintings, and written accounts from the 17th century.

What is interesting, however, is that the extinction of Dodo has been linked to far reaching consequences that extended up to the Eastern UP and Bihar. Let me explain.

Not long back Mauritius was an island with rich resources of its own. It included a hard wood tree known as Calvaria major or tambalacoque or dodo tree (Sideroxylongrandiflorum). It was a long-living tree valued for its timber and was used in ship building which was the main source of wealth of Mauritius. But why was it called Dodo tree? Was it because the dodo nested on the ground and ate fallen fruits of this tree, which looked like peach?

Another curious phenomenon was noticed about the Calvaria major or tambalacoque or dodo tree. There was a marked drop in the number of the tambalacoque tree and by 1973 only 13 living Calvaria trees were known to survive, all over 300 years old. What baffled botanists was the fact that these trees produced healthy fruits, yet no new trees were germinating now. Consequently, the dodo tree faces extinction the dodo way.

No one paid attention till they found that the Calveria major tree was disappearing. Stanley Temple, an American avian ecologist and wildlife biologist, hypothesized that the seeds of this tree could germinate only if it passed through the gut of the Dodo bird, which became extinct in the 17th century. And thus the tambalacoque or dodo tree also started disappearing gradually. With this the main source of income for the Muaritians also vanished and they switched to sugarcane plantation instead. Sugarcane plantation necessitated a huge labour force which was brought in from Eastern UP and Bihar. Today these people are the identity of this island and have taken over political power as well. So, in a way, the diaspora community of Mauritius should be grateful to Dodo, in a way!

Though the theory of Stanley Temple is contested by some other scientists[4]and the idea of associating labour migration to the extinction of dodo may sound spacious and lacking in the rigour of causation, what they do illustrate beautifully is the idea of mutuality, interdependence, and symbiosis. This reasserts the fact that the destinies of species are closely associated. It is not a wastage of our precious resources to save tigers when so many human beings go hungry every day, as many people claim. Our destinies are too closely tied up with each other to ignore anyone, even a tiny butterfly.

What sparked my imagination greatly is the fact that ‘certain seeds become suitable for germination only when they pass through the gut of some bird.’ Could this be the reason that Peepal tree did not germinate when I planted it in my flower bed? And it grows anywhere and in the most unlikely of places? This conclusion looks obvious in the case of the Peepal tree. However, what is not clear is the process. What happens to the seed inside the bird gut that the seed acquires the ability to germinate?