Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  We returned to the lodge. Still filthy and soaked in sweat, with my hair standing on end and a leech ceremoniously clinging to my leg, I went off in search of Stephen. I found him by the pool, reclining in the sunshine and calmly sipping a gin and tonic. He listened sympathetically while I told him my story, gasped at the sight of my still-expanding leech and then told me about his visit to Lemur Island, a 50-metre (160-foot) stroll from the lodge. He’d seen diademed sifakas dancing on the path, fed black-and-white ruffed lemurs by hand, photographed a grey bamboo lemur leaping from tree to tree, and had brown lemurs climbing all over him. And he’d had an ice cream. He was very excited.

  ‘I still don’t understand why you have to go on a seven-hour hike not to see one kind of lemur when you can potter down the path by the pool and be surrounded by four other kinds of lemur before mid-morning coffee,’ he commented. ‘Why do you have to make it all so difficult and complicated?’

  We’d gone all the way to Madagascar to see an aye-aye, and we did see one eventually.

  We stayed at the promisingly named Aye-aye Hotel to maximise our chances. Within a stone’s throw of Mananara airport (though calling the airstrip and ramshackle terminal building an ‘airport’ is rather like calling Godalming a bustling ‘metropolis’), it was a pleasant place to stay. There were lemurs running around the garden, a couple of mangy dogs barking at the brightly coloured Madagascar day geckos on the veranda, and a shockingly large orb web spider hanging over my bed.

  Basically a collection of large bamboo huts with holey palm-leaf roofs, the Aye-aye Hotel was run by a delightfully eccentric and overwhelmingly hospitable French lady who took an instant liking to our Director, Tim. She made a great performance of cutting his hair, even though he didn’t really want it to be cut (‘Oh my God! What on earth has happened?’ was Stephen’s reaction to seeing Tim shortly afterwards, thinking he’d had an accident). She even laughed at all Tim’s jokes (something we hadn’t considered trying ourselves).

  Stephen checking emails, ignoring the indris and muttering ‘twat’ under his breath all at the same time.

  Goodness knows how you are supposed to pronounce ‘diademed sifaka’.

  A motley collection of primates.

  We rescued Tim, drove a short distance to the river, picked up a boat and took an even shorter trip to the promisingly named Aye-aye Island. At last, the stars were aligned and the signs were good – if we were going to see aye-ayes at all before leaving Madagascar we agreed wholeheartedly that this was going to be the place.

  ‘Of course we will see an aye-aye,’ said our local guide Marie-Claire, shocked at our audacity in enquiring about the odds. ‘I know exactly where they are. Follow me.’

  ‘When did you last see one?’ asked Stephen, suspiciously.

  ‘Last night. And the night before that, and the night before that. I see them every night, except when it rains.’

  She led us along a well-worn path to a cluster of coconut palms, and it started to rain. It was only a light drizzle, but it was enough to justify more than a slight sense of despondency.

  ‘They’re up there,’ Marie-Claire said confidently, pointing into the crown of a tree about 20 metres (65 feet) above our heads.

  ‘Really, can you see them?’ I asked, peering through binoculars and feeling a sudden sense of excitement.

  An assortment of aye-ayes.

  ‘No, of course I can’t! It’s not dark yet. They’re still asleep.’ She didn’t actually say ‘I thought you were a zoologist’ but I could tell by the way she looked at me exactly what she was thinking.

  I caught Stephen’s eye and he grinned.

  Marie-Claire reminded me of Josia, who’d been our guide in Berenty – forever on the verge of giggling. She spent night after night in the gathering gloom on Aye-aye Island, answering a stream of inane questions and pointing into coconut palms – and clearly loved it. Her eyes positively lit up as she told us about the animals we were hoping to see.

  We’d barely set up base camp beneath one particular coconut palm, surrounded by delicious-smelling ylang-ylang trees, when the world’s largest nocturnal primate suddenly appeared from nowhere and started to groom immediately above our heads. It was hanging upside down by its feet. We watched closely as it scratched and cleaned, then used its long middle finger to rub its eyes, poke something out from one of its ears and, as if for a grand finale, carefully pick its nose.

  Then there was another aye-aye, and the two animals started to groom each other. They weren’t as large as I remembered. In fact, they were quite weedy at heart, with surprisingly small bodies bulked up with the help of an extraordinarily shaggy, unkempt grey-brown-black coat of coarse hair.

  The last light of the day had long gone by the time the aye-ayes had finished their evening ablutions and were on the move, and we found it surprisingly hard to keep up with them. Bumbling around in the darkness with the fading lights of our torches (we’d forgotten to change the batteries since Nosy Mangabé), we were clambering and stumbling our way through the undergrowth of the forest floor while they ran along palm fronds and leapt from tree to tree with gay abandon.

  Occasionally, they would stop and tap a coconut with one of those long middle fingers, before gnawing a hole about 3 centimetres (1 inch) in diameter to reach the flesh inside, showering us in gooey coconut milk in the process. At one point they spent a lot of time in a lychee tree, scooping out the pulp of the fruit and licking it off the ends of their fingers.

  Once or twice we made too much noise, struggling to coordinate filming in the dark. Every time we disturbed them, albeit briefly, they’d make a loud sniffing sound, just like someone trying to stifle a gigantic sneeze, and move on in disgust.

  We lost them, eventually, and despite Tim’s protestations headed back to the hotel.

  We were halfway through our year-long quest and the aye-aye had been our first real success – our first proper tick. We’d seen everything from pink river dolphins and emerald tree boas to mountain gorillas and tree-climbing lions, but we’d emphatically failed to see the primary animals on our endangered species list. We didn’t see Amazonian manatees in the wild on our first trip, to Brazil, and never did stand a chance of finding extinct northern white rhinos in the Democratic Republic of Congo: not only that – we hadn’t even managed to enter the DRC to fail to find them.

  But the aye-aye was definitely a good sign and we returned to Antananarivo in high spirits. Casting aside centuries of Malagasy folklore and superstition, we convinced ourselves that seeing the animal most shrouded in fear and folklore would bring us good luck for the next trip.

  It was our final day and we were heading back to the airport for one last time, reminiscing about our adventure.

  ‘I really want to come back to Madagascar,’ I said.

  ‘Me too!’ enthused Stephen, ‘but I think I’ll wait until it’s finished.’

  Only an aye-aye could get away with looking so delightfully shaggy and unkempt.

  4

  DEAR OLD RALPH

  I was on the train to London, where I was going to meet Stephen for lunch, and stared out of the window imagining how the conversation might go …

  ‘A parrot? We’re flying nearly 20,000 kilometres (12,000 miles) just to see a parrot?’ asks Stephen incredulously. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure!’ I reply.

  ‘But why? It’s on the other side of the world and it’s … it’s … a parrot. It doesn’t sound like the ultimate must-see animal. What’s the point? I could go to Beaconsfield or Basingstoke to see a parrot.’

  ‘Ah, but not this kind of parrot. We’re going to look for a kakapo, the old night parrot of New Zealand. It’s actually the world’s largest, fattest and least-able-to-fly parrot.’

  ‘What do you mean “least-able-to-fly”?’ he asks, unimpressed and a little tetchy. ‘Surely if a bird can’t fly, it can’t fly? Simple as that.’

  ‘Well, yes, I see what you mean. But the kakapo has forgotten that it has
forgotten how to fly. Sometimes, a seriously worried one will run up a tree and launch itself into the air before remembering that its wings don’t actually work.’

  ‘So what happens?’

  ‘Well, it flies like a brick and lands in a graceless heap on the ground. Actually, to be fair, with a bit of practice it can do a sort of controlled crash-landing.

  The only bird with a song like an unreleased collection of Pink Floyd studio outtakes.

  At least, that’s the rumour – I’ve never actually seen it myself.’

  ‘And this is definitely a parrot, you say?’

  ‘Yes. But it’s so much more than just a parrot. It’s part dog, part kitten …’

  ‘Hang on, hang on. How can it be part dog, part kitten? You’re just trying to convince me to go to New Zealand to see a parrot.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘Yes you are.’

  ‘Okay, I am. But what I meant to say was that it’s as affectionate as a dog and as playful as a kitten. And there’s more. It can inflate itself with air to become the size and shape of a football; it has a song like an unreleased collection of Pink Floyd studio outtakes; it only comes out at night; and it smells like a musty clarinet case. There’s nothing else quite like it.’

  ‘Are you making this stuff up?’

  ‘No, honest.’

  ‘And presumably, it’s endangered too – or it wouldn’t be on our radar?’

  ‘It’s about as endangered as you can possibly get without disappearing off the map altogether. There are just ninety kakapo left, so it’s one of the most endangered animals in the world.’

  Evolution designed the kakapo in the good old days, before there was anything to eat it. Just a few hundred years ago there were no terrestrial mammals in New Zealand. There were a few species of bats, which are mammals, but – and this is the point – there were no predatory mammals.

  So the kakapo and all the other birds could run amok.

  Life was good.

  But it was too good to be true. When the Maori and Europeans arrived, they brought a lot of different animals with them – some on purpose, and some by mistake. Suddenly, the country was full of hungry ferrets, stoats, weasels, rats, cats, dogs, hedgehogs and possums. They couldn’t believe their luck – they found a smörgåsbord of tasty birds (New Zealand has more species of flightless birds than any other country) with no idea that anything could possibly want to hurt them, let alone eat them.

  In fact, if you were trying to design a vulnerable species you’d be hard pushed to come up with something better than the kakapo: it’s incredibly tame and trusting; it spends most of its time on the ground; it’s lost the power of flight, because it had nothing to fly away from (flying is hard work and consumes lots of energy so if you don’t need to do it why bother?); and it has lost the ability to worry, because there was nothing much to worry about.

  I imagined explaining all this to Stephen.

  ‘It sounds as if you’re describing the dodo,’ he comments. He is beginning to perk up.

  Stephen was almost ecstatic at the prospect of flying to the other side of the world, and then another 800 kilometres (500 miles), to see a Chatham Island black robin.

  ‘Yes, in many ways the kakapo’s story is history repeating itself. It just happens to be a giant parrot instead of a giant pigeon.’

  ‘And both of them happened to be sitting ducks?’

  ‘Exactly. The trouble is that natural selection takes so long to adapt to change it would take forever to evolve a kakapo that is sufficiently nervous and fleet-footed to escape all the predators trying to gobble it up, let alone one that could learn to fly all over again.’

  ‘And the kakapo doesn’t have forever.’

  ‘Sadly, not. I remember Douglas commenting that if only we could just tell the kakapo “When you see one of those things with whiskers and little bitey teeth, run like hell” it would all be solved in a moment. But that’s not going to happen.’

  ‘Presumably, as with so many endangered species, their only hope of survival is human intervention?’

  ‘Absolutely. And when you look into the large, round, greeny-brown face of a kakapo, and see the look of serenely innocent incomprehension in its eyes, you’ll understand why so many people have devoted their lives to making sure it will be all right. I guarantee you will fall in love with it. Besides, New Zealand is your kind of place – with no snakes, good wine and high-speed internet access. So what do you think – will you come?’

  Stephen laughs.

  ‘Of course I will! But I’ll reserve judgement on whether a smelly flightless parrot is worth flying 20,000 kilometres for. Are we just going to see a kakapo and then coming straight back?’

  ‘Um, not really. I thought we could go and see some other endangered wildlife, too, to give you a broader picture of what’s going on in New Zealand.’

  ‘Okay,’ says Stephen, suspiciously. ‘What else, then?’

  ‘A robin.’

  ‘Good grief. A robin?!’

  In the event, I had nothing at all to worry about. This is how the conversation actually went…

  ‘Oh the kakapo!’ he said. ‘I remember reading about the kakapo in the original book – and Douglas used to rave about it all the time. The old night parrot of New Zealand was his favourite animal. I can’t wait to see one. When are we going?’

  And so, with Stephen almost ecstatic at the prospect of seeing a fat, flightless, nocturnal parrot, let alone a robin, we flew to the other side of the world.

  If you have dirty boots, the other side of the world is the best place to get them cleaned. Just tick the appropriate box on your landing card and they’ll be whisked away by New Zealand Customs & Immigration for a thorough scrub and polish. We couldn’t believe our luck. The airport staff refused to do our dirty laundry as well, understandably, but our boots were returned with a friendly smile a mere twenty minutes later, completely spotless and smelling brand spanking new.

  Stephen searches for aliens (not the kind that chase Sigourney Weaver).

  Actually, dirt is taken very seriously in New Zealand and we were gently reprimanded for failing to arrive with clean boots in the first place. No patriotic full-blooded New Zealander would consider arriving in such a mucky state.

  It’s not about pride or an obsession with cleanliness – it’s about a thing called bio-security. Bio-security is as much of an obsession in the land of the kiwi as national security is in the land of the free.

  We were confronted with bio-security at almost every turn and, to be honest, it was a bit of a palaver.

  Take Codfish Island, for instance. Our ultimate goal was to spend several days on this remote and rugged nature reserve off the southern tip of New Zealand, because it’s home to most of the last surviving kakapo. It offered our only real hope of meeting a kakapo in real life.

  Quite rightly, we’d been made to jump through interminable diplomatic and administrative hoops to get permission from the Department of Conservation for a visit (Codfish is, after all, the jewel in New Zealand’s conservation crown). We did get permission, eventually, but we had one large and final hoop to jump through first: the dreaded bio-security one.

  Consequently, all we really saw of our departure point, the sleepy town of Invercargill, was the dauntingly named Southland Quarantine Facility.

  It turned out to be a large warehouse, in a quiet part of town. We were led into a sealed room that looked just like the inside of a Hollywood space station.

  Stephen and I glanced at one another and started to snigger and giggle.

  Heavy doors were closed behind us.

  Everyone was very serious and solemn as they told us what to do, which made us giggle even more.

  We were sent into a small room in one corner and told to change out of our clothes.

  ‘Oh my God, it’s like being back at school,’ whispered Stephen. ‘Do you think we’re going to be caned?’

  ‘Um, I think you went to a slightly different school to mi
ne. It feels to me as if we are being prepared for a trip to the moon.’

  The clothes we wanted to take with us to Codfish were washed thoroughly in TriGene (I don’t know what it is either – but it sounds seriously hazardous and tremendously important) before being transferred to special Department of Conservation-approved disinfected bags. Our sweet-smelling hiking boots were sprayed with TriGene, too, just to be sure.

  Then we had to check all our belongings, in intimate detail, for aliens (not the kind that chase Sigourney Weaver, but alien animals and plants that shouldn’t have been travelling with us). Not that you’re likely to find a mouse or a rat inside your socks, but you might find a seed. In fact, Stephen did find a surprising number of grass seeds in some of his multicoloured Paul Smith socks (he was at a loss to explain how they got there and went bright red when I made some provocative suggestions).

  Finally, we had to answer lots of questions. Did we shower this morning? Have we washed our hair? Have we been on a farm recently?

  ‘Please God will someone just kill me?’ Stephen muttered under his breath.

  We giggled uncontrollably.

  No one else was giggling as we were transferred to a specially disinfected Department of Conservation-approved vehicle and driven straight to the heliport.

  By the time we landed on Codfish, we were past giggling and just plain bored with bio-security. And just in case something might have wormed its way into our specially approved disinfected bags between the quarantine facility and the helicopter (or, against all the odds, was stowed away in the helicopter itself) we had to go through the whole process all over again as soon as we touched down.

  I’m not mocking the principle behind bio-security, even if sometimes it feels as if all conservationists in New Zealand are just a little bit paranoid. But that’s okay because they have something to be paranoid about. They’ve learnt some very hard lessons from a highly destructive past and are absolutely determined to make amends.