The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Graham Cowles
Head of birds at the Natural History Museum who unearthed the fabled ‘white dodo’ of Réunion
GRAHAM COWLES, the pal ae ornithologist who has died aged 92, was head of bird collections at the Natural History Museum. In 1974, on the island of Réunion, he discovered the remains of an extinct semi-flightless bird that proved pivotal in solving the mystery of the quasi-mythical “white dodo”.
The Mascarene islands – lofty and volcanic Réunion, flattish Mauritius and tiny Rodrigues – had been visited by Dutch sailors at the start of the 17th century. On Mauritius, they found a friendly, fat, hapless, greyish bird which they called the walckvogel, or doederssen (perhaps meaning “sluggardly”).
It came to be called “the dodo”, and the speed with which the hungry settlers with their dogs and rats snuffed it out made it legendary – a disturbing symbol of man’s power to reshape what had been believed to be God’s immutable creation. But according to Lost Land of the Dodo: an ecological history of Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues (2008) by Anthony Cheke and Julian Hume, the other two islands had their own dodo-like birds, which met with the same fate. On Rodrigues, there was the solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria), a close kin of the dodo (Raphus cucullatus), both descended (scientists eventually agreed) from the pigeon family, dodos and solitaires forming the sub-family raphinae. The flightless Rodrigues solitaire was carefully described and drawn by the French naturalist François Leguat, when he was stranded there for two years.
On Réunion, there was also a fat and semi-flightless species of bird that made excellent eating, but reports were fragmentary and contradictory. In 1613,
John Tatton reported a “great fowl the bigness of a turkie, very fat, and so shortwinged that they cannot flie, beeing white”.
The Dutch adventurer Willem Bontekoe, in 1619, saw on Réunion “dodos that had small wings... so far they could scarcely move and as they walked they dragged their back end on the ground.” The French named them “solitaires because they always go alone”.
Mauritian dodos could be transported alive to Europe, but not the Réunion solitaires: “as soon as they were in the vessel they died of melancholy, not wanting to drink or eat,” wrote the Abbé Carré.
The Réunion solitaire, later speculatively named Raphus solitarius, was extinct by around 1705, outlasting the dodo by only 30 years; the Rodrigues solitaire went the same way in 1770. But whereas there were dodo and Rodrigues solitaire bones aplenty, there was nothing substantial on which to base the travellers’ descriptions of the Réunion solitaire, which mutated in myth – eventually becoming conflated with a painting of a white dodo, and generating a huge quantity of scientific debate and some wildly imaginative taxidermic reconstructions.
For 200 years, Réunion’s “white dodo” was accepted as scientific fact, and was given lavish billing in Walter Rothschild’s 1907 Extinct Birds. Then, in 1974, Graham Cowles discovered “a distal part of a metatarsus” near St Paul on Réunion, in caves that had been inhabited by the island’s earliest French settlers in the 17th century. He speculated that it was a kind of massive, man-sized stork, a new species of Ciconia.
In 1994, Cowles reidentified the bone as belonging to a type of ibis – and his fellow ornithologist Anthony Cheke raised the ghost of the Réunion solitaire. Various bone fragments discovered in 1987 by French palaeontologists then came together with his find to solve the “white dodo” mystery. The solitary, fat, semi-flightless bird that had graced so many 17th-century cooking pots on Réunion had been an ibis all along. It was named Threskiornis solitarius.
On the same 1974 expedition, Cowles also recovered fragments of the saddle-backed Mauritius giant tortoise (Cylindraspis inepta), a friendly beast eaten to extinction in the 18th century, and various now-extinct birds known only from travellers’ descriptions: the Réunion sheldgoose (Alopochen kervazoi); the Réunion kestrel (Falco duboisi); and the Rodrigues bulbul, named Hypsipetes cowlesi in his honour.
The mythical white dodo, however, proved hard to kill: it even resurfaced in a definitive 2001 work on pigeons.
Graham Stewart Cowles, the oldest of three siblings, was born on June 27 1931 at Harpenden, Hertfordshire, where he lived for the rest of his life. His father, William, was a company secretary; his mother, Helen, a milliner. As a child, he cared for injured birds, and loved the sea and sailing.
He joined the Bird Section of the National History Museum in 1949 as an assistant, interrupted in 1950 by two years’ National Service in the Royal Army Service Corps at Fort Victoria on the Isle of Wight. In 1963, in the acacia scrubland of Queensland in eastern Australia, he discovered Hall’s babbler (Pomatostomus halli), which he named after Major Harold Wesley Hall, the philanthropist who had funded the expedition. He also described, in 1980, a new type of collared kingfisher, Todiramphus chloris kalbaensis, found in the UAE and Oman.
In 1971, he transferred with the bird collections to the Natural History Museum’s Tring outpost (then known as the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum), and became Senior Scientific Officer in 1977. On the retirement of ICJ Galbraith in 1985, he took charge of the bird collections until his own retirement in 1991.
Graham Cowles was adept at the piano and organ, and played the drums for the local pantomime, in the spirit of the old-time musical hall, doing all the special effects with aplomb. He was also in a jazz band called the Stackyard Stompers.
He was a natural gentleman, with an anecdote for anyone. He never married, but for a long time his companion was Jean, who worked in the Natural History Museum mammal department.