Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams

Mark did the tough bits. He did all the preparation and organisation and research involved in mounting the trips, and also taught me most of the small amount I now know about zoology, ecology, and conservation work. All I had to do was turn up with a suitcase and try to remember what happened for long enough afterward to write it down.

THIS ISN’T AT ALL WHAT I expected. In 1985, by some sort of journalistic accident, I was sent to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine to look for an almost extinct form of lemur called the aye-aye. None of the three of us had met before. I had never met Mark, Mark had never met me, and no one, apparently, had seen an aye-aye in years.

Mark is an extremely experienced and knowledgeable zoologist who was working at that time for the World Wildlife Fund, and his role, essentially, was to be the one who knew what he was talking about. My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise. All the aye-aye had to do was do what aye-ayes have been doing for millions of years; sit in a tree and hide.

When Madagascar sheered off into the Indian Ocean, it became entirely isolated from all the evolutionary changes that took place in the rest of the world. It is a life raft from a different time. It is now almost like a tiny, fragile, separate planet.

The major evolutionary change that passed Madagascar by was the arrival of the monkeys. These were descended from the same ancestors as the lemurs, but they had bigger brains, and were aggressive competitors for the same habitat. Where the lemurs had been content to hang around in trees having a good time, the monkeys were ambitious, and interested in all sorts of things, especially twigs, with which they found they could do all kinds of things that they couldn’t do by themselves—dig for things, probe things, hit things. The monkeys took over the world and the lemur branch of the primate family died out everywhere—other than on Madagascar, which for millions of years the monkeys never reached. Then fifteen hundred years ago, the monkeys finally arrived, or at least the monkeys’ descendants—us. Thanks to astounding advances in twig technology, we arrived in canoes, then boats, and finally airplanes, and once again started to compete for use of the same habitat, only this time with fire and machetes and domesticated animals, with asphalt and concrete. The lemurs are once again fighting for survival.

My airplane full of monkey descendants arrived at Antananarivo airport. Mark, who had gone out ahead to make the arrangements for the expedition, met me for the first time there and explained the setup. “Everything’s gone wrong,” he said. He was tall, dark, and laconic and had a slight nervous tic. He explained that he used to be just ...

Antananarivo is pronounced Tananarive, and for much of this century has been spelt that way as well. When the French took over Madagascar at the end of the last century (“colonised” is probably too kind a word for moving in on a country that was doing perfectly well for itself but which the French simply took a fancy to), they were impatient with the curious Malagasy habit of not bothering to pronounce the first and last syllables of place names. They decided, in their rational Gallic way, that if that was how the names were pronounced then they could damn well be spelt that way too. It would be rather as if someone had taken over England and told us that from now on we would be spelling Leicester “Lester” and liking it. We might be forced to spell it that way, but we wouldn’t like it, and neither did the Malagasy. As soon as they managed to divest themselves of French rule, in 1960, they promptly reinstated all the old spellings and just kept the cooking and the bureaucracy.

“One species after another is on the way out. And they’re really major animals. There are less than twenty northern white rhino left, and there’s a desperate battle going on to save them from the poachers. They’re in Zaïre. And the mountain gorillas too—they’re one of man’s closest living relatives, but we’ve almost killed them off this century. And it’s happening throughout the rest of the world as well. Do you know about the kakapo?” “The what?” “The kakapo. It’s the world’s largest, fattest, and least-able-to-fly parrot. It lives in New Zealand. It’s the strangest bird I know of and will probably be as famous as the dodo when it goes extinct.” “How many of them are there?” “Forty and falling. Do you know about the Yangtze river dolphin?” “No.” “The Komodo dragon? The Rodrigues fruit bat?” “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. I went into the hut and rummaged around in the ants for one of the monkey’s most prized achievements. It consisted of a lot of twigs mashed up to a pulp, flattened out into sheets, and then held together with something that had previously held a cow together. I took my Filofax outside and flipped through it while the sun streamed through the trees behind me from which some ruffed lemurs were calling to one another.

“So were the Komodo dragons the origin of the Chinese dragon myths?” “Well, nobody really knows, of course. At least I don’t. But it certainly seems like a possibility. It’s a large creature with scales, it’s a man-eater, and though it doesn’t actually breathe fire, it does have the worst breath of any creature known to man. But there’s something else you should know about the island as well.” “What?” “Have another beer first.” I did. “There are,” said Mark, “more poisonous snakes per square metre of ground on Komodo than on any equivalent area on earth.”

There is in Melbourne a man who probably knows more about poisonous snakes than anyone else on earth. His name is Dr. Struan Sutherland, and he has devoted his entire life to a study of venom. “And I’m bored with talking about it,” he said when we went along to see him the next morning, laden with tape recorders and notebooks. “Can’t stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I’ll tell them what to do. Don’t get bitten in the first place. That’s the answer. I’ve had enough of telling people all the time. Hydroponics, now, that’s interesting. Talk to you all you like about hydroponics. Fascinating stuff, growing plants artificially in water, very interesting technique. We’ll need to know all about it if we’re going to go to Mars and places. Where did you say you were going?” “Komodo.” “Well, don’t get bitten, that’s all I can say. And don’t come running to me if you do because you won’t get here in time and anyway I’ve got enough on my plate. Look at this office. Full of poisonous animals all over the place. See this tank? It’s full of fire ants. Venomous little creatures, what are we going to do about them? Anyway, I got some little cakes in case you were hungry. Would you like some little cakes? I can’t remember where I put them. There’s some tea but it’s not very good. Sit down for heaven’s sake. “So, you’re going to Komodo. Well, I d...

We asked, tentatively, if we could perhaps take a snake bite detector kit with us to Komodo. “ ’Course you can, ’course you can. Take as many as you like. Won’t do you a blind bit of good because they’re only for Australian snakes.” “So what do we do if we get bitten by something deadly, then?” I asked. He blinked at me as if I were stupid. “Well, what do you think you do?” he said. “You die of course. That’s what deadly means.”

David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e., that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali.

When we told our guide that we didn’t want to go to all the tourist places, he took us instead to the places where they take tourists who say that they don’t want to go to tourist places. These places are, of course, full of tourists. Which is not to say that we weren’t tourists every bit as much as the others, but it does highlight the irony that everything you go to see is changed by the very action of going to see it, which is the sort of problem which physicists have been wrestling with for most of this century.

Moose was much more straightforward, though it quickly turned out that Moose was not “Moose” but “Mus” and was short for Hieronymus. I felt a little stupid for having heard it as “Moose.” It was unlikely that an Indonesian islander would be named after a large Canadian deer. Almost as unlikely, I suppose, as him being called Hieronymus with a silent “Hierony.”

We had been told by someone on the plane that there were only three trucks on the whole of the island of Flores, and we passed six of them on the way in. Virtually everything we were told in Indonesia turned out not to be true, sometimes almost immediately. The only exception to this was when we were told that something would happen immediately, in which case it turned out not to be true over an extended period of time.

The images that the island presented to the imagination were very hard to avoid. The rocky outcrops took on the shape of massive triangular teeth, and the dark and moody grey-brown hills undulated like the heavy folds of a lizard’s skin. I knew that if I were a mariner in unknown waters, the first thing I would write on my charts at this moment would be “Here be dragons.”

There is something profoundly disturbing about watching an eye that is watching you, particularly when the eye that is watching you is almost the same size as your eye, and the thing it is watching you out of is a lizard. The lizard’s blink was also disturbing. It wasn’t the normal rapid reflex movement that you expect from a lizard, but a slow, considered blink which made you feel that it was thinking about what it was doing.

“For instance,” said Mark, “we don’t eat our own babies if they happen to be within reach when we’re feeling a little peckish.” “What?” said Gaynor, putting down her knife and fork. “A baby dragon is just food as far as an adult is concerned,” Mark continued. “It moves about and has got a bit of meat on it. It’s food. If they ate them all, of course, the species would die out, so that wouldn’t work very well. Most animals survive because the adults have acquired an instinct not to eat their babies. The dragons survive because the baby dragons have acquired an instinct to climb trees. The adults are too big to do it, so the babies just sit up in trees till they’re big enough to look after themselves. Some babies get caught though, which works fine. It sees them through times when food is scarce and helps to keep the population within sustainable levels. Sometimes they just eat them because they’re there.” “How many of these things are there left?” I asked quietly. “About five thousand.” “And how many did there used to be?” “About five thousand. As far as anyone can tell, that’s roughly how many there have always been.” “So they’re not particularly endangered?” “Well, they are, because only three hundred and fifty of them are breeding females. We don’t know if that’s a typical number or not, but it seems pretty low. Furthermore, if an animal has a low population and lives in a very restricted area, like just a few small islands in the case of the dragons, it’s particularly v...

What makes you wonder about the nature of this god character is that he creates something that is so perfectly designed to be of benefit to human beings and then hangs it twenty feet above their heads on a tree with no branches.

I went and sat on the beach by a mangrove tree and gazed out at the quiet ripples of the sea. Some fish were jumping up the beach and into the tree, which struck me as an odd thing for a fish to do, but I tried not to be judgmental about it. I was feeling pretty raw about my own species, and not much inclined to raise a quizzical eyebrow at others. The fish could play about in trees as much as they liked if it gave them pleasure, so long as they didn’t try to justify themselves or tell one another it was a malign god who made them want to play in trees.

The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.

I certainly don’t like the idea of missionaries. In fact, the whole business fills me with fear and alarm. I don’t believe in God, or at least not in the one we’ve invented for ourselves in England to fulfill our peculiarly English needs, and certainly not in the ones they’ve invented in America, who supply their servants with toupees, television stations, and, most important, toll-free telephone numbers. I wish that people who did believe in such things would keep them to themselves and not export them to the developing world. I sat watching the Miami hats as they gazed out of the window at Africa—between an immensity of land and an immensity of sky they sat there, incomprehensible, smiling at a continent. I think Conrad said something similar about a boat. They smiled at Mount Kenya, beamed at Mount Kilimanjaro, and were winsomely benign at the whole of the Great Rift Valley as it slid majestically past beneath us.

The aircraft trundled to a halt outside a sort of bus shelter which served Mwanza as an airport, and we were told we had to disembark for half an hour and go and wait in the “international transit lounge.” This consisted of a large concrete shed with two fair-sized rooms in it connected by a corridor. The building had a kind of bombed appearance to it—some of the walls were badly crushed and had tangles of rusty iron spilling from their innards and through the elderly travel posters of Italy pasted over them. We moved in for half an hour, hefted our bags of camera equipment to the floor, and slumped over the battered plastic seats. I dug out a cigarette and Mark dug out his Nikon F3 and MD4 motordrive to photograph me smoking it. There was little else to do. After a moment or two a man in brown polyester looked in at us, did not at all like the look of us, and asked us if we were transit passengers. We said we were. He shook his head with infinite weariness and told us that if we were transit passengers, then we were supposed to be in the other of the two rooms. We were obviously very crazy and stupid not to have realised this. He stayed there slumped against the door-jamb, raising his eyebrows pointedly at us until we eventually gathered our gear together and dragged it off down the corridor to the other room. He watched us go past him, shaking his head in wonder and sorrow at the stupid futility of the human condition in general and ours in particular, and then closed th...

You can always tell an ex-colony from the inordinate numbers of people who are able to find employment stopping anybody who has anything to do from doing it.

I’ve heard an idea proposed, I’ve no idea how seriously, to account for the sensation of vertigo. It’s an idea that I instinctively like and it goes like this. The dizzy sensation we experience when standing in high places is not simply a fear of falling. It’s often the case that the only thing likely to make us fall is the actual dizziness itself, so it is, at best, an extremely irrational, even self-fulfilling fear. However, in the distant past of our evolutionary journey toward our current state, we lived in trees. We leapt from tree to tree. There are even those who speculate that we may have something birdlike in our ancestral line. In which case, there may be some part of our mind that, when confronted with a void, expects to be able to leap out into it and even urges us to do so. So what you end up with is a conflict between a primitive, atavistic part of your mind which is saying, “Jump!” and the more modern, rational part of your mind which is saying, “For Christ’s sake, don’t!”

We followed, encountering one gorilla after another until at last we came across another silverback lying on his side beneath a bush, with his long arm folded up over his head scratching his opposite ear while he watched a couple of leaves doing not very much. It was instantly clear what he was doing. He was contemplating life. He was hanging out. It was quite obvious. Or rather, the temptation to find it quite obvious was absolutely overwhelming. They look like humans, they move like humans, they hold things in their fingers like humans, the expressions which play across their faces and in their intensely human-looking eyes are expressions that we instinctively feel we recognise as human expressions. We look them in the face and we think, “We know what they’re like,” but we don’t.

As I moved again, he shifted himself away from me, just about six inches, as if I had sat slightly too close to him on a sofa and he was grumpily making a bit more room. Then he lay on his front with his chin on his fist, idly scratching his cheek with his other hand. I sat as quiet and still as I could, despite discovering that I was being bitten to death by ants. The silverback looked from one to another of us without any great concern, and then his attention dropped to his own hands as he idly scratched some flecks of dirt off one of his fingers with his thumb. I had the impression that we were of as much interest to him as a boring Sunday afternoon in front of the television. He yawned. It’s so bloody hard not to anthropomorphise. But these impressions keep on crowding in on you because they spark so much instant recognition, however illusory that recognition may be. It’s the only way of conveying what it was like. After a quiet interval had passed, I carefully pulled the pink writing paper out of my bag and started to make the notes that I’m writing from at the moment. This seemed to interest him a little more. I suppose he had simply never seen pink writing paper before. His eyes followed as my hand squiggled across the paper, and after a while he reached out and touched first the paper and then the top of my ballpoint pen—not to take it away from me, or even to interrupt me, just to see what it was and what it felt like. I felt very moved by this, and had a foolish ...

somewhere in the genetic history that we each carry with us in every cell of our body was a deep connection with this creature, as inaccessible to us now as last year’s dreams, but, like last year’s dreams, always invisibly and unfathomably present.

I watched the gorilla’s eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don’t listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn’t been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.

Mark started to get quietly ratty, which meant that he grasped the beer bottle very tightly between his hands and stared at it a lot. Kurt asked us what we were planning to do next and we said we were flying up to Garamba National Park to see if we could find any northern white rhinos. Kurt nodded and said that he himself thought he would probably walk to Uganda tonight. Mark’s knuckles grew white around his beer bottle. Mark, like most zoologists, tends to prefer animals to people anyway, but in this case I was with him all the way. It occurred to me that we had spent a day rapt with wonder watching the mountain gorillas, and being particularly moved at how human they seemed, and finding this to be one of their most engaging and fascinating features. To find afterward that a couple of hours spent with actual humans was merely irritating was a bit confusing.

Lmao

She worked out once and for all where the Land Rover had to be, and worked it out with such ruthless determination that the Land Rover would hardly dare not to be there, and eventually, of course, after miles of trekking, we discovered that it was exactly there,

Once we had revived ourselves with the sort of mug of tea that makes the desert bloom and angels sing, we rattled and rolled our way back to our base, which was a small visitors’ village of huts on the edge of Garamba National Park, separated from it by a small river. We were currently the only visitors to the park, which, as I say, is the size of part of Scotland. This is quite surprising because the park is one of Africa’s richest. It is situated in northeast Zaïre, on the border with Sudan, and takes its name from the Garamba River, which meanders from east to west through the park. Its habitat is a combination of savannah, gallery forest, and papyrus marshes, and contains currently 53,000 buffalo, 5,000 elephants, 3,000 hippos, 175 Congo giraffes, 270 species of birds, 60-odd lion, and some giant eland, which are large, spiral-horned antelopes. They know there are giant eland in the park because we saw one. The last time anybody saw one there was in the 1950s. We were rather pleased about that.

That evening we went to have a meal at the house that Kes shares with her husband, Fraser, a park conservation manager. It is a house they built themselves, out in the bush on the edge of the river, and is a long, low, rambling structure, full of books and largely open to the weather—when it rains they lower tarpaulins over the spaces where the windows aren’t. For the two years it took them to build the house, they lived in a tiny mud hut with a dog, two cats, a pet mongoose that used to dig up the floor looking for worms—and a baby. Because their house is so open, it is regularly full of animals. A young hippo, for instance, frequently comes to chew on the pot plants in their living room. It often spends the night asleep in their bedroom with its head resting next to the (second) baby’s cot. There are snakes and elephants in the garden, rats which eat all their soap, and termites gradually nibbling away at the support poles of the house. The only animals that really worry them are the crocodiles, which live in the river at the bottom of the garden. Their dog was eaten by one. “It is a bit of a worry,” Kes told us. “But we just have to make our lives as comfortable as possible under the circumstances. If we lived in the city, we’d be just as concerned about the children getting run over by a bus or abducted as we are about them being attacked by a crocodile.”

Charles flies his plane the same way my mother drives her car around the country lanes in Dorset. If you didn’t know she had done it invincibly every day of her life for years, you would be hiding in the footwell gibbering with fear instead of just smiling glassily and humming “Abide With Me.”

Charles is a thin and slightly intense man, and also rather shy. Sometimes you think you must have done something that has mightily offended him, but then you realise that the sudden silence is only because he can’t think of anything to say next and has given up.

Shouting above the noise in the cockpit, we asked Charles if it didn’t worry the rhino having us flying so close to them. “Not half as much as it worries you,” he said. “No, it doesn’t bother them at all really. A rhino isn’t scared of anything very much and is only really interested in what things smell like. We fly down low over them pretty regularly to get a good look at them, identify them, see what they’re up to, check that they’re healthy, and so on. We know them all pretty well, and we’d know if they were upset about anything.”

One of the things that people who don’t know anything about white rhinoceroses find most interesting about them is their colour. It isn’t white. Not even remotely. It’s a rather handsome dark grey. Not even a sort of pale grey that might arguably pass as an off-white, just plain dark grey. People therefore assume that zoologists are either perverse or colour-blind, but it’s not that, it’s that they’re illiterate. “White” is a mistranslation of the Afrikaans word weit, meaning “wide,” and it refers to the animal’s mouth, which is wider than that of the black rhino. By one of those lucky chances, the white rhino is in fact a very slightly lighter shade of dark grey than the black rhino. If the white rhino had actually been darker than the black rhino, people would just get cross, which would be a pity since there are many better things to get cross about regarding the white rhino than its colour, such as what happens to its horns.

There is a widespread myth about what people want rhino horns for—in fact, two myths. The first myth is that ground rhino horn is an aphrodisiac. This, I think it’s safe to say, is just what it appears to be—superstition. It has little to do with any known medical fact, and probably a lot to do with the fact that a rhino’s horn is a big sticky-up hard thing. The second myth is that anyone actually believes the first myth.

horn is used in traditional medicine in the Far East, but a major part of the trade in rhino horn is caused by something much more absurd, and it’s this: fashion. Dagger handles made of rhinoceros horn are an extremely fashionable item of male jewelry in Yemen. That’s it: costume jewelry.

IF YOU TOOK THE WHOLE of Norway, scrunched it up a bit, shook out all the moose and reindeer, hurled it ten thousand miles around the world, and filled it with birds, then you’d be wasting your time, because it looks very much as if someone has already done it. Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the southwest corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God’s earth, and one’s first impulse, standing on a clifftop surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.

Bill Black is said to be one of the most experienced helicopter pilots in the world, and he needs to be. He sits like a cuddly old curmudgeon hunched over his joystick and chews gum slowly and continuously as he flies his helicopter directly at sheer cliff faces to see if you’ll scream.

“Keas!” he says. I nod but only very slightly. My head already has quite enough contrary motions to contend with. “They’re mountain parrots,” says Mark. “Very intelligent birds with long curved beaks. They can rip the windscreen wipers off cars and often do.” I’m always startled by the speed with which Mark is able to recognise birds he’s never seen before, even when they’re just a speck in the distance. “The wing beat is very distinctive,” he explains. “But it would be even easier to identify them if we weren’t in a helicopter with all this noise. It’s one of those birds which very helpfully calls out its own name when it’s flying. ‘Kea! Kea! Kea!’ Birdwatchers love them for that. It would be great if the Pallas’s grasshopper warbler would learn the same trick. Make warbler identification a lot easier.”

When the thudding blades of the helicopter are finally still, the spacious murmur of the valley gradually rises to fill the silence: the low thunder of cataracts, the distant hiss of the sea, the rustling of the breeze in the scrubby grass, the keas explaining who they are to one another. There is one sound, however, that we know we are not going to hear—not just because we have arrived at the wrong time of day, but because we have arrived in the wrong year. There will not be any more right years. Until 1987 Fiordland was the home of one of the strangest, most unearthly sounds in the world. For thousands of years, in the right season, the sound could be heard after nightfall throughout these wild peaks and valleys. It was like a heartbeat: a deep, powerful throb that echoed through the dark ravines. It was so deep that some people will tell you that they felt it stirring in their gut before they could discern the actual sound, a sort of wump, a heavy wobble of air. Most people have never heard it at all, or ever will again. It was the sound of the kakapo, the old night parrot of New Zealand, sitting high on a rocky promontory and calling for a mate. Of all the creatures we were searching for this year, it was probably the strangest and most intriguing, and also one of the rarest and most difficult to find. Once, before New Zealand was inhabited by humans, there were hundreds of thousands of kakapos. Then there were thousands, then hundreds. Then there were just forty … and...

the kakapo is the strangest. Well, I suppose the penguin is a pretty peculiar kind of creature when you think about it, but it’s quite a robust kind of peculiarness, and the bird is perfectly well adapted to the world in which it finds itself, in a way that the kakapo is not. The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, though you know that it probably will not be. It is an extremely fat bird. A good-sized adult will weigh about six or seven pounds, and its wings are just about good for waggling a bit if it thinks it’s about to trip over something—but flying is completely out of the question. Sadly, however, it seems that not only has the kakapo forgotten how to fly, but it has also forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly. Apparently a seriously worried kakapo will sometimes run up a tree and jump out of it, whereupon it flies like a brick and lands in a graceless heap on the ground.

On the other hand, human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

The trouble is that this predator business has all happened rather suddenly in New Zealand, and by the time nature starts to select in favour of slightly more nervous and fleet-footed kakapos, there won’t be any left at all, unless deliberate human intervention can protect them from what they can’t deal with themselves. It would help if there were plenty of them being born, but this brings us on to more problems. The kakapo is a solitary creature: it doesn’t like other animals. It doesn’t even like the company of other kakapos. One conservation worker we met said he sometimes wondered if the mating call of the male didn’t actively repel the female, which is the sort of biological absurdity you otherwise find only in discotheques.

The ways in which the kakapo goes about mating are wonderfully bizarre, extraordinarily long drawn out, and almost totally ineffective. Here’s what they do. The male kakapo builds himself a track and bowl system, which is simply a roughly dug shallow depression in the earth, with one or two pathways leading through the undergrowth toward it. The only thing that distinguishes the tracks from those that would be made by any other animal blundering its way about is that the vegetation on either side of them is rather precisely clipped. The kakapo is looking for good acoustics when he does this, so the track and bowl system will often be sited against a rock facing out across a valley, and when the mating season arrives, he sits in his bowl and booms. This is an extraordinary performance. He puffs out two enormous air sacs on either side of his chest, sinks his head down into them, and starts to make what he feels are sexy grunting noises. These noises gradually descend in pitch, resonate in his two air sacs, and reverberate through the night air, filling the valleys for miles around with the eerie sound of an immense heart beating in the night. The booming noise is deep, very deep,...

As if things aren’t difficult enough already, the female can only come into breeding condition when a particular plant, the podocarp for instance, is bearing fruit. This only happens every two years. Until it does, the male can boom all he likes, it won’t do him any good. The kakapo’s pernickety dietary requirements are a whole other area of exasperating difficulty. It makes me tired just to think of them, so I think we’ll pass quickly over all that. Imagine being an airline steward trying to serve meals to a plane full of Moslems, Jews, vegetarians, vegans, and diabetics when all you’ve got is turkey because it’s Christmastime, and that will give you the idea. The males therefore get extremely overwrought sitting in their bowls making noises for months on end, waiting for their mates, who are waiting for a particular type of tree to fruit. When one of the rangers who was working in an area where kakapos were booming happened to leave his hat on the ground, he came back later to find a kakapo attempting to ravish it.

Stephen Frys companion in the BBC series also had his head and neck ravished by a kakapo!

I can remember once coming face to face with a free-roaming emu years ago in Sydney zoo. You are strongly warned not to approach them too closely because they can be pretty violent creatures, but once I had caught its eye, I found its irate, staring face absolutely riveting. Because once you look one right in the eye, you have a sudden sense of what the effect has been on the creature of having all the disadvantages of being a bird—absurd posture, a hopelessly scruffy covering of useless feathers, and two useless limbs—without actually being able to do the thing that birds should be able to do, which is to fly. It becomes instantly clear that the bird has gone barking mad.

one of the more dangerous animals in Africa is, surprisingly enough, the ostrich. Deaths due to ostriches do not excite the public imagination very much because they are essentially so undignified. Ostriches do not bite because they have no teeth. They don’t tear you to pieces because they don’t have any forelimbs with claws on them. No, ostriches kick you to death. And who, frankly, can blame them?