If you’ve ever been to a zoo or wildlife park abroad, you will know how big an ostrich can be. At 2¾ metres tall, it is the largest living species of bird, and it lays the largest egg of any living bird – one ostrich egg can weigh as much as 20 chicken eggs.

Today this flightless giant survives in the wild only on the African continent, the Arabian ostrich of the Middle East having been hunted to extinction.

In the 17th century, the French governor of Madagascar l’Amiral Étienne de Flacourt, reported having heard of the vorompatra (“marsh bird” in Malagasy), “un grand oiseau qui…fait des œufs comme (ceux de) l’autruche…”

But it was only two centuries later, in 1851, that eggs and bones found in Madagascar were taken to the Académie des Sciences in Paris and found to be those of a giant ostrich-like bird. It was named the Aepyornis (pronounced ee-pee-or-nis, from the Greek aipus, meaning “high”, and ornis or “bird”).

 

It is often referred to as the elephant bird: studies have shown that it must have been at least three metres tall, with an egg the size of six ostrich eggs put together. It lived on Madagascar for nearly two million years before it became extinct, perhaps around the time of the reports that Flacourt recounted.

As to why the elephant bird disappeared, there are a number of theories: hunting by the ancestors of the Malagasy who arrived from Indonesia and settled on the island over 1,500 years ago; alteration of its natural habitat by humans; destruction of its eggs by introduced animals; and even climate change.

I have been thinking a lot about the Aepyornis or elephant bird recently. Following discussions with colleagues in the Island Conservation Society (ICS) regarding the possible rehabilitation of wildlife on Coëtivy, I began going through old historical documents relating to the island.
 
Imagine my astonishment when I discovered that the French artist and adventurer Ambroise Louis Garneray (1783-1857) claimed to have found on Coëtivy, at the beginning of the 19th century, not only eggshells (“des coquilles d’œufs énormes…d’une capacité de huit à neuf litres”) but even an actual living specimen of the Aepyornis!

Quarantine

According to Garneray, he had travelled from Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to Mauritius on board the Castor.

Because several of the men on board were suffering from smallpox, the port authorities in Mauritius ordered the ship to leave immediately for Coëtivy and to remain there in quarantine, with strict orders not to return before the smallpox outbreak was over.

It was during this enforced stay on the island that Garneray allegedly came across “un oiseau énorme, qui se tenait immobile sur la plage et semblait contempler notre canot…
 
Ce n’était pas une autruche, mais un oiseau monstre, bien autrement formidable, et qui m’était complètement inconnu. J’avoue qu’à la vue de son dos, qui avait la hauteur d’un cheval ordinaire, de ses jambes semblables à deux barreaux de fer couverts d’écailles, de sa contenance grave et dédaigneuse, je conçus quelque inquiétude…”

But this did not prevent him from savagely attacking the bird with a boat hook and wounding it in the back, whereupon it fled into the nearby vegetation. It was supposedly Captain Dacosta of the Castor, something of an amateur naturalist, who told Garneray that he must have encountered “le grand oiseau dit de Madagascar”.

This account raises a number of questions. How come no other visitor to Coëtivy has ever reported finding traces of a giant bird there? How could the elephant bird, which was unable to fly, have got to Coëtivy? The island is a sand cay that was formed in mid-ocean with the accumulation of sediments on a reef platform no more than 10,000 years ago – it has never had any land connection with Madagascar.

One explanation could be simply that Garneray’s account is more fiction than fact. There are other details in his description of the bird life on Coëtivy that do not make sense. For instance, he reports seeing fights between carnivorous penguins and frigate birds! This is the same Garneray, by the way, who reported seeing a kayman or crocodile chase a man up a tree on Mahé.

Rewritten

It’s believed that when Garneray’s manuscripts were first published in the 1860s, following his death, some parts were rewritten so as to spice them up. Edouard Corbière (1793-1875), the “father of the French maritime novel”, who was asked to proof-read the text, is believed to have been among the ghost-writers who added not-so-factual colourful episodes to the récits.

Is it possible that Garneray himself, Corbière or some other writer read the reports that were published on Aepyornis eggs and bones in 1851 and could not resist the temptation to weave a tale of the elephant bird into the memoirs?

On the other hand, there are credible reports dating from the end of the 17th century of an apparently different kind of giant bird, le géant, in Mauritius, Rodrigues and Réunion.  These islands, too, have never been connected to either Madagascar or the African mainland, and some scientists believe the bird was a now extinct giant moorhen or pouldo. Did this bird live in the swamps of Coëtivy?

I was still pondering over all this when I came across a very interesting paper in the British scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society. Entitled “Fossil avian eggshell preserves ancient DNA”, it describes how a team led by Professor Michael Bunce at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, have been able to extract DNA, the main constituent of chromosomes, from the fossilised eggshells of extinct birds – including the Aepyornis of Madagascar.

 Bunce has been quick to say that this does not necessarily mean the genetic material can be used to “resurrect” the extinct elephant bird.

“This is still in the realm of science fiction,” he told reporters.

Story

My latest surprise in all this has actually been the discovery of a piece of science fiction writing. It is a short story by the English writer Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), best known for the novels The Time Machine and War of the Worlds.

 Entitled – will you believe it – Aepyornis Island, it is about a collector for a museum who discovers the bones and three eggs of the elephant bird in a swamp in Madagascar.

After his Malagasy assistants revolt against him, he finds himself marooned on a nearby atoll, where one of the eggs hatches in the heat of the sun: “He looked at me and winked his eye from the front backward, like a hen, and gave a chirp and began to peck about at once, as though being hatched 300 years too late was just nothing…”

I shall let you find out the rest of the story for yourself. It is most unlikely that Wells knew about Garneray’s memoirs  before Aepyornis Island was first published in the Pall Mall Budget in 1894, but the Frenchman’s account of l’oiseau monstre of Coëtivy  and the English author’s short story are strangely disturbing in a similar sort of way.

Certainly neither of the two writers could have foreseen what is now becoming possible in the field of genetic engineering.

I, for one, firmly believe that one day it will be possible to recreate the elephant bird and perhaps see it in the wild in Madagascar – though it will probably not be appropriate to establish it on Coëtivy.

by Pat Matyot