Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams

I’ve never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I’ve seen a few and they’re never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you’re in the right frame of mind, which is usually about lunchtime.

China is in the Northern Hemisphere, so its washbasins drain clockwise, like ours. Their telephone dials are numbered like ours. Both those things are familiar. But every single other thing is different, and the assumptions that you don’t know you’re making will only get you into trouble and confusion. I had a kind of inkling that this would be the case from what little I knew of other people’s experiences in China. I sat in the plane on the long flight to Beijing trying to unravel my habits, to unthink as it were, and feeling slightly twitchy about it. I started buying copious quantities of aftershave. Each time the duty-free trolley came around, I bought a bottle. I had never done anything like it before in my life. My normal, instinctive reaction had always been just to shake my head and carry on reading my magazine. This time I thought it would be more Zen-like to say, “Yes, all right. What have you got?” I was not the only person I caught by surprise. “Have you gone completely mad?” Mark asked me as I slipped a sixth different bottle into my hand baggage. “I’m trying to challenge and subvert my own fundamental assumptions as to what constitutes rationally constructed behaviour.” “Does that mean yes?” “I mean that I’m just trying to loosen up a bit,” I said. “An airplane doesn’t give you much scope for arbitrary and alternative types of behaviour, so I’m just making the most of the opportunities that are offered.” “I see.” Mark shifted uncomfortably in his seat and fro...

We put on our sunglasses and cameras and went and spent the day looking at the Great Wall at Badaling, an hour or so outside Beijing. It looked to be remarkably freshly built for such an ancient monument, and probably the parts we saw had been. I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burned to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide. “But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question. “But it’s been burned down?” “Yes.” “Twice.” “Many times.” “And rebuilt.” “Of course. It is an important and historic building.” “With completely new materials.” “But of course. It was burned down.” “So how can it be the same building?” “It is always the same building.”

We went to a restaurant called Crispy Fried Duck for dinner, and walking back through the city centre afterward we came to a square called Tiananmen. I should explain that this was October 1988. I had never heard the name Tiananmen Square, and neither had most of the world. The square is huge. Standing in it at night, you have very little idea of where its boundaries are, they fade into the distance. At one end is the gateway to the Forbidden City, the Tiananmen Gate, from which the great iconic portrait of Chairman Mao gazes out across the vastness of the square, out toward its farthest point, where there stands the mausoleum in which his body lies in state. In between these two, beneath his gaze, the mood was festive. Huge topiary bushes carved into the figures of cartoon animals had been imported into the square to celebrate the Olympics. The square was not full or crowded—it would take many tens or even hundreds of thousands of people to achieve that—but it was busy. Families were out with their children (or more usually, with their single child). They walked around, chatting with friends, milling about easily and freely as if the square were their own garden, letting their children wander off and play with others without an apparent second thought. It would be hard to imagine anything of the kind in any of the great squares of Europe, and inconceivable in America. In fact, I cannot remember any time that I have felt so easy and relaxed in a busy public place, particul...

We flew to Shanghai the next day and began to think about the dolphins toward which we were slowly edging our way across China. We went to think about them in the bar of the Peace Hotel. This turned out not to be a good place to think because you couldn’t hear yourself doing it, but we wanted to see the place anyway. The Peace Hotel is a spectacular remnant of the days when Shanghai was one of the most glamorous and cosmopolitan ports in the world. In the Thirties the hotel was known as the Cathay, and was the most sumptuous place in town. This was where people came to glitter at one another. In one of its suites Noël Coward wrote a draft of Private Lives. Now the paint is peeling, the lobby is dark and draughty, the posters advertising the World Famous Peace Hotel Jazz Band are written in felt tip and Scotch-taped onto the paneling, but the ghost of the Cathay’s former grandeur still lurks high up among the dusty chandeliers, wondering what’s been going on for the last forty years.

The very existence of the dolphin had not been known of until relatively recently. Fishermen had always known of them, but fishermen did not often talk to zoologists, and there had been a recent painful period in China’s history, of course, when nobody talked to scientists of any kind, merely denounced them to the Party for wearing glasses.

“The committee welcomes you to Tongling,” began the interpreter, “and is honoured by your visit.” He introduced them one by one, each in turn nodding to us with a slightly nervous smile. One was the Conservation Vice-Chief, another the Association Chief-Secretary, another the Vice Chief-Secretary, and so on. I sat there feeling that we were stuck in the middle of some gigantic misunderstanding about something, and tried desperately to think of some way of looking intelligent and not letting on that I was merely a science-fiction comedy novelist on holiday.

At the end of our meeting they said, “The residents in the area gain some profit—that’s natural—but we have more profound plans, that is to protect the dolphin as a species, not to let it become extinct in our generation. Its protection is our duty. As we know that only two hundred pieces of this animal survive, it may go extinct if we don’t take measures to prevent it, and if that happens we will feel guilty for our descendants and later generations.” We left the room feeling, for the first time in China, uplifted. It seemed that, for all the stilted and awkward formality of the meeting, we had had our first and only real glimpse of the Chinese mind. They took it as their natural duty to protect this animal, both for its own sake and for that of the future world. It was the first time we had been able to see beyond our own assumptions and have some insight into theirs. I ordered the Thousand-Year-Old eggs again that night, determined to try to enjoy them.

“This is Pink,” he said. We looked. Pink gazed at us intently with his two large, deep brown eyes. He fidgeted a little with his feet, clawing at his perch, and seemed tense, expectant, and slightly irritated to see us. “Pink’s a Mauritius kestrel,” said Richard, “but he’s basically weird.” “Really?” said Mark. “Doesn’t look it.” “What does he look like to you?” “Well, he’s quite small. He’s got sleek brown outer plumage on his wings, mottled brown and white breast feathers, impressive set of talons …” “In other words, you think he looks like a bird.” “Well, yes …” “He’d be shocked to know you thought that.” “What do you mean?” “Well, one of the problems with breeding birds in captivity is that they sometimes have to be reared by humans, which leads to all sorts of misunderstandings on the bird’s part. When a bird hatches from its egg, it doesn’t have much of a clear picture of what’s what in the world, and it falls in love with the first thing that feeds it, which in Pink’s case was Carl. It’s called ‘imprinting,’ and it’s a major problem because you can’t undo it. Once he’s made up his mind that he’s human, he—” “He actually thinks he’s a human?” I asked. “Oh yes. Well, if he thinks Carl’s his mother, it more or less follows, doesn’t it? They may not be brilliant, but they’re logical. He’s quite convinced he’s a human. He completely ignores the other kestrels, hasn’t got time for them, they’re just a bunch of birds as far as he’s concerned. But when Carl walks in here he...

“There’s an island near here—a very, very important island as far as wildlife is concerned—called Round Island. There are more unique species of plants and animals on Round Island than there are on any equivalent area on earth. About a hundred, hundred and fifty years ago, somebody had the bright idea of introducing rabbits and goats to the island so if anybody got shipwrecked there, they’d have something to eat. The populations quickly got out of hand and it wasn’t until the mid-Seventies that they managed to get rid of the goats. Then just a few years ago a team from New Zealand came to exterminate the rabbits, until someone realised that they were exterminating a rare breed of French rabbit that didn’t exist anymore in Europe and it should therefore be transferred to mainland Mauritius and preserved in some way, i.e., by us. “As far as I’m concerned,” continued Richard, “we could just put them in the pot. They’re just ordinary rabbits. Also, someone has come along since then and said, ‘That’s a load of rubbish—these aren’t that particular variety.’ “So we’ve just got to sit here feeding these rabbits until the rabbit experts have decided whether they’re valuable or not.

He grinned. “Want to see some endangered mice?” “I didn’t think mice were an endangered species yet,” I said. “I didn’t say anything about the species,” said Richard. “I just meant the particular mice. Conservation is not for the squeamish. We have to kill a lot of animals, partly to protect the species that are endangered, and partly to feed them. A lot of the birds are fed on mice, so we have to breed them here.” He disappeared into a small, warm, squeaking room and reemerged a few seconds later with a handful of freshly killed mice. “Time to feed the birds,”

“See the way it’s so interested in everything it can see?” said Richard. “It lives by its eyes, and you have to remember that when you keep them in captivity. You must make sure they have a complex environment. Birds of prey are comparatively stupid. But because they’ve got such incredible vision, you’ve got to have things that will keep them occupied visually. “When we originally started breeding birds of prey in captivity, we brought in some very skittish birds, and whenever anybody went past the aviary the birds just went mad, and we thought they must be upset by the disturbance, and someone came up with the bright idea of what’s called a skylight and seclusion aviary. All four walls were opaque and just the roof was open so that there was no disturbance for the birds. But what we found was that we’d overdone it. The offspring that were born in those environments were basket cases because they hadn’t got the sensory input they needed. We’d got it completely the wrong way around. “I mean, animals may not be intelligent, but they’re not as stupid as a lot of human beings. You look at the primate areas in some zoos that are equipped with green metal architect-designed ‘trees’ that, in a minimalist sort of way, reproduce the shape of the tree, but don’t actually include any of the features that a monkey might find interesting about a tree: leaves and bark and stuff. It may look like a tree to an architect, but architects are a lot more stupid than monkeys. We just got a bro...

Everyone else in turn then made the trip across in the dinghy, three or four at a time. To land, you had to make the tricky jump across onto the rock, matching the crests of the incoming waves to the top of the rock, and leaping just an instant before the wave reached its height, so that the boat was still bearing you upward. Those already on the rock would be tugging at the dinghy’s rope, shouting instructions and encouragement over the crashing of the waves, then catching and hauling people as they jumped. I was to be the last one to land. By this time the sea swell was getting heavier and rougher, and it was suggested that I should land on the other side of the rock, where it was a lot steeper but a little less obviously slippery with algae. I tried it. I leapt from the edge of the heaving boat, lunged for the rock, found it to be every bit as slippery as the other side, merely much steeper, and slithered gracelessly down it into the sea, grazing my legs and arms against the jagged edges. The sea closed over my head. I thrashed about under the surface, trying desperately to get my head up, but the dinghy was directly above me and kept bashing me against the rock face whenever I tried to make for the surface. Okay, I thought, I’ve got the point. This is why the island is relatively unspoilt. I made one more lunge upward, just as those onshore succeeded at last in pushing the boat away from me. This allowed me to get my head up above water and cling on to a crack in the r...

To understand how anything very complex works, or even to know that there is something complex at work, man needs to see little tiny bits of it at a time. And this is why small islands have been so important to our understanding of life. On the Galápagos Islands, for instance, animals and plants that shared the same ancestors began to change and adapt in different ways once they were divided from one another by a few miles of water. The islands neatly separated out the component parts of the process for us, and it was thus that Charles Darwin was able to make the observations that led directly to the idea of Evolution. The island of Mauritius gave us an equally important but more sombre idea—extinction.

The most famous of all the animals on Mauritius is a large, gentle dove. A remarkably large dove, in fact: its weight is closest to that of a well-fed turkey. Its wings long ago gave up the idea of lifting such a plumpy off the ground and withered away into decorative little stumps. Once it gave up flying, it could adapt itself very well to the Mauritian seasonal cycle, and stuff itself silly in the late summer and autumn, when fruit is lying rich on the ground, and then live on its fat reserves, gradually losing weight, during the leaner, dry months. It didn’t need to fly anyway, since there were no predators that wished it any harm and it, in turn, is harmless itself. In fact, the whole idea of harm is something it has never learned to understand, so if you were to see one on the beach, it would be quite likely to walk right up to you and take a look, provided it could find a path through the armies of giant tortoises parading around the beach. There’s never even been any reason for humans to kill it because its meat is tough and bitter. It has a large, wide, downturned bill of yellow and green, which gives it a slightly glum and melancholic look, small, round eyes like diamonds, and three ridiculously little plumes sticking out of its tail. One of the first Englishmen to see this large dove said that “for shape and rareness, it might antagonise the Phoenix of Arabia.” None of us will ever see this bird though, because, sadly, the last one was clubbed to death by Dutch c...