SOLITAIRE, Pezopliaps, a genus of birds of the Dodo (q.v ) family (DiAlitus), but differing from the dodos in a smaller bill and longer legs. Like the dodos, the only species of this genus, of the existence of which there is any evidence (P. solitaria), seems to be now extinct, and to have become extinct in very recent times. It inhabited the island of Rodriguez, an island about 15 m. long by 6 broad, situated about NO in. to the e. of Mauritius, and appears to have been peculiar to that small and lonely island, where it wasabundant at the beginning of the 18th century. Rodriguez was uninhabited till 1691, when a colony of French Protestant refugees settled on it, under the command of Francois Leguat, who, in his Voyages et Adventures, has left an interesting and trust worthy account of the solitaire. He describes it as a large bird, the males sometimes weighing 45 lbs.; taller than a turkey, the neck a little longer in proportion. and carried erect; the head of the male without comb or crest, that of ,the female with something like a widow's peak above the bill; the wings small, and the bird incapable of flying, but only using the wings to flap itself or to flutter when calling for its mate, or as is weapon of offense or defense; the bone of the wing being thickened at the extremity so as to form a round mass, about the size of a musket-bullet, under the feathers, and to increase the force of the blow given by it; a roundish mass of feathers it-stead of a tail. He
further describes the plumage as very full and beautiful, not a feather out of its place, so there can have been no feathers with unconnected webs, as in the ostrich. He says the bird is called solitaire because it is very seldom seen in flocks. He tells us that the bird is with difficulty caught in the forests, but easily on open grAnd, because it can be outrun by a man; and that its flesh is very good to eat —But the solitaire seems to have completely disappeared from Rodriguez, which is now a British settlement. Bones have been found, although not yet abundantly, and some are preserved iu the Paris Museum, some in the Andersonism Museum, Glasgow.
The figure here given is derived from a rude cut in Leguat's work. and its general accuracy is attested byits correspondence with small figures introduced in is landscape and two maps in that work.
The name solitaire was originally given to a species of dodo Bourbon. and applied by Leguat to this bird, in a mistaken belief of its being the sense. See Strickland and Melville on the Dodo and its Kindred.