Island Hideaway 9 - First Sighting​

I'd lived on the island for nearly a month before I saw the dodos.​​
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I'd heard their cry, obviously, but never knew what it was. It was an island, a wildlife zone, who knew what lived there, I wasn't Tarzan, I couldn't tell the cry of an angry bear from a badger calling its mates for a party. ​​
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I was sitting in the mass of undergrowth (more like overgrowth) that I called my front garden, though at that time I hadn't cleared it and it was exactly the same as the rest of the island. I was staring in front of myself, focusing my mind on an article I'd been commissioned to write (about cooking for a Turkish lesbian visitor) when I saw what looked like a small turkey waddle into a bush. ​​
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Turkeys.​​
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People ate turkeys, I thought. Then I realised that that would involve killing the turkey myself, ripping out my victim's innards and feathers, cooking it and eating it, eating the thing that I had killed. ​​
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People breed turkeys, I thought. Catch a couple, a breeding pair, and in no time at all I have a third income. With a turkey-based income (see what I did there) I could say 'no' to impossible commissions, like cooking for a Turkish lesbian (I was new to the game then, now I can rattle off a hundred Turkish lesbian meals without pausing for breath.​
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I remembered the cage, the one I'd recently cleared from the room that was full of rubbish that I'd christened 'the rubbish room', then rechristened it the 'no longer rubbish room'. I fetched the cage from the 'no longer rubbish room' and stood there, holding a cage, with absolutely no idea what to do with it.​​
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A bucket.​​
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I could catch the turkey in a bucket, I reasoned, then transfer the turkey from the bucket to the cage. I had a bucket, it was a key ally in my fight against dirt, second only in importance to my mop. ​​
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Of course, having returned with a bucket I realised that a bucket was no use at all in catching a bird in a bush. What I needed was some wire netting with which to surround the bush, before making my approach. Luckily, I had found some wire netting in the shed. ​​
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Had the bird been a turkey it would have moved on long before I returned with the netting I had found in what I liked to call 'the room with lots of things that are probably junk but some of which might be useful room'. Much of my first year was spent naming the various rooms in the house, as, having used 'the rubbish room' for the first room full of rubbish I was pushed to find alternatives for all the other rooms full of rubbish. ​​
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But it wasn't a turkey. It was a dodo, so it didn't go anywhere, it was busy hiding.​​
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The dodos on my island are smaller than their Madagascan cousins, just a foot from beak to tail. Their nests are invisible to the naked eye. The mechanics of their nest closely resemble modern ideas for making cars invisible by the use of light-reflecting and absorbing materials, but in this case, honed by evolution, it actually works. Governments would give billions for the secret, but of course they don't know about it, they're invisible, so governments keep away along with the rest of the universe, hence my dodos lived and their Madagascan cousins became lunch for some long-forgotten sailors.​​
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The dodos' mating ritual is a game of hide and seek, the female doing the hiding and the male seeking. It can take weeks, or in some cases months, the females are brilliant at hiding, but when they do eventually get found you can hear the resultant noisy copulation for miles around. In older times, the island was rumoured to be the home of some great, but invisible monster, whose howls could be heard for miles and miles around. But it wasn't monsters, I would discover, it was dodos. ​​
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Of course, at the time I had no idea it was a dodo. I managed to catch the animal in in my chicken-wire/net/bucket/cage system, mostly because it had fallen asleep.  I put it in the cage and took it into the house, where I spent many fruitless hours trying to google the species.  It wasn't a turkey, it was, I realised far more important than a turkey. It was the first living dodo anyone had seen for hundreds of years.​​
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The implications of this were manifold, but primarily, on a personal level, it meant that I could never sell or rent the island now, if I did they would be driven to extinction all over again. Because though I believe in evolution on one level, on another level I'm pretty sure that mankind will never change.​​
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