Robert Drewe: A Tale of Two Birds

The dodo was almost a cartoon bird. It couldn’t fly, had a dopey-looking beak, a squat body and a tuft of curly feathers on its rear end. It waddled its way into people’s imaginations by becoming extinct. The dodo’s main claim to fame is that it’s as dead as a dodo.

Native to the island of Mauritius, it was first spotted by amused Portuguese and Dutch seamen in the 16th century. It looked comical, but after months at sea they found it very tasty.

Even its name was funny. And it was a cinch to catch. Twice the size of a turkey, it made the serious mistake of not fearing humans. The birds blithely waddled up to sailors like tame pets, and didn’t flinch as their fellow dodos were killed around them.

Furthermore, rats brought to Mauritius on the sailors’ ships assisted the dodos’ elimination by eating their eggs — and they only laid one at a time. Within a century, the dodo was extinct. Done like a dinner.

Achieving widespread recognition through its role in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, the dodo became a feature of popular culture, outdoing the thylacine — the Tasmanian tiger — as an example of rapid human-induced extinction.

Like a clumsy phoenix, however, the dodo may rise again. In 2023, Colossal Biosciences, a Texas-based gene-editing company that had already made headlines for planning to revive the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, announced it would attempt to bring the dodo “back to life”.

While “de-extinction science”, even if feasible, presents significant problems, getting rich celebrities to cough up millions to resuscitate extinct animals isn’t difficult.

Last week The Lord Of The Rings director Peter Jackson and his producer partner Fran Walsh donated a cool $15 million to Colossal Biosciences for the dodo’s “de-extinction”.

Best of luck with that (and with the thylacine and mammoth. I’m guessing the sabre-tooth tiger is a step too far).

Jackson’s gift to bring the dodo back to life coincided with another bird extinction story. This time it was a reverse tale: of science’s concern at the possible annihilation of the black swan.

You hardly need reminding the black swan is the State emblem and WA’s most common commercial trademark.

Depicted onthe flag and coat-of-arms, it has popped up everywhere since the Swan River Colony began in 1829.

It’s not just Perth’s river that borrows its name. So do places, businesses and products, from beers to taxis and hotels — everything from an electorate to a football team, a theatre company, a ship, an orphanage, a bridge, and companies selling everything from cement to soft drinks.

The black swan has featured on stamps, sporting uniforms, and in the logo for the Swan Brewery, on the banks of the Swan.

But this post-colonial history hides an older, broader story. Not only is the black swan important for Aboriginal people, it was also a potent fantasy symbol in the European imagination 1500 years before Europeans — familiar only with white swans — learnt a black variety existed in the Antipodes.

So it’s causing concern that a deadly strain of bird flu could wipe out the bird’s local populations, with the rapid spread of the virus in wild birds and marine mammals, and even cattle, ringing alarm bells.

Australia is battling an outbreak of the H5N7 strain of bird flu, which has caused mass chicken culling (and an egg shortage) in three Eastern States. Not only are black swans highly susceptible to H5N7 bird flu, but a more virulent strain, H5N1, could be spread to Australia by birds migrating from Asia before this summer.

It has now spread to every other continent, killing millions of wild birds; even to Antarctica, where it has killed thousands of Adelie penguins and skuas.

A study on the black swan genome just released in the journal Genome Biology found it was “extremely sensitive to avian influenza”. The study said an outbreak in Australia would put black swans in “significant peril”.

One of the study’s authors, University of Queensland Associate Professor Kirsty Short, said black swans were “incredibly susceptible” to the H5N1 virus and Australia should be preparing for an outbreak.

According to the Invasive Species Council policy analyst Carol Booth, the evidence indicated that black swans could be wiped out. “They’re highly susceptible to bird flu, and we are at risk of their extinction,” she said.

“New Zealand has started vaccinating their rare species to protect them from H5N1, as the US is doing with their eagle populations.” We should follow.

Around 100AD the Roman poet Juvenal coined a phrase for something that almost defied belief: “Like a black swan”. The dodo was in that category. Let’s hope our black swan doesn’t become as dead as the dodo.