In the year 1298, while languishing in the prison of Genoa, the Venetian merchant Marco Polo committed to paper his memoirs of 26 extraordinary years of travel through the Orient. In chapter 33, Concerning the Island of Madagascar, the Venetian recorded strange accounts of giant birds, and that 'the Great Khan sent to those parts to inquire about these curious matters'. The tale of the envoys of the Khan, of course, reflected one of the many Arabian stories of the giant Roc, such as those which relate to the adventurer-heroes, Sinbad and Aladdin. Yet had the envoys of the Khan made their journey to Madagascar they indeed would have brought back news of a Roc, and relics that were in need of little exaggeration. By Marco Polo's time Saracen and Indian traders had plied the ocean along the African coast for many centuries, and knew the giant birds, not as mythical beings at all, but as a living if startling reality.

Tales of this Roc-bird of Madagascar can be traced back to the days of Carthage¹; although often the shape, size and powers of the giant bird were changed or enlarged in the telling. Still, it was not until the sixteenth century that there was any direct European contact. Dutch, Portuguese and French seamen returned from the Indian Ocean with huge eggs taken as curios. These eggs astounded the few educated men who saw them.

They were as much as 91cm (3ft) in circumference and had a fluid capacity of over two imperial gallons (9 litres) - the equivalent of 200 domestic chicken eggs. They were three times the size of the eggs of the largest dinosaurs. What bird could lay such eggs?

It came to be called the Elephant Bird (Aepyornis maximus) and it lived in the primeval wilderness of that 1,600km (1,000 miles) long island, Madagascar. To the first men who encountered it, the Elephant Bird must have been a terrifying apparition as it loomed out of the dense tropical forest or strode across the dune-sands of the shoreline. It was 300cm (10ft) tall, weighed over 504kg (1,100lb)² and was the largest bird that ever lived on earth. It was a ratite, a giant running bird³. It had massive legs armed with taloned claws. Its huge body was covered in strange, bristling, hair-like feathers⁴ similar to the Emus'. It had vestigial wings and a powerful, serpent-like neck with a head and beak like a broad-headed spear. Although it did not fly and feed on elephants, like the creature of Sinbad's tale, it was scarcely less amazing than the Roc of Marco Polo's account.

The Elephant Birds were born to an age when the birds were the dominant life form on earth, and on Madagascar for perhaps sixty million years they remained the lords of their world⁵. Though they were herbivores, they had little to fear. They were protected like the elephant itself by size. If need be there were the slashing taloned feet and a blow like a heavy spear thrust from the beaked head. There was no predator that could hope to threaten them; none, that is, until the advanced hominid called Man entered their world.

These giant birds had through their long history adapted to many changes and could be numbered among the most successful of bird species - enduring more than thirty times as long as humans have existed at all. Indeed, contact with humans is not likely to have been more than a few thousand years in duration: the direct result being the total eclipsing of the giant species.

Aepyornis maximus, however, is known not to have been the only ratite on Madagascar. From fossil evidence, it is likely that there were between three and seven species of Elephant Bird or Aepyornithidae, varying in height from 300cm (10ft) to less than 90cm (3ft). However, nearly all these were prehistoric forms, most dying out before Homo sapiens had even evolved. Nonetheless, it seems likely that at least one other, smaller ratite - probably the form called Mullerornis - survived into historic times with the giant Elephant Bird.

Because there are no reliable historical records of the pre-European history of Madagascar, it is difficult to get a clear picture of the reasons for the Elephant Birds' extinction. However, it is likely that they were hunted by primitive men for one or perhaps two thousand years before European contact. This hunting would probably not have endangered the species to so great an extent had it not been combined with egg collecting⁶. It is probably this form of predation more than anything else that so reduced the birds' numbers, although it must have taken considerable habitat destruction to extinguish the species finally.

The Malagasy people had had contact with Arab traders over several centuries, but they fiercely resisted colonization. Dutch and French expeditions established coastal settlements after 1509, but the heavily populated interior was closed to them for another 150 years. Of early Arab and European influences, again, there is little in the way of records. Merchants and men involved in such trades as slave-running and pirating were not the type to keep ornithological notes on exotic birds. Still, it cannot be doubted that trade and skirmishing battles resulted in the importation of steel weapons and tools - and even muskets in later times. Against guns and the devastation of the forests by burning, cutting and clearing, the already critically dwindled population of Elephant Birds retreated, driven to ever remoter regions.

Evidently by 1658 the giant birds had already withdrawn from the major part of their habitat. In his report of that year the Sieur Etienne de Flacourt, Director of the French East India Company and Governor of Madagascar, wrote of the Elephant Bird under its local name: 'The Vouron Patra is a giant bird that lives in the country of the Amphatres⁷ people [in the south of Madagascar], and lays eggs like the Ostrich; so that people of these places may not catch it, it seeks the loneliest places.'

On an island - even one as large as Madagascar - there proved to be no place lonely enough for the Vouron Patra. When the final blow fell - whether by gun, axe or fire - is not known, although by 1700 the Elephant Bird was almost certainly extinct. Thus, almost before the western world had learned of its existence, the largest bird that ever lived had vanished.

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Notes on this text

1. This may be an oblique reference to the Phoenician circum-Africa expedition organized by the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho, around 600 BC (since Carthage was a Phoenician colony). The expedition sailed down the Mozambique Channel, but did they set foot on Madagascar? If they did, this could have been the first time Man met Vorompatra, since the Malagasies had not yet arrived on the island.



2. This estimate is somewhat larger than what is usually quoted for Dean Amadon's 1947 estimate, but I have yet to locate the original work. Most sources quote Amadon as estimating the bird weighed approximately 1,000 lbs (454 kg).



3. To be fair, Vorompatra had a better chance of running than of flying, but it's more likely it did neither. Until the arrival of Man, there was no hurry...



4. I do not know the author's source for the description of "strange, bristling hair-like feathers similar to the Emus'." None of the other sources make any real mention of this, although there is a report of ONE FEATHER being recovered. Surely it would be premature to extrapolate Vorompatra's plumage on the basis of a single feather.



5. The author appears to weigh in "pro" on the Gondwanaland Dispersal theory, although there is no mention of the dearth of supporting fossil evidence for most of those "sixty million" (actually, more) years.



6. The author's point is valid, that egg predation certainly contributed to the Vorompatra's extinction. Nevertheless, hunting the birds themselves would have done the trick even if the eggs had been left alone, as the effective breeding population was gradually reduced and made more vulnerable to stochastic variations in the population size.



7. This reference is usually rendered "Ampatres"--I'm not familiar with the aitched variety (i.e., "Amphatres").