There is another complicating factor, too. Research interest and public support have been heavily concentrated on animals hit by persecution or exploitation. This is how the international conservation movement began, and it is how many people still perceive it. More than twice as many searches are mounted for animals that have been shot as for those that have lost their habitats or been displaced by alien species. Perhaps the guilt is sharper, the issue more emotive, but it’s a mistake to imagine that the lanyard of a chainsaw is any less lethal than the trigger of a gun. Lingering, attritional deaths may not be as dramatic but the animals in the end are just as dead. On the other hand, as animals that range very widely are harder to exterminate by gunfire than those whose ranges are small, it follows that roaming species reduced by habitat-loss are much more likely to be rediscovered than victims of the gun. The good news, according to Queensland, is that the number of species thought to have been eliminated by loss of habitat ‘is likely to be overestimated’. But of course the truth of this can’t be tested without a huge global research effort, and huge global research efforts are few and far between.
I think again of ‘my’ long-lost mole. Somalia, formed in 1960 by merging a former Italian colony with a British protectorate, was still a young country when Alberto Simonetta found his owl pellet there in 1964. It developed rapidly into one of the most chaotic and violent countries in the world, literally ungovernable. There has been no effective central government since the overthrow of the socialist President Siad Barre in 1991. Tribal, political and religious factions have been at war ever since, at the cost of at least a million lives and a persistent headache for neighbouring Ethiopia and Kenya. Somali poachers are notorious plunderers of Kenyan wildlife, especially elephants, and pirates have put coastal waters off limits to any sailor without either a death wish or a naval escort. The British Foreign Office warns against all travel to Somalia, and advises visitors to Kenya not to venture within 60 kilometres of the border. Would I – would anyone – go there in search of a mole, even one as rare as Calcochloris tytonis?
Speaking for myself, the answer is no. Risks have to be in proportion to the likely gain. If I am to search anywhere, it will have to be well inside the Kenyan border, or in Florence, where Alberto Simonetta took his now apparently lost specimen in 1964. It is too much to expect that anyone in Kenya will be able to find a living example of Calcochloris tytonis, but the country has a very long relationship with golden moles. Fossil remains of a bygone species known as Prochrysochloris miocaenus date back to the Miocene epoch, between 23 and 5.3 million years ago. These days Kenya is known to harbour Stuhlmann’s golden mole, Chrysochloris stuhlmanni, which lives also in Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania. Its IUCN category is ‘Least concern’, which makes it considerably more common than some of the other animals I hope to see. Golden moles are usually described as a family of ‘ancient’ species which are distinct from ‘true’ moles, though they look and behave very like them. They have the same burrowing habit and powerful claws for digging, and spend most of their lives under ground. They are blind, and use their ears to locate the small insects and worms that are their preferred food. They conserve energy in cold weather by going into a torpor, and have such efficient kidneys that most of them do not need to drink. These extreme specialisations seem to argue against the idea, put forward by some, that they are undeveloped primitives, but the absence of a scrotum in the males, and possession of a cloaca – a single orifice through which they pass both urine and faeces, like a bird – are not exactly marks of sophistication. Pictures of Stuhlmann’s golden mole show a densely furred, eyeless and iron-clawed creature with a long sleek body like a swimmer’s (desert species are indeed described as ‘swimming’ through the sand). Kenya might not offer C. tytonis, but to see one of these cousins would be a major consolation. As yet I don’t know how likely it might be but, even with my optimism still undimmed, I have to reckon it’s odds against. Huge landscape, tiny subterranean animal. Who am I kidding?
Which of course leaves the riddle of Professor Simonetta, the Florence Institute of Zoology, and the animal unluckily named after a failed state. Is Simonetta still alive? As he published his paper on the Somali golden mole in 1968, it’s clearly possible. I search for him on Google and find what appears to be a short biography written in Italian. From this, though I can’t understand much else, I gather that he was born on 26 March 1930 and so would be in his early eighties. I gather also that his wife died in 1999, but there is no date for his own demise. It’s a good start, which becomes better still when I scan the document again and spot the key word, ‘Somalia’. Next I find an undated paper written by him in English, promisingly titled ‘Control of poaching and the market for products such as ivory, rhino horn, tiger and bear body products.’ It identifies him as Professor of Zoology at the University of Florence. Looking further, I find that this is a chapter from a book, Biodiversity conservation and habitat management (Vol II), published in 2008. I might not get to read it – Amazon is asking £146 for the paperback – but it’s an encouraging sign. All it should take is a call to the Università degli Studi di Firenze . . .
Then I remember. I am not the first to embark on this trail. One of the highly qualified and experienced authors of Mammal Species of the World – the golden mole expert Gary Bronner from the University of Cape Town – has tracked Calcochloris tytonis to Florence but failed to find it. Why should I – unqualified, inexperienced and no kind of expert – hope to do any better? And there is another reason why my finger hesitates over the telephone keypad. It’s just too soon. I’m not ready for a definitive answer. Suppose I get through to Simonetta and he tells me the specimen is lost. What then? Or suppose, against all expectation, he’s got it in his desk drawer. Either way, the search would be over. It’s over, too, if Simonetta is no longer alive. I write down the university’s number but do not dial it. I want an excuse to go on searching.
It’s deep midwinter now. Florence, I decide, can wait for the European spring or early summer. On a bright and unseasonably warm day in the second week of January, I take a train to Cambridge. The hunt has brought me here once before, to pick the brain of Craig Hilton-Taylor, the amiable South African biologist who heads up the IUCN species programme. It was thanks to him that I knew what to look for in the Natural History Museum. Thanks to him, too, that I started browsing zoology textbooks and stumbled across the golden mole. It was also in Cambridge, during a brief fellow-commonership at Corpus Christi, that I learned the habit of not-always-disciplined research. In Jaroslav Hasek’s satirical masterpiece The Good Soldier Schweik, a character called Cadet Biegler is said to pursue knowledge with the zeal of an idiot. Cambridge always brings out my inner Biegler. I once went to the University Library to read about men’s hairstyles in the seventeenth century, and spent the entire afternoon learning about bearded women (leading world authority: the Surgeon General of the US Army). Where else would I have begun to read, species by species, through a database of mammalian taxonomy? Today, arriving early, I allow myself a short, unscheduled visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Trumpington Street, where I have just enough time to sprint through the Italian Renaissance before a lunch-date further up the street.
My host is Mark Rose, long-serving chief executive of Fauna & Flora International. Like most conservationists of my acquaintance, he is no prissy vegetarian. Having steered me towards the wild duck (which jogs our memories of Peter Scott), he opts for steak and a serious red wine of the kind that would have pleased the clubbable gents who founded the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire in 1903. FFI still enjoys big-name backing, but the names these days are more likely to be from the celluloid aristocracy than from the blood-lines of English nobility. Its vice-presidents include Sir David Attenborough, Dame Judi Dench, Stephen Fry and the Australian comedian Rove McManus. Cate Blanchett has also turned out in support. I wonder if celebrity endorsement really works; whether the attachmen
t of star names doesn’t actually trivialise rather than add weight to a campaign? I reflect that I long resisted the purchase of a perfectly good coffee-making machine simply because it was endorsed by a Hollywood film star. Mark is adamant that it works, provided the names are from the cerebral end of the celebrity spectrum and not realitytelevision airheads. Judged by this criterion, his list looks impeccable. As we have seen, the big-name tendency in wildlife conservation extends also to headline species. FFI in Africa is focusing on, among others, the lion and African wild dog in Mozambique; the black and northern white rhinoceroses in Kenya; the Pemba flying fox on Pemba Island off Tanzania; the pygmy hippopotamus in Liberia; the Cross River gorilla and western mountain gorilla in Cameroon: the eastern lowland gorilla in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and mountain gorilla in the DRC, Uganda and Rwanda. Elsewhere it is working with the Asian elephant, the Bornean orang-utan, the jaguar, the Iberian lynx, the red panda, the snow leopard, the Sumatran tiger, the Hainan gibbon (the world’s rarest ape, with only twenty still surviving), the Tonkin snub-nosed monkey (which was believed extinct until it was rediscovered in the early 1990s), and the newly identified Myanmar snub-nosed monkey.
The argument for charismatic species is pretty much the same as it is for charismatic vice-presidents. They attract attention. In conservation terms the justification is that what’s good for a headliner is good for every other creature that shares its territory. Habitat is for one and all, and to conserve rhino and gorilla is to conserve the golden mole. The question is: where in Africa (and for me it has to be Africa) should I go to see conservation at the cutting edge? Mark suggests northern Mozambique, where the huge Niassa National Reserve holds a large population of rare hunting dogs as well as a lions, leopards, elephants and spotted hyenas. It is the largest protected area in Mozambique, and one of the biggest in Africa. He is also keen on South Sudan, the brand-new country that declared its independence in July 2011 after twenty-two years of civil war had killed at least 1.5 million people and displaced millions more. FFI is now working with the national government to establish an effective conservation policy, fight the poachers and rehabilitate the ravaged but obstinately surviving wildlife (there have been rumoured sightings even of the critically endangered northern white rhino). Here are all the perils, pitfalls and pleasures of Africa in a single spectacular nutshell. There is a nice coincidence too, in that it was the threatened relocation of a nature reserve in Sudan that first brought Curzon, Kitchener, Roosevelt and the other ‘penitent butchers’ rushing to the aid of animals in 1903.
However, it is not to Mozambique or South Sudan, or even to the Congo, that my imagination has transported me. Two things attract me to Kenya – or three, if I count the fact that I’ve never been there. Both in their way are historical. Brumas apart, the animals that most excited me on childhood visits to Regent’s Park or Whipsnade were all natives of Africa, and (though I may be wrong about this) I remember Armand and Michaela Denis’s wildlife films being overwhelmingly a homage to Kenya. Then of course there’s all the Happy Valley, White Mischief stuff, and Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa. I may be up to five reasons now, but there is an even more important one to come. Julian Huxley wrote of ‘prehistory incarnate in a rhinoceros’. No animal better encapsulates the awesome strangeness of Africa, its ancient and mesmerising power, than the rhino. And no animal more starkly exemplifies the desperate fight for life in which so much of wild Africa now finds itself locked. In the 1970s and ’80s, poachers reduced the overall number of black rhinos from 100,000 to 4,000. The eastern subspecies is now down to 700. But this is nothing compared to the plight of the northern white species, of which (discounting unconfirmed Sudanese rumours) only four are known to exist in the wild and four more in zoos. Eighty per cent of the eastern blacks are in Kenya, and the largest single concentration of them lives within the protected area around the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in the Laikipia district north-west of Nairobi. All four northern whites are there too. And then there is Stuhlmann’s golden mole . . .
Where am I going to go? Mark Rose nods and raises his glass. It is settled.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Chopsticks
A man of strong religious conviction once wrote to me in fury – mauve ink, capital letters, heavy underlining – condemning my use of the word ‘sophisticated’ as a term of approbation. For me, sophistication had meant refinement (in this particular case, the subtle interpretation of a complex argument about animal rights). For him it meant something not far removed from blasphemy, the exact opposite of the artless simplicity with which he framed his prayers. To him, sophistication was the enemy of innocence, and hence of Christian integrity. I didn’t agree, but it made me think.
There are many things I regret about growing old, but first among them is the loss of innocence. I mean this in a different sense to my fulminating correspondent. It is not that experience has corrupted me. On the contrary. I entered the world as a screaming savage, and it is experience that has moulded me into a more or less tolerable member of society. I mean only that age has dimmed my vision. Nostalgia is not homesickness, nor any misplaced craving for a Golden Age that never existed. What I miss is childhood’s eager eye, the capacity to look at the world and be amazed. My first mind-altering experience with Dartmoor is unrepeatable. I can return to the spot – I do it often, and always love what I see – but it’s the same rabbit from the same hat. It’s wonderful but it’s not magic. Excitement is dulled by repetition, expectation fulfilled but not transcended. For me, the pleasure of travel is in rediscovering that elemental way of looking, the joy of never-before. Into my own mental storehouse, never to be forgotten, went the first, garlic-and-Gauloises whiff of France; the first view of the ground from an aircraft; the first shock of Mediterranean heat; the first ride in a car at over 60mph (an exhilarating speed in the 1950s); my first unaided swim. Later would come the first glimpses of Versailles, Venice, Botticelli’s Venus, the Alps, Marrakesh, an Icelandic glacier, a humpback whale.
Soon will come the first wild rhinoceros I’ve ever seen, and the first lions and elephants outside circuses and zoos. If I have given the impression that I am some kind of old Africa hand, then let me now dispel it. Discounting Egypt and Morocco, I have been to the continent just three times, and each time to the same country, Mozambique. These were big experiences, but not the kind that reawaken the sleeping child. As a journalist I had gone to record a blighted country’s loss, and its attempted recovery, after sixteen years of civil war.
Almost exactly in the middle of Mozambique, at the southern end of the Great African Rift Valley, midway between Zimbabwe and the Indian Ocean, lies Gorongosa National Park. Before the war its 4,000 square kilometres of forest and savannah was one of the glories of Africa. Its stylish headquarters at Chitengo Camp was (sorry, mauve-ink man) a sophisticated retreat for the fashionably rich, who could enjoy the sound of lions over their cocktails. War changed everything. On my initial visit in 2005 the first thing I noticed was a red rag hanging from a stick. Beneath it, poking through the dust, were two unexploded mortars. A few yards away, in the roofless shell of a bombed-out schoolroom, two men squatted by a fire. Through an interpreter I learned that they would be here for three months, working off a fine they couldn’t pay for poaching warthog. What had once been a resort was now an open prison.
During the civil war, Gorongosa was the heartland of the Renamo guerrillas, for whom trees were fuel and wildlife was meat. Chitengo was blown to bits, its elegant bars, restaurant and pavilions mortared from within, its swimming pool reduced to a shallow, slime-green sump. A bare coiled spring was all that remained of the diving board, and not much more was left of Gorongosa’s wildlife. Numbers of elephants during the war shrank from 4,500 to 200, hippos from 4,000 to 62, lions from 300 to 25, zebras from 20,000 to 60, wildebeest from 20,000 to 50, and so on, all the way down to soil invertebrates. In a year there had been no sign of leopard or cheetah, and plains that should have been swarming with antelope and wildebeest were
rolling oceans of head-high grass. The only animals in any kind of abundance were warthogs and baboons, which people in the villages surreptitiously killed and ate. Twelve years into the peace, the despoliation had yet to stop. A tiled bathroom in one of the old safari lodges contained a rusty arsenal of weapons confiscated from poachers. Heaped against the wall were machetes, knives, bows and arrows tipped with hammered barbed wire or sharpened strips cut from old car doors; buffalo-size snares; gin traps made from vehicle springs; 200-year-old cap-lock rifles complete with wadding, home-made gunpowder and misshapen hand-made bullets. This was Mozambican roulette. A gun like this may fire when you pulled the trigger; or it might explode and blow your head off. Such are the economics of desperation.
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