"Howard Waldrop - The Ugly Chickens" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

Think of the dodo as a baby harp seal with feathers. I know that's not
even close, but it saves time.
In 1507, the Portuguese, on their way to India, found the (then
unnamed) Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean-three of them a few
hundred miles apart, all east and north of Madagascar.

It wasn't until 1598, when that old Dutch sea captain Cornelius van
Neck bumped into them, that the islands received their names-names
which changed several times through the centuries as the Dutch,
French, and English changed them every war or so. They are now know
as Rodriguez, Reunion, and Mauritius.

The major feature of these islands were large flightless birds, stupid,
ugly, bad-tasting birds. Van Neck and his men named them dod-aarsen,
stupid ass, or dodars, silly birds, or solitaires.

There were three species-the dodo of Mauritius, the real grey-brown,
hooked-beak clumsy thing that weighed twenty kilos or more; the
white, somewhat slimmer dodo of Reunion; and the solitaires of
Rodriguez and Reunion, which looked like very fat, very dumb light-
colored geese.

The dodos all had thick legs, big squat bodies twice as large as a
turkey's, naked faces, and big long downcurved beaks ending in a hook
like a hollow linoleum knife. They were flightless. Long ago they had
lost the ability to fly, and their wings had degenerated to flaps the size
of a human hand with only three or four feathers in them. Their tails
were curly and fluffy, like a child's afterthought at decoration. They
had absolutely no natural enemies. They nested on open ground. They
probably hatched their eggs wherever they happened to lay them.

No natural enemies until van Neck and his kind showed up. The Dutch,
French, and Portuguese sailors who stopped at the Mascarenes to
replenish stores found that besides looking stupid, dodos were stupid.
They walked right up to them and hit them on the head with clubs.
Better yet, dodos could be herded around like sheep. Ship's logs are full
of things like: "Party of ten men ashore. Drove half-a-hundred of the
big turkey-like birds into the boat. Brought to ship where they are given
the run of the decks. Three will feed a crew of 150."

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Even so, most of the dodo, except for the breast, tasted bad. One of the
Dutch words for them was walghvogel, disgusting bird. But on a ship
three months out on a return from Goa to Lisbon, well, food was where