RECENT LITERATURE Edited by Bridget

Lost Land of the Dodo: The Ecological History of Mauritius, Reunion, and Rodrigues. A. Cheke and J. Hume. 2008. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. 480 pp. $55.00. (hardcover) Just over 200 years ago, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre served with the French military on a small Indian Ocean island we now call Mauritius. He was inspired by its lush forests and volcanic geography to set an idyllic romance there (Paul and Virginia), with the theme of avoiding the corruption of society by immersing oneself in wild nature. History itself served as a cynical sequel to this novel, however. Even as he wrote back in France, society was busy destroying the ecology of Mauritius, a destruction that would continue until only vestiges (though still beautiful) remained. In fact, a century before Bernardin ever visited the island, a species of bird that once lived only on Mauritius had been abused until it disappeared. The poor Dodo (Raphus cucullatus) has always tended to make a wretched impression on those who become casually acquainted with it. The only thing the Oxford English Dictionary had to say about this bird, aside from it having lived on Mauritius, is that it was clumsy and its wings didn’t work. Its very name apparently derives from a Portuguese word for “simpleton,” and its scientific name was once Didus ineptus. Opinions even of scientists once ranged from considering it to have been just asking for extinction, to disbelieving that it ever existed. Despite the intriguing effect it had on those who saw it, its extinction only decades after it was first discovered occurred with hardly a notice: “Oh, we haven’t seen Dodos in a while.” Today we generally treat its demise with similar nonchalance, and are content to use this portly pigeon as a symbol of stupidity and defenselessness in the face of annihilation. I remember saying “dodobird” and “dodobrain” while growing up (and hearing them said to me) before I knew anything about the bird we were insulting. One reason for our cavalier attitude toward this bird, toward the ecological condition of Mauritius, and toward nature in general, is that people have tended to assume that nature is resilient to anything we can throw at it. The notion that we could cause a species to go extinct was occasionally entertained, for instance by Buffon, but it was clearly not a majority view and the possibility was still fiercely debated as recently as the 1800s! The Dodo was at the center of this controversy, and as it became the first officially recognized extinction, a major change began to happen (slowly) in our perception of nature, one that would eventually fit very well with Darwin’s ideas. Just as the Dodo’s flightlessness and fearlessness would be recognized as hallmarks of having adapted to an island free of predators, its disappearance would become the first step in our realization that nature is continuously bubbling with speciation and extinction, and that we humans can contribute to the latter. Thus, with an evolutionary perspective, the Dodo’s vulgar symbolism becomes helpful: the frivolous phrase “dead as a Dodo” becomes a sobering object lesson about the ephemerality of species and the finality of extinction. Lost Land of the Dodo lavishly and meticulously elaborates such lessons—with respect not only to the Dodo, but more broadly to the vertebrate fauna and, to some extent, the ecosystems of the Mascarene Islands of Mauritius, Réunion, and Rodrigues. Most of the book is the product of a lifetime of investigation of the Mascarenes by Anthony Cheke, an ecologist and ornithologist who also (while running a bookstore) became the world’s expert on Mascarene ecological history. Julian Hume is a paleontologist involved in several excavations on Mauritius, the most recent of which are described in an appendix. Hume is also an artist, and contributed 39 color plates and three jacket illustrations of the communities that once thrived on the Mascarenes. He also wrote 38 informative boxes, each describing a group of