It has been established that the dodo, a large flightless bird native to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, went extinct because of the colonists’ overuse of the tree they fed off of.
What if it were actually an attempted genocide?
What if some of them had actually escaped?
Inspiration: a question asked to a friend of mine about whether there are still dodos in Australia
UPDATE:
I noticed, via the WP analytics, that people on Mauritius island found this post and visit it regularly. I appreciate your interest and visits, and hope you find it amusing. Please feel free to comment and let me know what you think, I’d genuinely like to know!
As it turns out, they actually banded up in a secret branch of the Freemasons, so secret even the name of the branch is unknown to the general public. This much is known to the experts.
It all started when their leader, Prince Doobeedoo Dodo LXVII, decided to save what was left of his population after the onslaught of the colonists began. Indeed, a group of colonists led by Dutch sailor Gert van Drenthe, had decided to eliminate the birds who were, in his own words, ‘unworthy of living on the island’. These colonists organized repeated massacres of dodo birds, raiding their nests and communities, imprisoning thousands for sport, eventually killing them.
The Prince himself narrowly escaped death by hiding in a hollow tree trunk during one particularly vicious raid. Once the colonists had left, the Prince came out of hiding and gathered together the hundred or so remaining dodos. Together they decided to mount a counteroffensive and free their comrades from the colonists’ prison. After weeks of preparation, the operation was a partial success: two thousand dodos were freed, but before everyone was out the colonists realized what was going on and killed the remaining ones. Van Drenthe swore to kill Prince Doobeedoo himself, and organized repeated searches of the island.
The prince and his people, meanwhile, had organized themselves into underground communities, frequently raiding isolated colonist farms to destroy crops in a vast intimidation campaign. These operations were carried out like clockwork, and before any of the colonists could wake up to what was happening the dodos were already back in their underground homes. Through these attacks the dodos were able to force the colonists out of a sizable area that they could live in safely.
That is when Van Drenthe decided to hire hundreds of foxes, to try and flush out and kill the remaining dodos. He contracted an alliance with King Vulpo VII of Neofoxia (a distant ancestor to Rupert Murdoch) to scout out the dodos’ nests and raid them. The Prince, hearing of this plan, then finally decided to save his people. With the help of a local group of Freemason possums led by Marsupias III, he and his people managed to infiltrate Port de Warwick and steal three ships. Two of these ships left ostentatiously, one bound for India and the other for Africa, but were only crewed by possums.
The third, rumored to have sunk just off Port de Warwick, had actually been hidden at night in a nearby bay to wait. When he heard of all of this, Van Drenthe sent the remainder of the local fleet after the two boats that had left. But by the time he had caught up with them and discovered the trick, the dodos had already escaped with the third ship under cover of night.
After two months on the Indian Ocean they finally reached the eastern coast of Australia, where they met up with Marsupias’ distant cousin Canguros IV, leader of a tribe of kangaroos, also Freemasons. They took the dodos in. They gave them new identities and moved them around quite a bit over the following years, but few details remain. The last thing known of this community of dodos are traces of a dodo settlement from 1835, near modern-day Carnarvon, that indicate that all dodos had left in a hurry.
No further trace of them has been found since, but there is speculation that they are still in Australia somewhere, still protected by their kangaroo helpers. Rumor has it there are several possible locations for the community, all of them well hidden and guarded by vicious two-meter-tall Red Kangaroos (the Canguros dynasty’s elite security force), with orders to kill any intruder on sight.
Most of this story comes from Van Drenthe’s diary and records in Port de Warwick, as well as the memoirs of Vulpo and Marsupias. Some extra details of the happenings on Mauritius island itself were found in documents Prince Doobeedoo left in his original settlement on the island.
As for the Prince himself, virtually nothing is known of what happened to him. His crown was found in the Carnarvon settlement, but not the hereditary scepter which was the true symbol of his dynasty’s power. The crown was intact, which is significant: indeed, when a dodo prince died of other than natural causes, his crown was traditionally broken into two pieces. This has led experts to believe that, although he survived the move to Australia, he eventually died there peacefully, his body likely cremated as was the custom. This, combined with the absence of the scepter, suggests the dynasty continued through the main bloodline, but no trace of that has been found to date.
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