A marooned French Huguenot , François Leguat , used the name " solitaire " for the Raphine bird he encountered on the nearby island of Rodrigues in the 1690s , but it is thought he borrowed the name from a 1689 tract by Marquis Henri Duquesne which mentioned the Réunion species . Duquesne himself had probably based his own description on an earlier one . No specimens of the solitaire was ever preserved . The two individuals Carré attempted to send to the royal menagerie in France did not survive in captivity . Billiard claimed that Bertrand @-@ François Mahé de La Bourdonnais sent a " solitaire " to France from Réunion around 1740 . Since the Réunion ibis is believed to have gone extinct by this date , the bird may actually have been a Rodrigues solitaire .