Last Chance to See (23 page)

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 cockatoo,' 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 casseroles. 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 hit 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 crap.

`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 ship 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, anchored 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 crashing 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 bashing 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 shore succeeded at last in pushing 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 thrashing 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 passed 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 grasses 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 ashore. 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 grass 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 rushing 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.