Last Chance To See Part 12

Oh.

'So you're staying here, right??

'Er...'

We were swaying erratically along, more or less in the middle of the road. Another truck hove into sight ahead of us, frantically flas.h.i.+ng its lights. Richard was still looking round at us.

'Agreed?' he insisted. 'You'll stay?'

'Yes! Yes! We'll stay!'

'Right. Good. I should think so too. You'll get to meet Carl then as well. He's brilliant, but completely mad. Jesus!'

The brilliant but completely, mad. Carl Jones is a tall Welshman in his late thirties, and there are those who say of him that his sheer perverse b.l.o.o.d.y-mindedness is the major thing that stands in the way of the almost total destruction of the ecology of Mauritius. It was Carl that Mark had contacted to make the arrangements for our trip, and it had been quite apparent from the first moment that we set foot on Mauritius that he was a man to contend with. When we told the immigration official at the airport that we would be staying 'with someone called Carl Jones at somewhere called Black River,' it had produced the unexpected and unnerving response of hysterical laughter, and also a friendly pat on the back.

When Carl met us at Richard's house, he greeted us with a scowl, leant in the doorframe, and growled, 'I hate media people.' Then he noticed our tape recorder and suddenly grinned impishly.

'Oh! Is that on? he asked.

'Not at the moment.'

'Turn it on, quick, turn it on!'

We turned it on.

'I really hate media people!' he boomed at it. 'Did you get that? Do you think it'll come out all right?'

He peered at the recorder to make sure the tape really was running.

'You know I once did an interview for Woman's Hour on the radio,' he said, shaking his head in wonderment at the folly of a malign and silly world. 'I hate media people, they take up all my time and don't pay me very much - but anyway... the interviewer said to me that he was sick of boring scientists and could I tell him about my work but be sure to mention women and babies. So I told him that I preferred women field a.s.sistants to men, that we reared lots of baby birds, and that women were better at looking after baby birds because they were more sensitive and all that. And it went out!'

This rendered him speechless with laughter and he tottered helplessly out of the room and was not seen again for hours.

'That was Carl,' said Richard. 'He's great. He's really brilliant. Honestly. Don't worry about him being a complete sod.'

We quickly discovered that we had fallen in with a bunch of pa.s.sionately obsessed people. The first obsession for Carl and for Richard was birds. They loved them with an extraordinary fervour, and had devoted their entire adult lives to working in the field, often in awful conditions and on horribly low budgets, to save rare birds, and the environments they live in, from extinction. Richard had trained in the Philippines, working to save the Philippines monkey-eating eagle, a wildly improbable looking piece of flying hardware that you would more readily expect to see coming in to land on an aircraft carrier than nesting in a tree. From there he had, in 1985, come to Mauritius, where the entire ecology of an island formerly famous for its abundant beauty is in desperate trouble.

They work with a manic energy that is disconcerting for a while until you begin to appreciate the enormity of the problems facing them, and the speed with which those problems are escalating. Ecologically speaking, Mauritius is a war zone and Carl, Richard and others - including Wendy Strahm, an equally obsessed botanist - are like surgeons working just behind the front line. They are immensely kind people, often exhausted by the demands that their caring makes on them. Their impatience often erupts into a kind of wild black humour because, faced with so much that is absolutely critical, they can't afford the time for anything that is merely very, very urgent.

The focus of their work is Carl's captive breeding centre in the village of Black River, and Richard took us along to see it the next day.

We screeched to a halt outside the gate set in a six foot high stone wall and went in.

Inside was a large sandy courtyard, ringed with low wooden buildings, large aviaries and cages. The warm air was rich with the sounds of flapping and cooing and sharp, bracing smells. Several very, very large tortoises were roaming about the centre of the yard completely free, presumably because virtually anybody would be able to beat them to the gate if they suddenly decided to make a break for it.

There you are,' said Richard, pointing at a large cage off to one side in which someone appeared to have hung a number of small broken umbrellas, 'Rodrigues fruitbats. You can relax now, you've seen 'em. Look at them later, they're boring. They're nothing to what else we've got here. Pink pigeons for a start . . . this place has got some of the rarest, s.e.xiest birds in the world. And you want to see the real stars? I'll see if Carl's in. He should be the one to show you.'

He took us for a quick hunt, but Carl wasn't there. There was, however, someone who was besottedly in love with him. Richard beckoned us in.

'This is Pink,' he said.

We looked.

Pink gazed at us intently with his two large, deep brown eyes. He fidgeted a little with his feet, clawing at his perch, and seemed tense, expectant, and slightly irritated to see us.

'Pink's a Mauritius kestrel,' said Richard, 'but he's basically weird.'

'Really?' said Mark. 'Doesn't look it.'

'What does he look like to you?

'Well he's quite small. He's got sleek brown outer plumage on his wings, mottled brown and white breast feathers, impressive set of talons...'

'In other words you think he looks like a bird.'

'Well, yes...'

'He'd be shocked to know you thought that.'

'What do you mean?

'Well, one of the problems with breeding birds in captivity is that they sometimes have to be reared by humans, which leads to all sorts of misunderstandings on the bird's part. When a bird hatches from its egg it doesn't have much of a clear picture of what's what in the world, and it falls in love with the first thing that feeds it, which in Pink's case was Carl. It's called "imprinting" and it's a major problem because you can't undo it. Once he's made up his mind that he's a human, he...'

'He actually thinks he's a human?' I asked.

'Oh yes. Well, if he thinks Carl's his mother it more or less follows, doesn't it? They may not be brilliant, but they're logical. He's quite convinced he's a human. He completely ignores the other kestrels, hasn't got time for them, they're just a bunch of birds as far as he's concerned. But when Carl walks in here he goes completely berserk. It's a problem because, of course, you can't introduce an imprinted bird into the wild, it wouldn't know what the h.e.l.l to do. Wouldn't nest, wouldn't hunt, it would just expect to go to restaurants and stuff. Or at least, it would expect to be fed it wouldn't survive by itself.

'However, he does have a very important function in the aviary.

You see, the young birds that we've hatched here don't come to s.e.xual maturity at the same time, so when the females start getting s.e.xy, the males are not ready to handle it. The females are bigger and more belligerent and often beat the males up. So when that happens, we collect s.e.m.e.n from Pink, and...'

'How do you do that? asked Mark.

'In a hat.'

'I thought you said in a hat.'

'That's right. Carl puts on this special hat, which is a bit like a rather strange bowler hat with a rubber brim, Pink goes mad with desire for Carl, flies down and f.u.c.ks the h.e.l.l out of his hat.'

'What?

'He e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es into the brim. We collect the drop of s.e.m.e.n and use it to inseminate a female.'

'Strange way to treat your mother.'

'He's a strange bird. But he does serve a useful purpose in spite of being psychologically twisted.'

Setting up the captive breeding centre on Mauritius is one of Carl's major failures. in fact it is the result of probably the most spectacular and brilliant failure of his life.

'They always thought I would be a failure when I was a boy,' he told us when he turned up later, incredibly late for something. 'I was hopeless, a complete write-off. Never did any work, wasn't interested in anything at all. Well, anything other than animals. n.o.body at my school in Wales thought it was very useful being only interested in animals, but I had about fifty of them, to my father's despair, in cages all over the backyard. Badgers and foxes, wild Welsh polecats, owls, hawks, macaws, jackdaws, everything. I even managed, just as a schoolboy, to breed kestrels in captivity.

'My headmaster said it was nice that I had an interest, but I would never get anywhere because I was a lousy scholar. One day he called me into his study and said, 'Jones," he said, "this just isn't acceptable. You spend your whole life going around looking under hedges. You spend no time doing your school-work. You're a failure. What are you going to do with yourself?"

'I said - and remember, this was in Wales, "Sir, I want to go to tropical islands and study birds."

'He said, "But to do that you have to be either rich or intelligent and you're neither."

'I took this as some kind of encouragement, finally managed to pa.s.s a few exams, went to college, and when I was an undergraduate I went to a lecture in Oxford by Professor Tom Cade, who's a world authority on falcons. He told us how in America they were working with peregrine falcons by breeding them in captivity and releasing the young back into the wild.

'I couldn't believe it. This was incredibly exciting. Here were these people going out and actually doing something. Then he said that in the Indian Ocean on an island called Mauritius there was a very rare bird, perhaps the rarest of all falcons, called the Mauritius kestrel, which was, at the moment, doomed to extinction, but that it could possibly be saved by captive breeding. And it suddenly came to me that all this work I'd been doing in my back yard as a kid, fiddling round with birds, could actually be used to save a whole species from becoming extinct.

'I was overwhelmed by excitement and I . thought, Christ, I must see if I can do something about this. So in the summer I went to America and studied a number of the projects there, saw how they were doing it, and promised myself that if I possibly could, I'd go to Mauritius and work to save the Mauritius kestrel.

'And they said, "Well, Carl, it's all very well you wanting to go to Mauritius but there's lots of problems out there and you can't save these birds. There just aren't enough of them. just one breeding pair and a couple of other individuals. And with all the local problems and no facilities, it just can't be done. There's a small project there, but it's got to be closed down. It's just throwing good resources after bad."

'But I got the job. The job was to close the project down. That was the job I came here to do, ten years ago, close the whole thing down, what there was of it. None of this was even here then,' he said, looking around at the captive breeding centre in which they had raised over forty Mauritius kestrels for gradual reintroduction to the wild, two hundred pink pigeons, and even a hundred Rodrigues fruitbats. 'I suppose I have to admit,' he said with a naughty smile, 'that I've been a complete failure.'

As he finished his story his hand dropped to his knee and he happened to catch sight of his watch. Instantly a distraught expression came into his face and he jumped to his feet, clapping his hand to his head. He was late for a fund raising meeting.

We heard him complain regularly and bitterly during our time on Mauritius that he was no good at administration or politics, and yet to keep his work going he had to spend an awful lot of time doing both. He had constantly to work raising money, justifying and accounting for the money he gets to the people he gets it from, and negotiating with the various international conservation bodies who seem to watch over his shoulder all the time. As far as he's concerned it just prevents him from doing the work he's best able to do, and he wishes they'd leave him alone and let him get on with it. Or rather, give him the money and then leave him alone and let him get on with it. The whole project, to save the fragile and unique ecology of Mauritius, is run on a pathetically meagre budget, and money - or the lack of it - is the bane of Carl's life. He left in a hara.s.sed fl.u.s.ter.

'You'd think that everyone involved in conservation work would be on the same side,' said Mark after he'd gone, 'but there's just as much squabbling and bureaucracy as there is in anything else.'

'You're telling me,' said Richard. 'And it's always the workers out in the field who get mucked about by it. Look at these rabbits.'

With a contemptuous wave of his hand he showed us a cage in which a few perfectly ordinary looking rabbits sat twitching at us.

'There's an island near here - a very, very important island as far as wildlife is concerned - called Round Island. There are more unique species of plants and animals on Round Island than there are on any equivalent area on earth. About a hundred, hundred and fifty years ago somebody had the bright idea of introducing rabbits and goats to the island so if anybody got s.h.i.+pwrecked there they'd have something to eat. The populations quickly got out of hand and it wasn't until the mid-seventies that they managed to get rid of the goats. Then just a few years ago a team from New Zealand came to exterminate the rabbits, until someone realised that they were exterminating a rare breed of French rabbit that didn't exist any more in Europe and it should therefore be transferred to mainland Mauritius and preserved in some way, i.e. by us.

'As far as I'm concerned,' continued Richard, 'we could just put them in the pot. They're just ordinary rabbits. Also, since then someone has come along and said, "That's a load of rubbish - these aren't that particular variety."

'So we've just got to sit here feeding these rabbits until the rabbit experts have decided whether they're valuable or not. It's a waste of our time and resources. I mean just feeding all these animals is a problem. They all need something different and you have to work out what it is.

These Rodrigues fruitbats you've come to see, we have to feed them on a mixture of fruit and powdered dog food reconst.i.tuted with milk. They used to be fed a diet rich in banana which did them no good at all and only gave them a nervous tic.' He shrugged.

'I don't know what you've got against them,' said Mark, 'I think they're great animals.'

'I've nothing against them. They're great. They're just common that's all.'

Mark protested, 'It's the rarest fruitbat in...'

'Yeah, but there are hundreds of them,' insisted Richard.

'Hundreds means they're severely endangered!' said Mark.

'Do you know how many echo parakeets there are in the wild? exclaimed Richard, 'Fifteen! That's rare. Hundreds is common. When you come to Mauritius and you see things in such a last ditch state, everything else becomes unimportant. It becomes unimportant because we're witnessing here a species which could be saved if people put their minds to it, and if it does go extinct it will be our fault because we never got around to saving it. There's fifteen of them left. We've got the kestrels up and the pigeons up purely because of the effort we've put into them, the money and the personnel. The parakeets? We're working very, very hard to save them, and if we don't manage it they will be gone for ever, and we have to worry about somebody else's rabbits.'

He shook his head, and then calmed down.

'Listen,' he said to Mark. 'You're right. The Rodrigues fruitbat is a very important animal, and we are working to protect it. It's lost a lot of its habitat because the people of Rodrigues live by subsistence farming which means that they've done a lot of forest clearance. The bat population is so reduced that one big cyclone - and we get them here - could wipe them out. But the Rodriguans have suddenly realised that it's actually damaging their own interests to cut down the forest, because it's reducing their water supply. If they want to preserve their watersheds they have to preserve the forests, which means the bats get somewhere to live. So they're in with a chance. By the world's standards they're severely endangered, but by the standards of these islands where every indigenous species is endangered, they're doing fine.'

He grinned.

'Want to see some endangered mice? he said.

'I didn't think mice were an endangered species yet,' I said.

'I didn't say anything about the species,' said Richard. 'I just meant the particular mice. Conservation is not for the squeamish. We have to kill a lot of animals, partly to protect the species that are endangered, and partly to feed them. A lot of the birds are fed on mice, so we have to breed them here.'

He disappeared 'into a small, warm, squeaking room and re-emerged a few seconds later with a handful of freshly killed mice.

'Time to feed the birds,' he said, heading back towards the Landrover from h.e.l.l.

The best and quickest road to the Black River gorges where the kestrels live is a private one through the Medine sugar estate.

Sugar, from the point of view of the ecology of Mauritius, is a major problem. Vast swathes of the Mauritius forest have been destroyed to provide s.p.a.ce to grow a cash crop which in turn destroys our teeth. This is serious anywhere, but on an island it is a very special problem, because island ecologies are fundamentally different to mainland ones. They even have a different vocabulary. When you spend much time on islands with naturalists you will tend to hear two words in particular an awful lot: 'endemic' and 'exotic'. Three if you count 'disaster'.

An 'endemic' species of plant or animal is one that is native to an island or region and is found nowhere else at all. An 'exotic' species is one that has been introduced from abroad, and a disaster is usually what results when this occurs.

The reason is this: continental land ma.s.ses are big. They support hundreds of thousands, even millions, of different species, each of which is competing with another for survival. The sheer ferocity of the compet.i.tion for survival is immense, and it means that the species that do survive and flourish are mean little fighters. They grow faster and throw out a lot more seeds.

An island, on the other hand, is small. There are far fewer species, and the compet.i.tion for survival has never reached anything like the pitch that it does on the mainland. Species are only as tough as they need to be, life is much quieter and more settled, and evolution proceeds at a much slower rate. This is why you find on, for instance, Madagascar, species like the lemurs that were overwhelmed aeons ago on the mainland. Island ecologies are fragile time capsules.

So you can imagine what happens when a mainland species gets introduced to an island. It would be like introducing AI Capone, Genghis Khan and Rupert Murdoch into the Isle of Wight - the locals wouldn't stand a chance.

So what happens on Mauritius, or indeed any island, is that when endemic vegetation or animals are destroyed for any reason, the exotic forms leap into the breach and take over. It's hard for an Englishman to think of something like privet as being an exotic and ferocious life form - my grandmother has neatly trimmed privet bushes lining her front garden - but in Mauritius it behaves like a bunch of marauding triffids. So does the introduced guava and numerous other foreign invaders, which grow much more quickly and produce many more seeds.

Black ebony comes from the lowland hardwood forests of Mauritius, which is why the Dutch first colonised the island. There's hardly any of it left now. The reasons for the forest being cut down include straightforward logging, clearing s.p.a.ce for cash crops, and another reason: deer hunting. Le Cha.s.se.

Vast tracts of forest have been cleared to make game parks, in which hunters stand on short wooden towers and shoot at herds of deer that are driven past them. As if the original loss of the forest were not bad enough - and for such a reason - the grazing habits of the deer keep the fragile endemic plants from regrowing, while the exotic species thrive in their place. Young Mauritian trees are simply nibbled to death.

We pa.s.sed through huge fields of swaying sugar cane, having first negotiated our way past the sugar estate's gate keeper, an elderly and eccentric Mauritian called James who will not let anybody through his gate without a permit, even someone he's let through every day for ten years but who has accidentally left his permit at home that day. He did this to Carl recently, who since then has been threatening to superglue the gate shut in revenge, and it's quite possible that he will. Carl is clearly the sort of person who will get as many laughs as he can from a situation by threatening to do something silly and then try and get a few more by actually doing it.

There was a more serious confrontation a little while earlier when Carl and Wendy arrived with a party of officials from the World Bank from whom they were negotiating some financial support. James wouldn't let them in on the grounds that they had two cars and he was only authorised to let in one.

James also reports to Carl and Richard regularly about the movements of the kestrels, not because they've asked him to but just because, other evidence to the contrary, he likes to help. If he hasn't actually seen any kestrels he'll still, in a friendly and encouraging sort of a way, say that he has. This means that now, whenever Carl has to change the coloured bands the kestrels wear round their legs, he makes a point of putting on a different colour so that he will know James is lying if he claims to have seen a kestrel with a band that doesn't exist.

The kestrel we were going to see had been trained to take mice in 1985. The purpose of feeding kestrels in the wild was to b.u.mp up their diet and encourage them to lay more eggs. If a kestrel was well fed then Carl could take the first clutch of eggs the bird laid from its nest and back to the breeding centre, confident that the kestrel would simply lay some more. In this way they were increasing the number of eggs that might hatch, but there was a limit to the number of birds available to sit on them, so they had to be incubated artificially. This is a highly skilled and delicate task and requires constant monitoring of the egg's condition. If an egg is losing weight too rapidly, by evaporation of liquid through its sh.e.l.l, then portions of the sh.e.l.l are sealed. If it is not losing enough, then portions of the sh.e.l.l are meticulously sanded to make it more porous. It is best if an egg can have one week under a real bird and the other three in the incubator - eggs which have been swapped around like that have a much higher success rate.

Richard yanked the Landrover to a halt on the edge of the forest near the bottom of the gorge and we piled out of it. The air was brisk and clear, and Richard strode about the small clearing making an odd a.s.sortment of calling noises.

Within a minute or two the kestrel came zipping through the forest and perched itself up in a high tree overlooking a large hemispherical rock. Since the bird is adapted to living in the forest rather than the open land, it does not hover like many falcons, but can instead fly at great speeds unerringly through the forest canopy, where it catches its food of geckos, smaller birds and insects. For this it relies on having fantastically keen and fast eyesight.

We watched it for a while and it watched us intently. In fact it watched everything that moved, glancing rapidly in one direction after another with constant attention.

'See the way it's so interested in everything it can see? said Richard. 'It lives by its eyes, and you have to remember that when you keep them in captivity. You must make sure they have a complex environment. Birds of prey are comparatively stupid. But because they've got such incredible vision you've got to have things that will keep them occupied visually.

'When we originally started breeding birds of prey in captivity we brought in some very, skittish birds and whenever anybody went past the aviary the birds just went mad, and we thought they must be upset by the disturbance, so someone came up with the bright idea of what's called a skylight and seclusion aviary. All four walls were opaque and just the roof was, open so that there was no disturbance for the birds. But what we found was that we'd overdone it. The offspring that were born in those environments were basket cases because they hadn't got the sensory input they needed. We'd got it completely the wrong way round.