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.
由于不能飞翔，它只得将鸟巢筑在地上，因此它的蛋和幼鸟极易被外来的人带到该岛的猪、狗和猴子捕猎。
It was probably extinct by 1683 and was most certainly gone by 1693.
它大约消失于1683年，到了1693年很可能就完全灭绝了。
Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see its like again.
除此以外，我们几乎对它一无所知，只知道我们再也见不到它了。
We know nothing of its reproductive habits and diet, where it ranged, what sounds it made in tranquility or alarm.
我们不知道它的繁殖习性、饮食特点、它分布的地区、安静时和惊恐时会发出什么样的叫声。
We don't possess a single dodo egg.
我们连一只渡渡鸟蛋也没有保存下来。
From beginning to end our acquaintance with animate dodos lasted just seventy years.
我们与活着的渡渡鸟相伴的时间从头到尾不过70年。
That is a breathtakingly scanty period
这是一段令人吃惊的短暂时间
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.
尽管我们必须说，到我们历史的这个时候，我们在不可逆转地灭绝其他物种方面已经干了数千年。
Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are,
没有人十分清楚人类的破坏性究竟有多大，
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.
但是一个无可回避的事实是，在过去的5000年左右时间里，不论我们走到哪里，那里的动物就容易灭绝，而且往往效量大得惊人。

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2万年前到1万年前，在现代人类到达美洲大陆之后，在那里有30种大型动物——有的确实非常大——简直是一下子消失了。
Altogether North and South America between them lost about three quarters of their big animals
在整个北美洲和南美洲，在那些手持燧石尖矛，
once man the hunter arrived with his flint-headed spears and keen organizational capabilities.
彼此协调配合的猎人的捕杀下，有将近四分之三的大型动物遭遇了灭顶之灾。
Europe and Asia, where the animals had had longer to evolve a useful wariness of humans,
即便在欧洲和亚洲，那里的动物经过长期进化而对人类存有高度的戒心，
lost between a third and a half of their big creatures.
也有三分之一到一半的大型动物灭绝。
Australia, for exactly the opposite reasons, lost no less than 95 percent.
而在澳大利亚，由于那里的动物还没有来得及形成对人类保持警惕的习性，就有不少于95%的大型动物一去不复返。