Red Rail - Relationship With Humans

Relationship With Humans

Though Mauritius had previously been visited by Arab vessels in the Middle Ages and Portuguese ships between 1507 and 1513, they did not settle on the island. The Dutch Empire acquired the island in 1598, renaming it after Maurice of Nassau, and it was used from then on for the provisioning of trade vessels of the Dutch East India Company. To the sailors who visited Mauritius from 1598 and onwards, the fauna was mainly interesting from a culinary standpoint. The Dodo was sometimes considered rather unpalatable, but the Red Rail was a very popular gamebird for the Dutch and French settlers. The reports dwell upon the varying ease with which the bird could be caught according to the hunting method and the fact that when roasted it was considered similar to pork.

Johann Christian Hoffmann, who was on Mauritius in the early 1670s, described a Red Rail hunt as follows:

... a particular sort of bird known as toddaerschen which is the size of an ordinary hen. you take a small stick in the right hand and wrap the left hand in a red rag, showing this to the birds, which are generally in big flocks; these stupid animals precipitate themselves almost without hesitation on the rag. I cannot truly say whether it is through hate or love of this colour. Once they are close enough, you can hit them with the stick, and then have only to pick them up. Once you have taken one and are holding it in your hand, all the others come running up as it to its aid and can be offered the same fate.

Hoffman's account refers to the Red Rail by the German version of the Dutch name originally applied to the Dodo, "Dod-aers", and John Marshall used "red hen" interchangeably with "Dodo" in 1668. Mascarene expert Anthony Cheke has suggested that the name "Dodo" was transferred to the Red Rail after the former had gone extinct, so that all post 1662 references to "Dodos" refer to the rail instead. A 1681 account of a "Dodo", previously thought to have been the last, mentioned that the meat was "hard", similar to the description of Red Hen meat. Errol Fuller has also cast the 1662 "Dodo" sighting in doubt, as the reaction to distress cries of the birds mentioned matches what was described for the Red Rail. Milne-Edwards suggested that early travellers may have confused young Dodos with Red Rails.

230 years before Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the appearance of the Red Rail and the Dodo led Peter Mundy to speculate:

Of these 2 sorts off fowl afforementionede, For oughtt wee yett know, Not any to bee Found out of this Iland, which lyeth aboutt 100 leagues From St. Lawrence. A question may bee demaunded how they should bee here and Not elcewhere, beeing soe Farer From other land and can Neither fly or swymme; whither by Mixture off kindes producing straunge and Monstrous formes, or the Nature of the Climate, ayer and earth in alltring the First shapes in long tyme, or how.