Description
Book SynopsisThe Mascarene islands in the southern Indian Ocean - Mauritius, Réunion
and Rodrigues - were once home to an extraordinary range of birds and
reptiles. Evolving on these isolated volcanic islands in the absence of
mammalian predators or competitors, the land was dominated by giant
tortoises, parrots, skinks and geckos, burrowing boas, flightless rails
& herons, and of course (in Mauritius) the Dodo. Uninhabited and
only discovered in the 1500s, colonisation by European settlers in the
1600s led to dramatic changes in the ecology of the islands; the birds
and tortoises were slaughtered indiscriminately while introduced rats,
cats, pigs and monkeys destroyed their eggs, the once-extensive forests
logged, and invasive introduced plants from all over the tropics
devastated the ecosystem. The now-familiar icon of extinction, the
Dodo, was gone from Mauritius within 50 years of human settlement, and
over the next 150 years many of the Mascarenes'' ot
