Ten birds have changed the world.

Stephen Moss's new book.

He's also a producer, but the author of a book that reveals to me again and again,

language is important, and the word extinction is frightening.

How many extinctions have been since the creation of the earth

in the bombardment of three and a half to four billion years ago?

But this one, the dodo bird, turns out to be the author

of the word extinction that enters into the vocabulary

of the century since he was first discovered.

I believe it was the 16th century when a ship called there.

And the dodo no longer exists, but the word extinction is now important for those who move to save or protect or in some way worry about the habitats and the destruction of our birds.

The humble dodo, I learned from you that when the Dutch first found him,

they call him the wallow birds, and they regarded him as loathsome.

What happened to him?

Why did they go away on the Mauritius Islands suddenly, Stephen?

Well, what I haven't realized about the dodo was that unlike other oceanic islands that were

colonized by humans during the sort of age of empire, if you like, in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries,

Mauritius was not inhabited by people. So unlike America, unlike New Zealand, unlike Australia, where there were,

humans were there already, Mauritius was the place where the dodo lived and it had involved

not to have to fly because why would it have to fly if there's no enemies and there were also

no predators, no ground predators, no mammals.

And unfortunately, the Dutch sailors, who arrived, I think, in 1597 or 98, brought in dogs and cats and rats and actually macaque monkeys, which they kept as pets.

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