"Search for the Pygmy Hippo" (pp.138-139)

Giant lemurs may not have been the only members of the megafauna to survive into Flacourt's time¹. The Frenchman, whose descriptions of natural and cultural history in the region around Fort Dauphin where he lived are considered scrupulously accurate by modern scholars, describes a bird that local Antandroy tribespeople called the Vouron-Patra. "[T]his is a large bird haunting the Ampastres²," Flacourt wrote. "[I]ts eggs are like those of an ostrich; the people of these regions cannot catch it, as it seeks out the most deserted places." As with the giant lemurs, it is deeply disquieting to think how recently the world lost Madagascar's elephant birds. Had they survived just a few more centuries, elephant birds might have gained official protection and today might enjoy a haven inside Malagasy reserves.

The "elephant bird" acquired its name from the Roc of the Arabian Nights. In "Sinbad the Sailor," one of the tales in this oral collection, which Arab storytellers began circulating around the tenth century, the Roc was a bird so enormous that it could lift an elephant in its talons. Marco Polo picked up on this legend as he passed through Arabia on his way back from China in 1294:

According to the report of those who have seen them... they are just like eagles but of the most colossal size.... They are so huge and bulky that one of them can pounce on an elephant and carry it up to a great height in the air. Then it lets go, so that the elephant drops to earth and is smashed to a pulp. Whereupon the gryphon bird perches on the carcass and feeds at its ease. They add that they have a wingspan of thirty paces and their wingfeathers are twelve paces long and of a thickness proportionate to their length.... I should explain that the islanders call them rukhs and know them by no other name.*

* The rook in chess got its name from this mythical creature.

The "islanders" Polo refers to are none other than the Malagasy, for this account comes from his brief description of Madagascar. While his account is quaintly erroneous, as we've seen, his rukh-and the Arabian Nights' Roc--had a basis in fact. Arabian merchants first began trading along the northern coasts of Madagascar in the ninth or tenth centuries, and they may very well have seen elephant birds or at least their outsized eggs. Travelers even brought back giant "quills" said to be from the feathers of the Roc.*

* One later writer argued sensibly that the "quills" were likely the midribs of leaves from the raffia, a native Malagasy³ palm whose leaves can reach twenty or thirty feet in length and, as he wrote, "are not at all unlike an enormous quill stripped of its feathery portion."

It wasn't until the mid-nineteenth century that people outside of Madagascar realized a kernal of truth might lie in such tales. In 1851, the French naturalist Isidore Saint-Hilaire uncovered eggshells and bones of a giant bird on the west coast. Neither he nor anyone else had any idea what it was⁴. In the coming decades, more bones and eggshell fragments turned up, but nothing sent heads spinning like the whole eggs that Malagasy occasionally brought forth. The eggs' Brobdingnagian⁵ proportions astounded scientists and others in the West. Nature's largest eggs, elephant-bird eggs measure a foot long and nine inches in diameter. (English historian) Mervyn Brown has noted that a single elephant bird egg had a capacity equivalent to 150 hen's eggs and could therefore produce an omelet for fifty people. Complete eggs occasionally still erode out of the desiccated hillsides of the southwest, where local middlemen are becoming more savvy about the astronomical prices the eggs can bring in the West.⁶

In the nineteenth century, scientists bent over backward trying to identify the owner of these remains. One thought it was a diving bird related to the auks and penguins. Another, perhaps a bit too swayed by legends of the Roc, wrote a series of papers aiming to demonstrate it was a giant bird of prey, whose closest living relative was the condor. Eventually scientists settled on the ratites. Today, paleontologists identify between six and a dozen species of Malagasy⁷ elephant bird, in two genera. The smaller Mullerornis species were about the size of an ostrich, while the largest of the Aepyornis species stood ten feet tall and weighed half a ton. These gigantic birds likely filled the browsing niche left empty on Madagascar by the absence of competing large herbivores such as giraffes.

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Notes on this text

1. Admiral �tienne de Flacourt was the first French governor of Madagascar, in the 1640s & 1650s.



2. sic: this is usually rendered "Ampatres" or even "Amphatres" (Malagasy for "marshes") but I don't have Flacourt's account to check it against his original spelling.



3. "Malagasy" refers to the people of the island; though some sources do not make a distinction, I prefer "Madagascan" where refering to aspects of the island that predate Man's arrival.



4. This is somewhat misleading: it implies that St-Hilaire excavated the sub-fossils himself; other sources say that travelers to Madagascar SENT them to him, in Paris. I'm sure he didn't know quite what they were at first, but Richard Owen, the eminent naturalist who coined the term "dinosaur," deduced in 1839 that the Giant Moa of New Zealand was an extinct ratite--and from a single bone, less than the Frenchman had to work with! St-Hilaire formally described Aepyornis maximus on the basis of these finds in 1851, shortly after he received them.



5. "large"--from Brobdingnag, land of the giants, Part II of Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1728).
   
   You DID read that one in school, didn't you...?



6. The Government of Madagascar has something to say about that, too, since they restrict the export of these eggs and all endemic wildlife.



7. See "3" above