Last Chance To See Part 13

'I mean, animals may not be intelligent, but they're not as stupid as a lot of human beings. You look at the primate areas in some zoos which are equipped with metal green architect-designed 'trees' which, in a minimalist sort of way, reproduce the shape of the tree, but don't actually include any of the features that a monkey might find interesting about a tree: leaves and bark and stuff. It may look like a tree to an architect, but architects are a lot more stupid than monkeys. We just got a brochure through from the States for exactly this - fibregla.s.s trees. The whole brochure was designed to show us how proud they were of what they could sell us here in Mauritius, and showing the particular paints they had for painting lichen on trees. I mean it's b.l.o.o.d.y ridiculous, who are these people? OK. Let's feed the bird. You watching?

The bird was watching. It's hard to avoid saying that it was watching like a hawk. It was watching like a kestrel.

Richard swung his arm back. The kestrel's head followed his movement precisely. With a wide underarm swing Richard lobbed the small mouse high up into the air. For a second or so, the kestrel just watched it, jittering its legs very slightly on the branch as it engaged in monumental feats of differential calculus. The mouse reached the top of its steep parabola, its tiny dead weight turning slowly in the air.

At last the kestrel dropped from its perch, and swung out into the air as if on the end of a long pendulum, the precise length, pivotal position and swing speed of which the kestrel had calculated. The arc it described intersected sweetly with that of the falling mouse, the kestrel took the mouse cleanly into its talons, swept on up into another nearby tree and bit its head off.

'He eats the head himself,' said Richard, 'and takes the rest of the mouse to the female in the nest.'

We fed the kestrel a few more mice, sometimes throwing them in the air, and sometimes leaving them on the hemispherical rock for it to dive for at its leisure. At last the bird was fed up and we left.

The term 'fed up' actually comes from falconry. Most of the vocabulary of falconry comes from middle English, and zoologists have adopted a lot of it.

For instance 'Teeking' describes the process by which the bird cleans its beak of meat after eating, by rubbing it along a branch. 'Mutes' are the white trails along cliffs where the bird has been sitting. These are more normally called 'bird droppings' of course, but in falconry talk they're 'mutes'. 'Rousing' is the action of shaking its wings and body, which is generally a sign that the bird is feeling very comfortable and relaxed.

When you train a falcon you train it by hunger, using it as a tool to manipulate the bird's psychology. So when the bird has had too much to eat it won't co-operate and gets annoyed by any attempts to tell it what to do. It simply sits in the top of a tree and sulks. It is 'fed up'.

Richard became extremely fed up that evening, and with reason. It was nothing to do with eating too much, though it had a little to do with what other people liked to eat. A Mauritian friend came round to see him and brought her boss with her, a Frenchman from the nearby island of Reunion who was visiting the island for a few days and staying with her.

His name was Jacques, and we all took an instant dislike to him, but none so strongly as Richard, who detested him on sight.

He was a Frenchman of the dapper, arrogant type. He had lazy supercilious eyes, a lazy, supercilious smile and, as Richard later put it, a lazy, supercilious, and terminally stupid brain.

Jacques arrived at the house and stood around looking lazy and supercilious. He clearly did not quite know what he was doing in this house. It was not a very elegant house. It was full of battered, second-hand furniture, and had pictures of birds stuck all over the walls with drawing pins. He obviously wanted to slouch moodily against a wall, but could not find a wall that he was prepared to put his shoulder to, so he had to slouch moodily where he was standing.

We offered him a beer, and he took one with the best grace he could muster. He asked us what we were doing here, and we said we were making a programme for the BBC and writing a book about the wildlife of Mauritius.

'But why? he said, in a puzzled tone. 'There is nothing here.'

Richard showed admirable restraint at first. He explained quite coolly that some of the rarest birds in the world were to be found on Mauritius. He explained that that was what he and Carl and the others were there for: to protect and study and breed them.

Jacques shrugged and said that they weren't particularly interesting or special.

'Oh?' said Richard, quietly.

'Nothing with any interesting plumage.'

'Really? said Richard.

'I prefer something like the Arabian c.o.c.katoo,' said Jacques with a lazy smile.

'Do you.'

'Me, I live on Reunion,' said Jacques.

'Do you., 'There are certainly no interesting birds there,' said Jacques.

'That's because the French have shot them all,' said Richard.

He turned around smartly and went off into the kitchen to wash up, very, very loudly. Only when Jacques had gone did he return. He stalked back into the room carrying an unopened bottle of rum and slammed himself into the corner of a battered old sofa.

'About five years ago,' he said, 'we took twenty of the pink pigeons that we had bred at the centre and released them into the wild. I would estimate that in terms of the time, work and resources we had put into them they had cost us about a thousand pounds per bird. But that's not the issue. The issue is holding on to the unique life of this island. But within a short time all of those birds we had bred were in ca.s.seroles. Couldn't believe it. We just couldn't believe it.

'Do you understand what's happening to this island? It's a mess. It's a complete ruin. In the fifties it was drenched with DDT which found its way straight into the food chain. That killed off a lot of animals. Then the island was. .h.i.t with cyclones. Well, we can't help that, but they hit an island that was already terribly weakened by all the DDT and logging, so they did irreparable damage. Now with the continued logging and burning of the forest there's only ten per cent left, and they're cutting that down for deer hunting. What's left of the unique species of Mauritius is being overrun by stuff that you can find all over the world - privet, guava, all this c.r.a.p.

'Here, look at this.'

He handed the bottle to us. It was a locally brewed rum called Green Island.

'Read what it says on the bottle.'

Underneath a romantic picture of an old sailing s.h.i.+p approaching an idyllic tropical island was a quotation from Mark Twain, which read, 'You gather the idea that Mauritius was made first and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.'

'That was less than a hundred years ago,' said Richard. 'Since then just about everything that shouldn't be done to an island has been done to Mauritius. Except perhaps nuclear testing.'

There is one island in the Indian Ocean, close to Mauritius, which is miraculously unspoilt, and that is Round Island. In fact it isn't a miracle at all, there's a very simple reason for it, which we discovered when we talked to Carl and Richard about going there.

You can't,' said Carl. 'Well, you can try, but I doubt if you'd manage it.'

Why not?' I asked.

'Waves. You know, the sea,' said Carl. 'Goes like this.' He made big heaving motions with his arms.

'It's extremely difficult to get on,' said Richard. 'It has no beaches or harbours. You can only go there on very calm days, and even then you have to jump from the boat to the island. It's quite dangerous. You've got to judge it exactly right or you'll get thrown against the rocks. We haven't lost anybody yet, but...'

They almost lost me.

We hitched a ride on a boat trip with some naturalists going to Round Island, anch.o.r.ed about a hundred yards from the rocky coastline and ferried ourselves across in a dinghy to the best thing that Round island has to offer by way of a landing spot - a slippery outcrop called Pigeon House Rock.

A couple of men in wetsuits first leapt out of the dinghy into the tossing sea, swam to the rock, climbed with difficulty up the side of it and at last slithered, panting on to the top.

Everyone else in turn then made the trip across in the dinghy, three or four at a time. To land, you had to make the tricky jump across on to the rock, matching the crests of the incoming waves to the top of the rock, and leaping just an instant before the wave reached its height, so that the boat was still bearing you upwards. Those already on the rock would be tugging at the dinghy's rope, shouting instructions and encouragement over the cras.h.i.+ng of the waves, then catching and hauling people as they jumped.

I was to be the last one to land.

By this time the sea swell was getting heavier and rougher, and it was suggested that I should land on the other side of the rock, where it was a lot steeper but a little less obviously slippery with algae.

I tried it. I leaped from the edge of the heaving boat, lunged for the rock, found it to be every bit as slippery as the other side, merely much steeper, and slithered gracelessly down it into the sea, grazing my legs and arms against the jagged edges. The sea closed over my head. I thrashed about under the surface trying desperately to get my head up, but the dinghy was directly above me, and kept bas.h.i.+ng me against the rockface whenever I tried to make for the surface.

OK, I thought, I've got the point. This is why the island is relatively unspoilt. I made one more lunge upwards, just as those on sh.o.r.e succeeded at last in pus.h.i.+ng the boat away from me. This allowed me to get my head up above water and cling on to a crack in the rock. With a lot more slipping and sliding and thras.h.i.+ng in the heavy swell I managed finally to manoeuvre myself up to within arm's reach of Mark and the others, who yanked me urgently up and on to the rock. I sat in a spluttering, bleeding heap protesting that I was fine and all I needed was a quiet corner to go and die in and everything would be all right.

The sea had been swelling heavily for the two or three hours it had taken us to reach the island and it seemed as if my stomach had heaved something approaching my entire body weight into the sea, so by this time I was feeling pretty wobbly and strung out and my day on Round island pa.s.sed in rather a blur. While Mark went with Wendy Strahm, the botanist, to try and find some of the species of plants and animals that exist only here on this single island, I went and sat in the sun near a palm tree called Beverly and felt dazed and sorry for myself.

I knew that the palm tree was called Beverly because Wendy told me that was what she had christened it. It was a bottle palm, so called because it is shaped like a Chianti bottle, and it was one of the eight that remain on Round Island, the only eight wild ones in the world.

Who on earth, I wondered, as I sat next to Beverly in a sort of companionable gloom, gets to name the actual islands?

I mean, here was one of the most amazing islands in the world. It looked utterly extraordinary, as if the moon itself was rising from the sea - except that where the moon would be cold and still, this was hot and darting with life. Though it appeared to be dusty and barren at first sight, the craters with which the surface was pocked were full of dazzling white-tailed tropicbirds, brilliant Telfair's skinks and Guenther's geckos.

You would think that if you had to come up with a name for an island like this you'd invite a couple of friends round, get some wine and make an evening of it. Not just say, oh it's a little bit round, let's call it 'Round Island'. Apart from anything else it isn't even particularly round. There was another island just visible on the horizon, which was much more nearly round, but that is called Serpent Island, presumably to honour the fact that, unlike Round island, it hasn't got any snakes on it. And there was yet another island I could see which sloped steadily from a peak at one end down to the sea at the other, and that, unaccountably, was called Flat Island. I began to see that whoever had named the islands probably had made a bit of an evening of it after all.

The reason that Round island has remained a refuge for unique species of skinks, geckos, boas, palm trees, and even gra.s.ses that died out long ago on Mauritius is not simply that it is hard for man to get on to the island, but that it has proved completely impossible for rats to get ash.o.r.e. Round Island is one of the largest tropical islands in the world (at a bit over three hundred acres) on which rats do not occur.

Not that Round Island is undamaged - far from it. A hundred and fifty years ago, before sailors introduced goats and rabbits on to the island, it was covered in hardwood forest, which the foreign animals destroyed. That is why from a distance and to the untutored eye, such as mine, the island appeared to be more or less barren at first sight. Only a naturalist would be able to tell you that the few odd-shaped palms and clumps of gra.s.s dotted about the place on the hot, dry, dusty land were unique and unspeakably precious.

Precious to whom? And why?

Does it actually matter very much to anyone other than a bunch of obsessed naturalists that the eight bottle palm trees on Round Island are the only ones to be found in the wild anywhere in the world? Or that the Hyophorbe amarfcaulis (a palm tree so rare that it doesn't have any name other than its scientific one) standing in the Curepipe Botanic Gardens in Mauritius is the only one of its kind in existence? (The tree was only discovered by chance while the ground on which it stands was being cleared in order to construct the Botanic Gardens. It was about to be cut down.) There is no 'tropical island paradise' I know of which remotely matches up to the fantasy ideal that such a phrase is meant to conjure up, or even to what we find described in holiday brochures. It's natural to put this down to the discrepancy we are all used to finding between what advertisers promise and what the real world delivers. It doesn't surprise us much any more.

So it can come as a shock to realise that the world we hear described by travellers of previous centuries (or even previous decades) and biologists of today really did exist. The state it's in now is only the result of what we've done to it, and the mildness of the disappointment we feel when we arrive somewhere and find that it's a bit tatty is only a measure of how far our own expectations have been degraded and how little we understand what we've lost. The people who do understand what we've lost are the ones who are rus.h.i.+ng around in a frenzy trying to save the bits that are left.

The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realised that it was a system at all and that it wasn't something that was just there.

To understand how anything very complex works, or even to know that there is something complex at work, man needs to see little tiny bits of it at a time. And this is why small islands have been so important to our understanding of life. On the Galapagos islands, for instance, animals and plants which shared the same ancestors began to change and adapt in different ways once they were divided from each other by a few miles of water. The islands neatly separated out the component parts of the process for us, and it was thus that Charles Darwin was able to make the observations which led directly to the idea of Evolution.

The island of Mauritius gave us an equally important but more sombre idea - extinction.

The most famous of all the animals of Mauritius is a large, gentle dove. A remarkably large dove, in fact: its weight is closest to that of a well-fed turkey. Its wings long ago gave up the idea of lifting such a plumpy off the ground, and withered away into decorative little stumps. Once it gave up flying it could adapt itself very well to the Mauritian seasonal cycle, and stuff itself silly in the late summer and autumn, when fruit is lying rich on the ground, and then live on its fat reserves, gradually losing weight, during the leaner, dry months.

It didn't need to fly anyway, since there were no predators that wished it any harm and it, in turn, is harmless itself. In fact the whole idea of harm is something it has never learnt to understand, so if you were to see one on the beach it would be quite likely to walk right up to you and take a look, provided it could find a path through the armies of giant tortoises parading round the beach. There's never even been any reason for humans to kill it because its meat is tough and bitter.

It has a large, wide, downturned bill of yellow and green, which gives it a slightly glum and melancholic look, small, round eyes like diamonds, and three ridiculously little plumes sticking out of its tail. One of the first Englishmen to see this large dove said that 'for shape and rareness it might antagonise the Phoenix of Arabia'.

None of us will ever see this bird, though, because, sadly, the last one was clubbed to death by Dutch colonists in about 1680.

The giant tortoises were eaten to extinction because the early sailors regarded them much as we regard canned food. They just picked them off the beach and put them on their s.h.i.+ps as ballast, and then, if they felt hungry they'd go down to the hold, pull one up, kill it and eat it.

But the large, gentle dove - the dodo - was just clubbed to death for the sport of it. And that is what Mauritius is most famous for: the extinction of the dodo.

There had been extinctions before, but this was a particularly remarkable animal, and it only lived in the naturally limited area of the island of Mauritius. There were, very clearly and obviously, no more of them. And since only dodos could make a new dodo, there never would be any more of them ever again. The facts were very clearly and starkly delineated for us by the boundaries of the island.

Up until that point it hadn't really clicked with man that an animal could just cease to exist. It was as if we hadn't realised that if we kill something, it simply won't be there any more. Ever. As a result of the extinction of the dodo we are sadder and wiser.

We finally made it to Rodrigues, a small island dependency of Mauritius, to look for the world's rarest fruitbat, but first of all we went to look at something that Wendy Strahm was very keen for us to see - so much so that she rearranged her regular Rodrigues-visiting schedule to take us there herself.

By the side of a hot and dusty road there was a single small bushy tree that looked as if it had been put in a concentration camp.

The plant was a kind of wild coffee called Ramus mania, and it had been believed to be totally extinct. Then, in 1981, a teacher from Mauritius called Raymond Aquis was teaching at a school in Rodrigues and gave his cla.s.s pictures of about ten plants that were thought to be extinct on Mauritius.

One of the children put up his hand and said, 'Please, sir, we've got this growing in our back garden.'

At first it was hard to believe, but they took a branch of it and sent it to Kew where it was identified. It was wild coffee.

The plant was standing by the side of the road, right by the traffic and in considerable danger because any plant in Rodrigues is considered fair game for firewood. So they put a fence round it to stop it being cut down.

Immediately they did this, however, people started thinking, 'Aha, this is a special plant,' and they climbed over the fence and started to take off little branches and leaves and pieces of bark. Because the tree was obviously special, everybody wanted a piece of it and started to ascribe remarkable properties to it - it would cure hangovers and gonorrhoea. Since not much goes on in Rodrigues other than home entertainments it quickly became a very sought-after plant, and it was rapidly being killed by having bits cut off it.

The first fence was soon rendered useless and a barbed wire fence was put around that. Then another barbed wire fence had to be put around the first barbed wire fence, and then a third barbed wire fence had to be put around the second till the whole compound covered a half acre. Then a guard was installed to watch the plant as well.

With cuttings from this one plant Kew Gardens is currently trying to root and cultivate two new plants, in the hope that it might then be possible to reintroduce them into the wild. Until they succeed, this single plant standing within its barbed wire barricades will be the only representative of its species on earth, and it will continue to need protecting from everyone who is prepared to kill it in order to have a small piece. It's easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo we are now sadder and wiser, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.

At dusk that day we stood by the side of another road, where we had been told we would have a good view, and watched as the world's rarest fruitbats left their roost in the forest and flapped across the darkening sky to make their nightly forage among the fruit trees.

The bats are doing just fine. There are hundreds of them.

I have a terrible feeling that we are in trouble.

Sifting Through the Embers

There's a story I heard when I was young which bothered me because I couldn't understand it. It was many years before I discovered it to be the story of the Sybilline books. By that time all the details of the story had rewritten themselves in my mind, but the essentials were still the same. After a year of exploring some of the endangered environments of the world I think I finally understand it.

It concerns an ancient city - it doesn't matter where it was or what it was called - it was a thriving, prosperous city set in the middle of a large plain. One summer, while the people of the city were busy thriving and prospering away, a strange old beggar woman arrived at the gates carrying twelve large books, which she offered to sell to them. She said that the books contained all the knowledge and all the wisdom of the world, and that she would let the city have all twelve of them in return for a single sack of gold.

The people of the city thought this was a very funny idea. They said she obviously had no conception of the value of gold and that probably the best thing was for her to go away again.

This she agreed to do, but first, she said, she was going to destroy half of the books in front of them. She built a small bonfire, burnt six of the books of all knowledge and all wisdom in the sight of the people of the city and then went on her way.

Winter came and went, a hard winter, but the city just about managed to flourish through it and then, the following summer the old woman was back.

'Oh, you again,' said the people of the city. 'How's the knowledge and wisdom going??

'Six books,' she said, 'just six left. Half of all the knowledge and wisdom in the world. Once again I am offering to sell them to you.'

'Oh yes?' sn.i.g.g.e.red the people of the city.

'Only the price has changed.'

'Not surprised.'

'Two sacks of gold.'

'What?

'Two sacks of gold for the six remaining books of knowledge and wisdom. Take it or leave it.'

'It seems to us,' said the people of the city, 'that you can't be very wise or knowledgeable yourself or you would realise that you can't just go around quadrupling an already outrageous price in a buyer's market. If that's the sort of knowledge and wisdom you're peddling then, frankly, you can keep it at any price.'

'Do you want them or not?'