Solitaire, the Dodo’s "cousin"

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32667, 24 July 1971, Page 12

Solitaire, the Dodo’s "cousin"

(Contributed by the Canterbury Museum)

Solitaire is not just a game of card patience. It is the name applied by the French to a large ground-pigeon which once inhabited the island of Rodriguez, lying to the east of Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean.

The island was known to the Arabs as Dina Moraze. Our main knowledge of the external appearance of these pigeons and their habits comes from an anonymous manuscript, written about 1730, and the earlier “Voyage er Aventures” of Francois Leguat, the leader of a party of young French Protestant refugees, who settled on Rodriquez in 1681, and remained there for two years.

The male seems to have been less beautiful than the female. Leguat said that the male plumage was ordinarily grey and brown. The beak and feet resembled those of a turkey, but the beak was a little more hooked. “They have hardly any tail, and their hind part covered with feather, is round like a horse’s rump. They are taller than turkeys, and their neck is straight, and a little longer than that of a turkey when it raises its head; the eye is black and the head is without comb or crest. They never fly and their wings are too small to sustain the weight of their bodies. The bone of the wing increases in size towards the end and forms a small round mass under the feathers as big as a musket ball.” Up to 451 b Leguat said that from March to September they were extremely fat, and males weighed as much as 451 b. Females varied in colour, from “fair, the colour of blonde hair” to brown. They had a “kind of head-band, like the head-band of a widow,” high upon their beak. This varied from dark brown to black. On the chest were “elevations,” on which the features were whiter than those of the rest of the body. Females were at least six inches shorter than the males. Both sexes carried a large gizzard stone.

The scientific name of these birds is Pezophops solitaria. The Canterbury Museum has a part skeleton of a male bird, and some bones of a much smaller one, probably a female. .

Although no skins of these interesting pigeons are known to have survived, many bones and a few complete skeletons of them have been found in limestone caves formed of marine coral which had been pushed up with the basalt of which Rodriguez is formed. Some of the Canterbury Museum bones still bear traces of this limestone. Mated for life Solitaire nests were built of palm leaves, one and a half feet from clean ground. They laid one large egg at ,a time. The pigeons mated for life, and usually nested apart from others of their kind, fiercely repelling intruders.

Incubation, which was shared between the two birds, took about seven weeks. After incubation, old and young birds joined in bands of 30 or 40. As the wings were degenerate, the birds could not fly. According to Leguat, they ate “dates of the plantain,” and they also fed on seeds and tree-leaves. They were forest inhabitants. By 1791, 110 years after Leguat and his friends settled on the islands, and perhaps for many years before that, the solitaires were extinct. Although Leguat and company ate them for food, they admired the birds, and there seem to have been plenty still alive when they left the island. They were still alive in 1734, and known to Monsieur D’Haguerty, who had been Governor of Reunion. The cause of their becoming extinct is unknown.—RJ.S.