Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  The Chatham Islands form a tiny archipelago some 800 kilometres (500 miles) east of New Zealand. Barely a dot on the world map, they are home to about 600 hardy souls of mixed European, Maori and Polynesian descent. There are two main islands – Chatham and Pitt – and these are surrounded by several smaller islands, islets, rocks and stacks, spanning a total radius of about 40 kilometres (25 miles).

  The Chathams sit slap-bang on the international date line and, indeed, Pitt Island (population 35) is further east than any other inhabited island in the world. This means that a fisherman leaving Pitt today can sail a few kilometres east and suddenly be in tomorrow. Or is it yesterday? We tried it once and got incredibly confused.

  Rather than have a time zone that puts them in a permanent parallel universe between today and tomorrow, or yesterday, the islanders have solved the problem with their own unique time zone – not a handy and simple one hour ahead of New Zealand, but a confusing and difficult 45 minutes.

  It’s a friendly place, with the quiet charm of a secluded Cornish fishing village.

  Everyone waves to everyone else.

  ‘Oh my God!’ said Stephen, on the one occasion we forgot to wave to a passing Land Rover. You know what’s going to happen now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve seen the movies. Next time they see us they’ll pull out a pump-action shotgun.’

  Best of all, the Chathams are among the best places in the world for bird-watching.

  Now, before I lose you, I am fully aware that saying ‘this is one of the best places in the world for bird-watching’ is about as exciting to most normal people as saying ‘let me explain the intricacies of Morris dancing’ or ‘have you tried the new 1.2.14 version of software for small business accounting?’.

  So let me explain.

  Evolution has worked with reckless abandon in the Chatham Islands. Like a mad professor in a biologically sealed laboratory, far from the madding crowd, it has been able to design new species without interference from the rest of the world.

  One in every three birds in this little Garden of Eden in the middle of the South Pacific is found absolutely nowhere else. The Chatham Island oystercatchers at the airport, the Chatham Island warbler feeding in scrub next to the only proper tar-sealed road into town, and the Chatham Island pigeons in the hotel garden are all endemic.

  I fear I might be losing you again, but bear in mind that this would probably sound a lot more riveting if the ornithologists studying these unique birds found nowhere else in the world had a little more imagination for diverse and inspiring names. I know ‘Chatham Island pigeon’ does what it says on the tin, but it’s a bit like calling a kitten ‘Kitty’ or a café ‘The Café’.

  If I ever discover a new species, I’m going to invite dozens of my best zoology friends to a special naming party and we’ll drink lots of champagne and discuss endless possibilities late into the night until we’ve dreamed up the most original and ingenious name ever thought possible.

  Don Merton, the man who saved Richard Henry Junior (the last surviving kakapo on the mainland) with a goalie’s dive, joined us in the Chatham Islands. Don is to conservation in New Zealand what Nelson was to naval warfare in Britain. With the air of a vicar and the determination of an Olympic athlete, he has a string of conservation successes under his belt.

  It was Don who took Douglas Adams and me to see the kakapo twenty years ago. He hadn’t changed a bit: he looked roughly the same age as he did then, was wearing exactly the same glasses and was still smiling. Don never stopped smiling.

  He had retired from his old job at the Department of Conservation, but seemed to be as active in the conservation world as ever before.

  Don was keen to show us a rather unremarkable little bird: a black robin called – rather unremarkably – the Chatham Island black robin. Never happier than when foraging among leaf litter on the forest floor, hunting for cockroaches, wetas and worms, it is the kind of bird you would be forgiven for overlooking.

  The Chatham Island black robin came closer to extinction (without falling off the map altogether) than any other animal on the planet.

  With Don Merton – the man responsible for saving the Chatham Island black robin and for catching Richard Henry Junior with a goalie’s dive.

  But it does have two claims to fame. First, the soles of its feet are bright yellow. And, second, it came closer to extinction (without actually vanishing altogether) than any other animal on the planet.

  Chatham Island black robins were once found throughout the archipelago. But when cats, rats and mice were introduced, they began to disappear. As if the onslaught of predators wasn’t enough, vast tracts of their forest home were cleared and converted to farmland.

  Many other Chatham Island birds suffered, too. A mind-boggling one-third of the 64 species that once bred in the islands are now extinct.

  Against all the odds, the robins somehow survived. But by 1880 they had retreated to one last stronghold: a tiny, mammal-free, 10-hectare (25-acre) rocky stack called Little Mangere. And that was it. There was nowhere else. Little Mangere was effectively a life raft from a different time – and the clock was ticking.

  Let’s skip forward a century to 1980, by which time there were just five Chatham Island robins left. Three of them were loners and showed no interest in starting a family. That left just one breeding pair.

  Don and his team were galvanised into action and initiated a daring and dramatic rescue operation to try to save the species. It was a long shot and there was no room for mistakes.

  All five birds were moved to a larger sanctuary on Little Mangere’s big brother, called Mangere Island, from which all the predators had been removed.

  ‘Much of the credit for the success of this last-ditch effort to save the Chatham Island black robin must be given to two particular birds,’ Don told us. ‘They were the last breeding female, called Old Blue, and her mate, Old Yellow.’

  The Buller’s albatross Stephen didn’t see, mainly because he was seasick.

  Stephen raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  ‘They were named for the colour of their leg bands,’ laughed Don.

  This is a famous story in the conservation world, told around campfires from Tiverton to Timbuktu and quoted in endangered species conferences as the reason why, no matter how bad things may seem, we must never give up hope.

  It’s one of the most remarkable conservation success stories of all time.

  But I could see Stephen struggling to accept the improbability of it all. He thought we were winding him up.

  An imaginatively named Chatham Island shore plover.

  ‘So let me get this straight,’ he said to Don. ‘This species was so endangered that there was just one breeding pair left?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Stephen still wasn’t sure.

  Don was keen for us to see one of his beloved robins, so we hitched a ride on a cray-fishing boat and sailed 38 kilometres (24 miles) from the main island to Southeast Island.

  As soon as we left shore the boat was rising and falling in the heavy swell. So were the remains of last night’s shepherd’s pie. Much worse and it would have brought to mind emergency flares, Mayday calls and air-sea rescues.

  I spent the two-hour journey looking at bottlenose dolphins, Buller’s albatrosses, Royal albatrosses and red-billed gulls, while Stephen spent it looking uncomfortably green about the gills.

  Every time we hurtled over the crest of a wave, and free-fell down the other side, it felt as if we had been standing in an elevator when the cable had snapped. The only difference was that, instead of being carried away on a stretcher and given a few weeks off work, we were thrown back in and winched up ready for the cable to snap again. And again, and again.

  It calmed a little as we approached Southeast Island. By then, the sensation wasn’t quite so violent: more like being in a washing machine on the spin cycle.

  Having spent much of my working life on all manner of boats in all corners
of the globe, I have learned a thing or two about the dreaded mal de mer, or seasickness.

  Firstly, the Japanese seem to suffer from it more than any other nationality.

  Secondly, artists, writers and other creative people tend to suffer more than practical people such as those in the pharmaceutical industry or bricklayers.

  Thirdly, if you worry about it you are more likely to get sick than if you turn your mind to more pleasant things. In this respect, it’s like jet lag: people who are constantly saying ‘Ooh, it’s 3.30 in the morning at home right now’ are the ones who will be tired all the time.

  Finally, it’s like giggling: if one person starts it’s hard not to join in. I was once on a whale-watch trip off the coast of New England, when a humpback whale came right alongside the boat. A man on board vomited over the side and his sick went straight into the whale’s blowhole. The whale blew it all out, understandably, and showered everyone on deck in the process. The poor animal left pretty quickly when every single whale-watcher, me included, started to retch.

  As soon as Stephen was feeling better, Don led us along the rocky coast of Southeast Island, through some thick bushes and into a shady little forest in the centre.

  We’d barely dumped our bags on the forest floor before there was a fluttering in the undergrowth. Suddenly, there was a Chatham Island black robin perched on a thin branch right next to us, bobbing up and down. There was no doubt it had found us, rather than the other way around, and very quickly we were joined by its mate.

  Don pulled a bag of wriggling mealworms from his pocket, brought specially for the occasion, and started to entice them in to within no more than a metre (3 feet) or so.

  ‘Ooh,’ said Stephen. ‘Can I feed them?’

  In profile they looked exactly like our European robins and they were pretty much the same size. They even moved in the same way. The only difference was that they were black instead of brown and red-breasted. Close up, they looked exactly like the tame robin that once fell down the chimney of our old house in Luton, all covered in soot, when I was about ten years old.

  ‘They’re not related to your robins at all,’ said Don. ‘Oh no, no, they belong to a completely different genus,’ he added, as if the mere suggestion of a similar bird somewhere else in the world was an unforgivable insult to his feathered friends.

  ‘Have you noticed the green- and white-coloured rings on that one?’ I asked Stephen.

  He was too busy to hear me – gently holding out a mealworm and trying unsuccessfully to coax the robin onto his hand with kissing sounds and a high-pitched ‘come on darling, come on, it’s okay, come on.’

  ‘We’ve used coloured rings since the beginning,’ said Don, ‘ever since Old Blue. She was a wonderful bird, tolerating our endless manipulation of her breeding attempts. She began to breed successfully in 1979, at the grand old age of nine. Thank goodness she lived until she was thirteen, which is extraordinary for a bird with a normal life expectancy of just six or seven years. If she hadn’t lived so long and bred throughout her geriatric years, the Chatham Island black robin would certainly have become extinct.’

  This Chatham Island black robin is a virtual clone of every other Chatham Island black robin.

  ‘So in a way it was just luck, then?’ asked Stephen.

  Don is incredibly modest and he started to nod in agreement, so I intervened.

  ‘There was an element of luck, of course. But Don and his team developed some incredibly inventive and pioneering new conservation techniques to make it happen. And now these are being used in other parts of the world to save other endangered birds.’

  ‘And we took a lot of risks, too,’ added Don. ‘We had to – we had no choice. It was all or nothing. We translocated birds to safer areas within the Chathams, we used Chatham Island tomtits as foster parents for some of the eggs and chicks, and we manipulated the breeding pairs. By 1986, we’d managed to increase the population to 37 birds. The situation was a lot better than it once was, but 37 was still a dangerously low number. And, indeed, there was a major setback the same year when a massive storm wiped out 14 of the robins. That took us back to 23.’

  ‘How many are there now?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, now there are more than we can easily count. Which, of course, is a good thing. I would say somewhere between 200 and 250.’

  ‘But because they are descended from just one breeding pair aren’t they suffering from some sort of inbreeding? Don’t they have genetic abnormalities?’ asked Stephen.

  ‘Well, all the Chatham Island black robins alive today are genetically identical,’ smiled Don. ‘They are virtual clones of one another. But so far it doesn’t seem to be a problem.’

  ‘Fingers crossed,’ Stephen and I said in unison, as you might expect molly-coddled twins to do.

  We burst out laughing.

  ‘Yes,’ said Don, smiling and holding two crossed fingers in the air. ‘Fingers crossed.’

  There was a time when you could tramp deep into the rugged mountainous region of Fiordland, tucked away in the southwestern corner of South Island, pitch a tent on the boggy floor of a steep-sided valley, wait until dark, and listen to one of the greatest live outdoor concerts in the world.

  The best way to enjoy the concert was to lie next to your tent, with your eyes closed.

  First, you would hear a deep, body-trembling, reverberating bass sound coming from somewhere high up in the mountains. It was like a foghorn, or distant thunder, or someone blowing across the top of a large empty bottle. Or perhaps more like a heartbeat.

  It was such a low-frequency sound that it was just on the threshold of what you could actually hear and what you could feel in the pit of your stomach. Boom, boom, boom, it echoed across the valley sides in the darkness.

  Sometimes, there would be more booms coming from different corners of the valley slopes.

  You’d have been listening to the unearthly mating calls of the old night parrots of New Zealand. Male kakapo, to be precise.

  I should explain why I keep saying ‘kakapo’ instead of ‘kakapos’, because it annoyed Stephen and so it’s probably annoying you. I don’t like it, either, when people talk in the singular when they should be talking in the plural (as in ‘we saw a family of gorilla’ or ‘there are three rhino’). But there’s a simple explanation: ‘kakapo’ is a Maori word and they don’t use plurals. In fact, there is no ‘s’ in the Maori language at all, so ‘kakapos’ would be entirely wrong (plus, Douglas and I got told off for saying ‘kakapos’ in the original Last Chance to See and I couldn’t bear another onslaught of cantankerous letters).

  Anyway, when the breeding season looms, the male kakapo head for the hills. They climb higher and higher, using their short legs and big feet to clamber up the steep slopes, until they reach a really good vantage point. There they search for a suitable rock or tree trunk and dig a shallow depression about a metre (3 feet) across – known as a ‘bowl’ – in the ground alongside. They are looking for good acoustics: the bowl acts as an amplifier and the rock or tree trunk serves as a reflector.

  Then they do a bit of gardening. They clear a couple of pathways, known as ‘tracks’, by weeding out all the unsightly vegetation with their beaks. Nearly a metre (3 feet) wide and up to 20 metres (66 feet) long, and meticulously maintained, these tracks lead a merry path through the undergrowth right up to the bowl (they are easy to spot because they look much tidier than all the other tracks made by less house-proud animals blundering their way about through the scrub).

  There is method in the male kakapo’s madness. If it could shower, dress in fine clothes and hang about in bars, it probably would. It would certainly be an easier way to pull the birds. But it can’t. So it builds a ‘track and bowl system’ instead. Every night during the breeding season, most male kakapo are sitting inside their bowls, puffing up enormous air sacs in their chests, lowering their heads, and booming competitively.

  As Stephen pointed out one evening, they defy economic law by having a boom
in a depression.

  They seem to defy physical and biological law, too. Their deep, powerful booms carry over huge distances – possibly as far as 5 kilometres (3 miles) with the help of the wind – but are so incredibly deep that it’s really hard to tell where they are coming from. This must be something of a shortcoming in a mating call: the kakapo’s booming display is rather like the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, except Romeo is throwing his voice and hiding.

  Douglas Adams described roughly how it might go in human terms: ‘Come and get me!’ ‘Where are you?’ ‘Come and get me!’ ‘Where the hell are you?’ ‘Come and get me!’ ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’ ‘Come and get me!’ ‘Go and stuff yourself.’

  It’s not that the females aren’t willing. When they are in the mood, their sex drive is extremely strong. They have been known to walk 10 kilometres (6 miles) in a single night to visit booming males, and then walk all the way back again in the morning.

  The most likely explanation is that, as the females get closer, the males make special ‘chinging’ sounds to guide them in. After all, the system must work to a degree or there would be no kakapo left at all.

  Come to think about it, there are no kakapo left on the mainland. So, sadly, all concerts there have been cancelled until further notice.

  Mainland New Zealand, where there are now no kakapo left at all.

  However, concerts are still being held on Codfish Island – and we were lucky enough to have tickets. So, two weeks into our three-week trip, we set off on our final adventure: to see and hear a real-life kakapo.

  We just had a couple of small health issues to sort out first.

  The Rolling Stones played in Invercargill in the early 1960s and reputedly received such a lacklustre reception that they were pelted with tomatoes. Mick Jagger famously stopped singing, lip pouting and hip shaking just long enough to accuse the locals of living in ‘the arsehole of the world’, and the southernmost town in New Zealand has struggled to recover from the shock ever since.