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Being flightless, it nested on the ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey for pigs, dogs, and monkeys brought to the island by outsiders.
由于不能飛翔，它只得將鳥巢筑在地上，因此它的蛋和幼鳥極易被外來的人帶到該島的豬、狗和猴子捕獵。
It was probably extinct by 1683 and was most certainly gone by 1693.
它大約消失于1683年，到了1693年很可能就完全滅絕了。
Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see its like again.
除此以外，我們幾乎對它一無所知，只知道我們再也見不到它了。
We know nothing of its reproductive habits and diet, where it ranged, what sounds it made in tranquility or alarm.
我們不知道它的繁殖習性、飲食特點、它分布的地區、安靜時和驚恐時會發出什么樣的叫聲。
We don't possess a single dodo egg.
我們連一只渡渡鳥蛋也沒有保存下來。
From beginning to end our acquaintance with animate dodos lasted just seventy years.
我們與活著的渡渡鳥相伴的時間從頭到尾不過70年。
That is a breathtakingly scanty period
這是一段令人吃驚的短暫時間
though it must be said that by this point in our history we did have thousands of years of practice behind us in the matter of irreversible eliminations.
盡管我們必須說，到我們歷史的這個時候，我們在不可逆轉地滅絕其他物種方面已經干了數千年。
Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are,
沒有人十分清楚人類的破壞性究竟有多大，
but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, in often astonishingly large numbers.
但是一個無可回避的事實是，在過去的5000年左右時間里，不論我們走到哪里，那里的動物就容易滅絕，而且往往效量大得驚人。
In America, thirty genera of large animals—some very large indeed—disappeared practically at a stroke after the arrival of modern humans on the continent between ten and twenty thousand years ago.
在2萬年前到1萬年前，在現代人類到達美洲大陸之后，在那里有30種大型動物——有的確實非常大——簡直是一下子消失了。
Altogether North and South America between them lost about three quarters of their big animals
在整個北美洲和南美洲，在那些手持燧石尖矛，
once man the hunter arrived with his flint-headed spears and keen organizational capabilities.
彼此協調配合的獵人的捕殺下，有將近四分之三的大型動物遭遇了滅頂之災。
Europe and Asia, where the animals had had longer to evolve a useful wariness of humans,
即便在歐洲和亞洲，那里的動物經過長期進化而對人類存有高度的戒心，
lost between a third and a half of their big creatures.
也有三分之一到一半的大型動物滅絕。
Australia, for exactly the opposite reasons, lost no less than 95 percent.
而在澳大利亞，由于那里的動物還沒有來得及形成對人類保持警惕的習性，就有不少于95%的大型動物一去不復返。
