The dodo as a species didn’t have a chance at that point, and they were doomed. None of the nests were safe from foraging wild pigs and a multitude of newly introduced rats. It didn’t take long for the production of new baby dodo chicks to take a very steep decline. The mother dodo would only lay one egg per season. They actually sealed the fate of the dodo by eating all the dodo eggs they could find that were all on the ground in the simple unprotected dodo nests. Cats were brought as working “pets.” So pigs and rats flourished in the wild, as they also had no natural enemies there. Sailors always had a way of letting pigs or goats escape on various islands they visited. There were never any rats on the island until they came with the ships and came ashore. Yes, many were collected by the Dutch sailors and settlers, but there was something else that had a larger impact on their eventual extinction, invasive animals that the sailors brought with them on their ships namely, rats, cats and pigs that went feral. One can only imagine what they were thinking when the tall two-legged visitors began massacring them. Fearless curiosity, rather than stupidity, is a more fitting description of their behavior. They were just trusting of humans because they’d never seen any other animal that was able to hurt them in any way. This in itself is a very sad story, since there was nothing “stupid” about the dodo (as they are infamously but wrongly known). Yes, the sailors hunted down many of the trusting birds simply by walking up to them and picking them up or using a machete on them.
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