Tahiti rail plantations. Its diet appears to have consisted mainly of insects and occasionally copra (coconut meat). The extinction of the Tahiti rail was probably due to predation by humans and introduced cats and rats. It appears to have become extinct some time after 1844 on Tahiti, and perhaps as late as the 1930s on Mehetia. The Tahiti rail was found on the South Pacific island of Tahiti (part of the Society Islands archipelago) by naturalists who were part of the British explorer James Cook's second voyage around the world (1772–1775). The bird was illustrated by Georg Forster, who accompanied his father,
Lapwing (1769 EIC packet) normally brought provisions had not arrived. The famine was the Great Bengal famine of 1770, which killed an estimated 10 million people (a quarter of the population), in the area. It was caused due to the widespread forced cultivation of opium (forced upon local farmers by the EIC as part of its strategy to export it to China) in place of local food crops, resulting in a shortage of grain. Citations References Lapwing (1769 EIC packet) Lapwing was a packet ship that made two round-trips to India for the British East India Company (EAC). Currently, both her origin and her