GLEN VAUDREY: Dancing Dodo

It isn’t that often that you find a cryptozoology-related advert but there are some and one of the best is the dancing dodo.

It all started with the strains of Don Fardon’s cracking tune ‘I’m Alive’ and lo and behold, there pops up a dancing dodo. Short of a juggling great auk, what could be better?

The dodo is one of the better known extinct birds and going from the one in the advert, it was also a great dancer.

Sadly, back in the in the real world the dodo was a bulky flightless bird of the Solitaire family, renowned for its clumsy movements, which would make a dancing dodo rather special; of course nowhere near as special as a living dodo as the last of its kind was reported to have died on Mauritius in the 1690s.

So it would seem rather surprising that there have been a number of reported sightings of this remarkable bird within living memory. The earliest of these sightings date from the 1930s when natives of Mauritius told Lawrence Green that the birds still could be found in caves and mountains in the remote parts of the country.

But there have been further reports not nearly so long ago. In the 1990s there started to appear reports of dodo-like birds walking along the beach in the Plain Champagne area. Whether these sightings consisted of live dodos or a related species is still open to question.

If you haven’t seen the dancing dodo it is worth tracking down, and if you haven't heard the song that is certainly worth tracking down too.