Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams

“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.