Last Chance To See Part 7

Here's what they do: The male kakapo builds himself a track and bowl system, which is simply a roughly dug shallow depression in the earth, with one or two pathways leading through the undergrowth towards it. The only thing that distinguishes the tracks from those that would be made by any other animal blundering its way about is that the vegetation on either side of them is rather precisely clipped.

The kakapo is looking for good acoustics when he does this, so the track and bowl system will often be sited against a rock facing out across a valley, and when the mating season arrives he sits in his bowl and booms.

This is an extraordinary performance. He puffs out two enormous air sacs on either side of his chest, sinks his head down into them and starts to make what he feels are s.e.xy grunting noises. These noises gradually descend in pitch, resonate in his two air sacs and reverberate through the night air, filling the valleys for miles around with the eerie sound of an immense heart beating in the night.

The booming noise is deep, very deep, just on. the threshold of what you can actually hear and what you can feel. This means that it carries for a very great distances, but that you can't tell where it's coming from. If you're familiar with certain types of stereo set-up, you'll know that you can get an additional speaker called a sub-woofer which carries only the ba.s.s frequencies and which you can, in theory, stick anywhere in the room, even behind the sofa. The principle is the same - you can't tell where the ba.s.s sound is coming from.

The female kakapo can't tell where the booming is coming from either, which is something of a shortcoming in a mating call. 'Come and get me!' 'Where are you?? 'Come and get me!' 'Where the h.e.l.l are you?' 'Come and get me!' 'Look, do you want me to come or not?' 'Come and get me!' 'Oh, for heaven's sake.' 'Come and get me!' 'Go and stuff yourself,' is roughly how it would go in human terms.

As it happens the male has a wide variety of other noises it can make as well, but we don't know what they're all for. Well, I only know what I'm told, of course, but zoologists who've studied the bird for years say they don't know what it's all in aid of. The noises include a high frequency, metallic, nasal 'ching' noise, humming, bill-clicking, 'scrarking' (scrarking is simply what it sounds like - the bird goes 'scrark' a lot), 'screech-crowing', pig-like grunts and squeals, duck-like 'warks' and donkey-like braying. There are also the distress calls that the young make when they trip over something or fall out of trees, and these make up yet another wide range of long-drawn-out, vibrant, complaining croaks.

I've heard a tape of collected kakapo noises, and it's almost impossible to believe that it all just comes from a bird, or indeed any kind of animal. Pink Floyd studio out-takes perhaps, but not a parrot.

Some of these other noises get heard in the later stages of courts.h.i.+p. The chinging for instance, which doesn't carry so well, is very directional and can help any females that have been aroused by night after night of booming (it sometimes goes on for seven hours a night for up to three months) to find a mate. This doesn't always work, though. Females in breeding condition have been known to turn up at completely unoccupied bowls, wait around for a while, and then go away again.

It's not that they're not willing. When they are in breeding condition, their s.e.x drive is extremely strong. One female kakapo is known to have walked twenty miles in one night to visit a mate, and then walked back again in the morning. Unfortunately, however, the period during which the female is prepared to behave like this is rather short. As if things aren't difficult enough already, the female can only come into breeding condition when a particular plant, the podocarp for instance, is bearing fruit. This only happens every two years. Until it does, the male can boom all he likes, it won't do him any good. The kakapo's pernickety dietary requirements are a whole other area of exasperating difficulty. It makes me tired just to think of them, so I think we'll pa.s.s quickly over all that. Imagine being an airline steward trying to serve meals to a plane full of Moslems, Jews, vegetarians, vegans and diabetics when all you've got is turkey because it's Christmas time, and that will give you the idea.

The males therefore get extremely overwrought sitting in their bowls making noises for months on end, waiting for their mates who are waiting for a particular type of tree to fruit. When one of the rangers who was working in an area where kakapos were booming happened to leave his hat on the ground, he came back later to find a kakapo attempting to ravish it. On another occasion the discovery of some ruffled possum fur in the mating area suggested that a kakapo had made another alarming mistake, an experience which is unlikely to have been satisfying to either party.

The net result of all these months of excavating and booming and walking and scrarking and being fussy about fruit is that once every three or four years the female kakapo lays one single egg which promptly gets eaten by a stoat.

So the big question is: How on earth has the kakapo managed to last this long?

Speaking as a non-zoologist confronted with this bird I couldn't help but wonder if nature, freed from the constraints of having to produce something that would survive a great deal of compet.i.tion, wasn't simply making it up as it went along. Doodling in fact. 'How about sticking this bit in? Can't do any harm, might be quite entertaining.'

In fact the kakapo is a bird that in some ways reminds me of the British motorbike industry. It had things its own way for so long that it simply became eccentric. The motorbike industry didn't respond to market forces because it wasn't particularly aware of them. It built a certain number of motorbikes and a certain number of people bought them and that was that. It didn't seem to matter much that they were noisy, complicated to maintain, sprayed oil all over the place and had their own very special way, as T.E. Lawrence discovered at the end of his life, of going round corners. That was what motorbikes did, and if you wanted a motorbike, that was what you got. End of story. And, of course, it very nearly was the end of the story for the British industry when the j.a.panese suddenly got the idea that motorbikes didn't have to be that way. They could be sleek, they could be clean, they could be reliable and well-behaved. Maybe then a whole new world of people would buy them, not just those whose idea of fun was spending Sunday afternoon in the shed with an oily rag, or marching on Aqaba.

These highly compet.i.tive machines arrived in the British Isles (again, it's island species that have never learnt to compete hard. I know that j.a.pan is a bunch of islands too but for the purposes of this a.n.a.logy I'm cheerfully going to ignore the fact) and British motorbikes almost died out overnight.

Almost, but not quite. They were kept alive by a bunch of enthusiasts who felt that though ,the Nortons and Triumphs might be difficult and curmudgeonly beasts, they had guts and immense character and the world would be a much poorer place without them. They have been through a lot of difficult changes in the last decade or so but have now re-emerged, re-engineered as highly prized, bike-lovers' bikes. I think this a.n.a.logy is now in serious danger of breaking down, so perhaps I had better abandon it.

A few days earlier I had had a dream. I dreamt that I awoke to find myself lying on a remote beach spreadeagled on huge round pink and pale blue boulders and unable to move, my head filled with the slow roar of the sea. I awoke from this dream to find myself lying spreadeagled on huge round pink and pale blue boulders on a beach and dazed with confusion. I couldn't move because my camera bag was slung around my neck and jammed behind a boulder.

I struggled to my feet and looked out to sea, trying to work out where on earth I was and if I was still embroiled in a recursion of dreams. Perhaps I was still on a plane going somewhere and was just watching an in-flight movie. I looked around for a stewardess but there was no one coming along the beach with a tray of drinks. I looked down at my boots and that seemed to trigger something in my head. The last clear memory that came to mind of looking closely at my boots was after emerging from a bog in Zaire when they were sodden with African mud. I looked around nervously. There were no rhinoceroses on the beach either. The beach was clearly not in Zaire because Zaire is landlocked and doesn't have them. I looked at my boots again. They seemed oddly clean. How had that happened? I remembered someone taking my boots away from me and cleaning them. Why would anyone do that? And who? An airport came swimming back to me and I remembered being questioned about my boots and where I had been with them. Zaire, I said. They took my boots away and returned them to me a few minutes later spotlessly clean and glistening with disinfectant. I remembered thinking at the time that any time I wanted to have my boots really cleaned properly I should remember to fly to New Zealand again. New Zealand. They were quite naturally paranoiac about any foreign bacteria being imported into one of the most isolated and unspoilt countries in the world. I tried to remember flying out of New Zealand and couldn't. Therefore, I must still be in New Zealand. Good. I'd narrowed it down a bit. But where?

I stumbled a little woozily up the beach, clambering over the boulders of quietly hallucinatory colours, and then from my new vantage point saw Mark away in the distance on his knees and peering into an old log.

'Moulting little blue penguin,' he said when at last I reached him.

'What? I said. 'Where?

'In the log,' he said. 'Look.'

I peered into the log. A small pair of black eyes peered anxiously back at me from out of a dark ball of ruffled blue fluff.

I sat back heavily on a rock.

'Very nice,' I said. 'Where are we?

Mark grinned. 'I thought you seemed a bit jet-lagged,' he said. 'You've been asleep for about twenty minutes.'

'OK,' I said, irritably, 'but where are we? I think I've narrowed it down to New Zealand.'

'Little Barrier Island,' he said. 'Remember? We came here this morning by helicopter.'

'Ah,' l said, 'so that answers my next question. It's the afternoon, yes?

'Yes,' said Mark. 'It's about four o'clock and we are expected for tea.'

I looked up and down the beach again, thunderstruck by this idea.'

'Tea?' I said.

With Mike and Dobby.'

'Well just pretend you know them when we get there because you spent an hour chatting to them this morning.'

'I did?

'Dobby is the warden of the island.'

'And Mike??

'His wife.'

'I see.' I thought for a bit. 'I know,' I said, suddenly. 'We've come to look for the kakapo. Yes?

'Correct.'

'Will we find one here?'

'Doubt it.'

'Then remind me. Why are we here?

'Because this is one of the only two places where there are definitely kakapos living.'

'But we probably won't find one.'

No.

'But we will at least get some tea.'

'Yes.'

'Well, let's go and get some. Tell me all about it again on the way. But slowly.'

'OK,' said Mark. He took a few last pictures of the little blue penguin, a bird which I was destined never to find out anything more about, packed away his Nikons, and together we set off back to the warden's lodge.

'Now that New Zealand is riddled with predators of all kinds,' said Mark, 'the only possible refuge for kakapos is on islands -and protected islands at that. Stewart Island, in the south, where one or two kakapos are still found, is inhabited and no longer even remotely safe. Any kakapos that are found there are trapped and airlifted to Codfish Island which is just nearby. They are studied and protected there. In fact they are so well protected that there's a certain amount of doubt at the moment about whether we'll even be allowed to go there. Apparently there's some furore going on at DOC about...'

'The New Zealand Department of Conservation. There's a disagreement about whether to let us go there. On the one hand there's a feeling that we might do some good by getting some publicity for the project, and on the other there's a feeling that the birds should not be disturbed on any account. There's only one person available who could help us find the bird and he doesn't want to take us at all.'

'Who is he?

'A freelance kakapo tracker called Arab.'

'I see.'

'He has a kakapo-tracking dog.'

'Hmm. Sounds like the sort of person we need. Is there a lot of work for freelance kakapo trackers? I mean, there aren't a lot of kakapos to track, are there?

'Forty. In fact there are three or four kakapo trackers...'

'And three or four kakapo-tracking dogs?

'Exactly. The dogs are specially trained to sniff out the kakapos. They wear muzzles so that they won't harm the birds. They've been used to trap the kakapos on Stewart Island so that they can then be airlifted to Codfish Island and here to Little Barrier Island by helicopter. First time any of the species have flown at all for thousands, perhaps millions, of years.'

'What does a kakapo tracker do when there aren't any kakapos that need tracking?

'Kills cats.'

'Out of frustration?

'No. Codfish Island was infested with feral cats. In other words cats that have returned to the wild.'

'I always think that's an artificial distinction. I think all cats are wild cats. They just act tame if they think they'll get a saucer of milk out of it. So they kill cats on Codfish Island?

'Killed them. Every last one. And all the possums and stoats. Anything that moved and wasn't a bird, essentially. It's not very pleasant, but that's how the island was originally, and that's the only way kakapos can survive - in exactly the environment that New Zealand had before man arrived. With no predators. They did the same here on Little Barrier island too.'

At that moment something happened which I found a little startling, until I realised that it had already happened once that day, only in my befuddled jet-lagged state I had completely forgotten about it.

Coming from the beach we had trudged through thick undergrowth and along rough muddy tracks, across a couple of fields full of sheep, and suddenly emerged into a garden. Not just a garden, but a garden that was meticulously mown and manicured, with immaculate flower beds, well-kempt trees and shrubs, rockeries, and a little stream with a natty little bridge over it. The effect was that of walking into a slightly suburban Garden of Eden, as if on the Eighth Day G.o.d had suddenly got going again and started creating Flymos, secateurs, and those things I can never remember the name of but which are essentially electrically driven pieces of string.

And there, stepping out on to the lawn was Mike, the warden's wife, with a tray full of tea things, which I fell upon with loud exclamations of delight and h.e.l.lo.

Meanwhile, I had lost Mark altogether. He was standing only a few feet away, but he had gone into a glazed trance which I decided I would go and investigate after I had got to grips with some serious tea. He was probably looking at the birds, of which there seemed to be quite a lot in the garden. I chatted cheerfully to Mike, reintroduced myself to her as the vaguely Neanderthal creature she had probably encountered lumbering in a lost daze from the helicopter that morning, and asked her how she coped with living, as she and Dobby had done for eleven and a half years, entirely isolated on this island apart from the occasional nature-loving tourist.

She explained that they had quite a few nature-loving tourists a day, and the worry was that there were too many of them. It was so horribly easy to introduce predators on to the island by mistake, and the damage would be very serious. The tourists who came on organised trips could be managed quite carefully, but the danger came from people coming over to the island on boats and setting up barbies on the beach. All it would take would be a couple of rats or a pregnant cat and the work of years would be undone.

I was surprised at the thought that anybody thinking of taking a barbecue to an island beach would necessarily think of including a pregnant cat in their party, but she a.s.sured me that it could happen very easily. And virtually every type of boat has rats aboard.

She was a cheerful, sprightly and robust woman, and I very much suspected that the iron will which had been imposed on the rugged terrain of the island to turn this acre of it into a ferociously manicured garden was hers.

Gaynor emerged from the neat white clapboard house at this moment with Dobby, whom she had been interviewing on tape. Dobby had originally come to the island eleven and a half years earlier as part of the cat-killing programme and stayed on as warden of the reserve, a post from which he was going to have to retire in eighteen months. He was not looking forward to this at all. From where they were standing, in their domain of miniature paradise, a little house in a mainland town seemed desperately constrained and humdrum.

We chatted for a while more and then Gaynor approached Mark to record a description of the garden on to tape, but he gestured her curtly away and returned to the trance he had been in for several minutes now.

This seemed rather odd behaviour from Mark, who was usually a man of mild and genial manners, and I asked him what was up. He muttered something briefly about birds and continued to ignore us.

I looked around again. There certainly were a lot of birds in the garden.

I have to make a confession here, and it's going to sound a little odd coming from someone who has travelled twelve thousand miles and back to visit a parrot, but I am actually not tremendously excited by birds. There are all sorts of things about birds that I find interesting, I suppose, but the things themselves don't really get to me. Hippopotamuses, yes. I'm happy to stare at a hippopotamus till the hippo itself gets bored and wanders away in bemus.e.m.e.nt. Gorillas, lemurs, dolphins I will watch entranced for hours, hypnotised as much as anything else by their eyes. But show me a garden full of some of the most exotic birds in the world and I will be just as happy to stand around drinking tea and chatting to people. It gradually dawned on me that this was probably exactly what was happening.

'This,' said Mark at last in a low, hollow voice, 'is . . . '

I waited patiently.

'Amazing!' he said at last.

Eventually Gaynor prevailed on him to bring himself back from his trance and he started to talk excitedly about the tuis, the New Zealand pigeons, the bellbirds, the North Island robins, the New Zealand kingfisher, the red-crowned parakeets, the paradise shelducks, and the great crowd of large kakas which were swooping around the garden and jostling each other at the bird bath.

I felt vaguely depressed and also a little fraudulent at being unable to share his excitement, and that evening I fell to wondering why it was that I was so intensely keen to find and see a kakapo and so little bothered by all the other birds.

I think it's its flightlessness.

There is something gripping about the idea that this creature has actually given up doing something that virtually every human being has yearned to do since the very first of us looked upwards. I think I find other birds rather irritating for the c.o.c.ky ease with which they flit through the air as if it was nothing.

I can remember once coming face to face with a free-roaming emu years ago in Sydney zoo. You are strongly warned not to approach them too closely because they can be pretty violent creatures, but once I had caught its eye, I found its irate, staring face absolutely riveting. Because once you look one right in the eye you have a sudden sense of what the effect has been on the creature of having all the disadvantages of being a bird - absurd posture, a hopelessly scruffy covering of useless feathers and two useless limbs - without actually being able to do the thing that birds should be able to do, which is to fly. It becomes instantly clear that the bird has gone barking mad.

Here, to digress for a moment, is a little known fact: one of the more dangerous animals in Africa is, surprisingly enough, the ostrich. Deaths due to ostriches do not excite the public imagination very much because they are essentially so undignified. Ostriches do not bite because they have no teeth. They don't tear you to pieces because they don't have any forelimbs with claws on them. No, ostriches kick you to death. And who, frankly, can blame them?

The kakapo, though, is not an angry or violent bird. It pursues its own eccentricities rather industriously and modestly. If you ask anybody who has worked with kakapos to describe them, they tend to use words like 'innocent' and 'solemn', even when it's leaping helplessly out of a tree. This I find immensely appealing. I asked Dobby if they had given names to the kakapos on the island, and he instantly came up with four of them: Matthew, Luke, John and Snark. These seemed to be good names for a group of solemnly batty birds.

And then there's the other matter: it's not merely the fact that it's given up that which we all so intensely desire, it's also the fact that it has made a terrible mistake which makes it so compelling. This is a bird you can warm to. I wanted very much to find one.

I became increasingly morose over the next two or three days, because it became clear to us as we traipsed up and down endless hills in the rain, that we were not going to find a kakapo on Little Barrier Island. We stopped and admired kakas, long-tailed cuckoos and yellow-eyed penguins. We endlessly photographed pied s.h.a.gs. One night we saw a morepork, which is a type of owl that got its name from its habit of continually calling for additional pigflesh. But we knew that if we were going to find a kakapo we would need to go to Codfish Island. We would need Arab the freelance kakapo tracker, and we would need the freelance kakapo tracker's kakapo-tracking dog.

And all the signs were that we would not get them. We flew off to Wellington and moped about.

We understood the dilemma facing the Department of Conservation. On the one hand they regarded protection of the kakapos as being of paramount importance, and that meant keeping absolutely everybody who was not vital to the project away from Codfish Island. On the other hand the more people who knew about the animal, the better the chances of mustering more resources to save it. While we were mulling all this over we were suddenly asked to give a press conference about what we were up to and happily agreed to this. We talked earnestly and cheerfully to the press about the project. Here was a bird, we explained, that was in its way as extraordinary and unique as the most famous extinct animal of all - the dodo - and it was itself poised on the brink of extinction. It would be far better if it could be famously loved as a survivor than famously regretted, like the dodo.

This seemed to cause some movement within the Department of Conservation, and it transpired that those within it who supported us won their case. A day or two later we were standing on the Tarmac of Invercargill airport at the very south of South island, waiting for a helicopter. And waiting for Arab. We had won our case, and hoped, a little nervously, that we were right to do so.

Also in our party was a Scotsman from DOC called Ron Tindal. He was politely blunt with us. He said that there was a lot of resentment among the field workers about our being allowed to go to Codfish, but a directive was a directive, and we were to go. One man, he said, who was particularly set against the whole idea was Arab himself, and it was just as well that we be aware of the fact that he was coming under protest.

A few minutes later Arab himself arrived. I had no idea what I expected a freelance kakapo tracker to look like, but once we saw him, it was clear that if he was hidden in a crowd of a thousand random people you would still know instantly that he was the freelance kakapo tracker. He was tall, rangy, immensely weather-beaten, and he had a grizzled beard that reached all the way down to his dog, who was called Boss.

He nodded curtly to us and squatted down to fuss with his dog for a moment. Then he seemed to think that perhaps he had been a little over curt with us and leant across Boss to shake our hands. Thinking that he had perhaps overdone this in turn, he then looked up and made a very disgruntled face at the weather. With this brief display of complete social confusion he revealed himself to be an utterly charming and likeable man.

Nevertheless, the half-hour helicopter trip over to Codfish Island was a little tense. We tried to make cheerful small talk, but this was rendered almost impossible by the deafening thunder of the rotor blades. In a helicopter c.o.c.kpit you can just about talk to someone who is keen to hear what you have to say, but it is not the best situation in which to try to break the ice.

'What did you say?

I just said, "What did you say?...

'Ah. What did you say before you said, "What did you say?...