Aphanapteryx - Extinction

Extinction

To the Dutch sailors who visited Mauritius from 1598 and onwards, the fauna was mainly interesting from a culinary standpoint. The Dodo was sometimes considered rather unpalatable, but the Red Rail was a very popular gamebird for the Dutch and French settlers. The reports dwell upon the varying ease with which the bird could be caught according to the hunting method and the fact that when roasted it was considered a good substitute for pork.

Johann Christian Hoffmann, who was on Mauritius in the early 1670s, described a Red Rail hunt as follows:

... a particular sort of bird known as toddaerschen which is the size of an ordinary hen. you take a small stick in the right hand and wrap the left hand in a red rag, showing this to the birds, which are generally in big flocks; these stupid animals precipitate themselves almost without hesitation on the rag. I cannot truly say whether it is through hate or love of this colour. Once they are close enough, you can hit them with the stick, and then have only to pick them up. Once you have taken one and are holding it in your hand, all the others come running up as it to its aid and can be offered the same fate.

Hoffman's account refers to the Red Rail by the German version of the Dutch name originally applied to the Dodo, "Dod-aers", and John Marshall used "red hen" interchangeably with "Dodo" in 1668. Mascarene expert Anthony Cheke has suggested that by the late 17th century, the name was transferred to the Red Rail, so that all post 1662 references to the Dodo are dubious. A 1681 account of a "Dodo", previously thought to have been the last, mentioned that the meat was "hard", similar to the description of Red Hen meat. Errol Fuller has also cast the 1662 "Dodo" sighting in doubt, as the reaction to distress cries of the birds mentioned matches what was described for the Red Rail.

As it nested on the ground, pigs ate their eggs and young, probably contributing to its extinction. When François Leguat, who had become intimately familiar with the Rodrigues Rail in the preceding years, arrived on Mauritius in 1693, he remarked that the Red Rail had already become rare. He was the last source to mention the bird, so it is assumed that it became extinct around 1700.

230 years before Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the appearance of the Red Rail and the Dodo led Peter Mundy to speculate:

Of these 2 sorts off fowl afforementionede, For oughtt wee yett know, Not any to bee Found out of this Iland, which lyeth aboutt 100 leagues From St. Lawrence. A question may bee demaunded how they should bee here and Not elcewhere, beeing soe Farer From other land and can Neither fly or swymme; whither by Mixture off kindes producing straunge and Monstrous formes, or the Nature of the Climate, ayer and earth in alltring the First shapes in long tyme, or how.