Last Chance To See Part 6

It was a little like that game we play as children, in which one child stands facing the wall, while the others try to creep up behind and touch her. She will from time to time suddenly turn around, and anyone she catches moving has to go all the way to the back and start again. Generally she won't be in a position to impale anyone she doesn't like the look of on a three foot horn, but in other respects it was similar.

The animal is, of course, a herbivore. It lives by grazing. The closer we crept to it, and the more monstrously it loomed in front of us, the more incongruous its gentle activity seemed to be. It was like watching a JCB excavator quietly getting on with a little weeding.

At about forty yards' distance, the rhinoceros suddenly stopped eating and looked up. It turned slowly to look at us, and regarded us with grave suspicion while we tried very hard to look like the smallest and most inoffensive animal we could possibly be. It watched us carefully but without apparent comprehension, its small black eyes peering dully at us from either side of its horn. You can't help but try and follow an animal's thought processes, and you can't help, when faced with an animal like a three ton rhinoceros with nasal pa.s.sages bigger than its brain, but fail.

The world of smells is now virtually closed to modern man. Not that we haven't got a sense of smell - we sniff our food or wine, we occasionally smell a flower, and can usually tell if there's a gas leak, but generally it's all a bit of a blur, and often an irrelevant or bothersome blur at that. When we read that Napoleon wrote to Josephine on one occasion, 'Don't wash - I'm coming home,' we are simply bemused and almost think of it as deviant behaviour. We are so used to thinking of sight, closely followed by hearing, as the chief of the senses that we find it hard to visualise (the word itself is a giveaway) a world which declares itself primarily to the sense of smells. It's not a world our mental processors can resolve - or, at least, they are no longer practised in resolving it. For a great many animals, however, smell is the chief of the senses. It tells them what is good to eat and what is not (we go by what the packet tells us and the sell-by date). It guides them towards food that isn't within line of sight (we already know where the shops are). It works at night (we turn on the light). It tells them of the presence and state of mind of other animals (we use language). It also tells them what other animals have been in the vicinity and doing what in the last day or two (we simply don't know, unless they've left a note). Rhinoceroses declare their movements and their territory to other animals by stamping in their faeces, and then leaving smell traces of themselves wherever they walk, which is the sort of note we would not appreciate being left.

When we smell something slightly unexpected, if we can't immediately make sense of it and it isn't particularly bothersome, we simply ignore it, and this is probably equivalent to the rhino's reaction to seeing us. It appeared not to make any particular decision about us, but merely to forget that it had a decision to make. The gra.s.s presented it with something infinitely richer and more interesting to its senses, and the animal returned to cropping it.

We crept on closer. Eventually we got to within about twenty-five yards, and Charles signalled us to stop. We were close enough. Quite close enough. We were in fact astoundingly close to it.

The animal measured about six feet high at its shoulders, and sloped down gradually towards its hindquarters and its rear legs, which were chubby with muscle. The sheer immensity of every part of it exercised a fearful magnetism on the mind. When the rhino moved a leg, just slightly, huge muscles moved easily under its heavy skin like Volkswagens parking.

The noise of our cameras seemed to distract it and it looked up again, but not in our direction. It appeared not to know what to think about this, and after a while returned to its grazing.

The light breeze that was blowing towards us began to shift its direction, and we shifted with it, which brought us round more to the front of the rhino. This seemed to us, in our world dominated by vision, to be an odd thing to do, but so long as the rhino could not smell us, it could take or leave what we looked like. It then turned slightly towards us itself, so that we were suddenly crouched in full. view of the beast. It seemed to chew a little more thoughtfully, but for a while paid us no more mind than that. We watched quietly for fully three or four minutes, and even the sound of our cameras ceased to bother the animal. After a few minutes we became a little more careless about noise, and started to talk to each other about our reactions, and now the rhino became a little more restive and uneasy. It stopped grazing, lifted its head and looked at us steadily for about a minute, still uncertain what to do.

Again, I imagine myself, sitting here in my study writing this through the afternoon and gradually realising that a slight smell I had noticed earlier is still there, and beginning to wonder if I should start to look for other clues as to what it could be. I would start to look for something, something I could see: a bottle of something that's fallen over, or something electrical that's overheating. The smell is simply the clue that there's something I should look for.

For the rhino, the sight of us was simply a clue that there was something he should sniff for, and he began to sniff the air more carefully, and to move around in a slow careful arc. At that moment the wind began to move around and gave us away completely. The rhino snapped to attention, turned away from us, and hurtled off across the plain like a nimble young tank.

We had seen our northern white rhinoceros, and it was time to go home.

The next day Charles flew us back across the ostrich skin savannah to Bunia airport where we were due once more to pick up a missionary flight returning to Nairobi. The plane was already there waiting and a representative from the airline a.s.sured us, against the evidence of all our previous experience, that there would be no problems, we could go straight to the plane. Then, a few minutes later we were told that we would just have to go quickly to the immigration office. We could leave our bags. We went to the immigration office, where we were told that we should bring our bags. We brought our bags. Expensive looking camera equipment.

We were then confronted by a large Zairois official in a natty blue suit whom we had noticed earlier hanging around watching us take our baggage out of Charles's plane. I had had the feeling then that he was sizing us up for something.

He examined our pa.s.sports for a goodish long time before acknowledging our presence at all, then at last he looked up at us, and a wide smile crept slowly across his face.

'You entered the country,' he asked, 'at Bukavu?

In fact he said it in French, so we made a bit of a meal of understanding him, which was something that experience had taught us to do. Eventually we admitted that, insofar as we had understood the question, yes, we had entered at Bukavu.

'Then,' he said, quietly, triumphantly, 'you must leave from Bukavu.'

He made no move to give us back our pa.s.sports.

We looked at him blankly.

He explained slowly. Tourists, he said, had to leave the country from the same port by which they had entered. Smile.

We utterly failed to understand what he had said. This was almost true anyway. It was the most preposterous invention. He still held on to our pa.s.sports. Next to him a young girl was sitting, studiously copying down copious information from other visitors' pa.s.sports, information that would almost certainly never see the light of day again.

We stood and argued while our plane sat out on the Tarmac 'waiting to take off to Nairobi, but the official simply sat and held our pa.s.sports. We knew it was nonsense. He knew we knew it was nonsense. That was clearly part of the pleasure of it. He smiled at us again, gave us a slow contented shrug, and idly brushed a bit of fluff off the sleeve of the natty blue suit towards the cost of which he clearly expected a major contribution.

On the wall above him, gazing seriously into the middle distance from a battered frame, stood the figure of President Mobuto, resplendent in his leopardskin pillbox hat.

Heartbeats in the Night

If you took the whole of Norway, scrunched it up a bit, shook out all the moose and reindeer, hurled it ten thousand miles round 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 south-west corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on G.o.d's earth, and one's first impulse, standing on a cliff top surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.

It is magnificent. It is awe-inspiring. The land is folded and twisted and broken on such a scale that it makes your brain quiver and sing in your skull just trying to comprehend what it is looking at. Mountains and clouds jumbled on top of each other, immense rivers of ice cracking their way millimetre by millimetre through the ravines, cataracts thundering down into the narrow green valleys below, it all shines so luminously in the magically clear light of New Zealand that to eyes which are accustomed to the grimier air of most of the western world it seems too vivid to be real.

When Captain Cook saw it from the sea in 1773 he recorded that 'inland as far as the eye can see the peaks are crowded together as to scarcely admit any valleys between them'. The great forked valleys have been carved out by glaciers over millions of years, and many are flooded by the sea for many miles inland.

Some of the cliff faces drop hundreds of feet sheer into the water, and continue sheer for hundreds of feet below it. It still has the appearance of a work in progress. Despite relentless lashing by the wind and rain it is sharp and jagged in its immensity.

Much of it has still not been explored at ground level. The only roads that approach the Fiordland National Park peter out quickly in the foothills, and most visiting tourists only ever explore the fringe scenery. A few backpackers plunge further in, and very, very few experienced campers try to get anywhere near the heart of it. Looking out across its serrated ma.s.ses and its impossibly deep ravines, the very idea of trying to cross it on foot seems ludicrous, and most serious exploration is of small local pockets, reached by helicopter, which is how we came to it.

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. Just as the helicopter seems about to smash itself against the rock wall an updraught catches it and wafts it impossibly up and over the top of the ridge which then falls away again precipitously on the other side, leaving us swinging out over a void. The valley lurches sickeningly away beneath us and we drop down a few feet, twisting to face up the next ravine as we do so, as if we are being swung by a giant on the end of an immense rubber rope.

The helicopter puts its nose down and goes thrumming its way along the ravine wall. We startle a couple of birds that scatter up into the air way ahead of us, flying with fast sharp wing beats. Mark quickly scrabbles under his seat for his binoculars.

'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 gra.s.shopper warbler would learn the same trick. Make warbler identification a lot easier.' He follows them for a few seconds more, until they round a large outcrop and disappear from view. He puts down his binoculars. They are not what we have come to look for.

'Interesting birds, though, with some odd habits. Very fussy about getting the design of their nests right. There was one kea nest that was found which the birds had started to build in 1958. In 1965 they were still sorting it out and adding bits to it but hadn't actually moved in yet. Bit like you in that respect.'

As we reach the narrow end of the ravine we pause briefly a few yards from a cataract crashing down its sides to fill the river hundreds of feet beneath us. We peer out at it from our floating gla.s.s bubble and I feel suddenly like a visitor from another planet, descending from the sky to study the minutiae of an alien world. I also feel sick but decide to keep this information to myself.

With a slight shrug Bill heaves the helicopter way up out of the ravine and into the clear air again. The sheer immensity of the volumes of rock and s.p.a.ce that turn easily around us continually overwhelms the spatial processors of the brain. And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs.

We are skimming over the tops of glaciers. The sudden splurge of light blinds us for a moment, but when the light coalesces into solid shapes they are like shapes from dreams. Great top-heavy towers resembling the deformed torsos of giants; huge sculpted caves and arches; and here and there the cracked and splayed remains of what looks like a number of Gothic cathedrals dropped from a considerable height: but all is snow and ice. It's as if the ghosts of Salvador Dali and Henry Moore come here at night with the elements and play.

I have the instinctive reaction of Western man when confronted with the sublimely incomprehensible: I grab my camera and start to photograph it. I feel I'll be able to cope with it all more easily when it's just two square inches of colour on a light box and my chair isn't trying to throw me round the room.

Gaynor, our radio producer, thrusts a microphone at me and asks me to describe what we're looking at.

What? I say, and gibber slightly.

'More,' she says, 'more!'

I gibber some more. The blades of the helicopter rotor are spinning mere inches from a tower of ice.

She sighs. 'Well, it will probably edit up into something,' she says and turns the tape off' again.

We take one more mind-wrenching turn around the giant ice sculptures and then head off down the ravines once more, which now seem almost domestic by comparison.

There is one other pa.s.senger in the aircraft: Don Merton, a benign man with the air of a vicar apologising for something. He sits quietly, occasionally pushing his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose and murmuring, 'Yes, ah yes,' to himself, as if this all confirmed something he'd always rather suspected. In fact he knows the area very well. He works for the New Zealand Department of Conservation and has probably done more than any man living to preserve the threatened birds of New Zealand.

We are once again very close to the rock wall of the ravine with hundreds of feet of sheer drop beneath us, and I notice that we are following a long narrow path that runs along an impossibly narrow ledge inclining gradually upwards towards a spur overlooking a broader sweep of valley. I suffer from terrible vertigo.

Being six foot five means I sometimes get giddy just standing up, and the very sight of the path gives me black swimmy nightmares.

'We used to come up that quite a lot,' murmurs Don, leaning forward to point at it.

I look at him in astonishment and then back at the terrifying path. We are hovering now just feet from it and the dull thudding of the rotor blades is reverberating back at us. The pathway is just a foot or two wide, gra.s.sy and slippery.

Yes, I suppose it is a bit steep,' says Don with a gentle laugh, as if that was the only reason they didn't do it by bicycle. 'There's a track and bowl system up on top of that ridge ahead of us. Want to take a look?

We nod nervously and Bill flies on.

I had heard the term 'track and bowl system' bandied about by New Zealand zoologists before, and they had bandied it about so casually that I hadn't immediately liked to say that I hadn't the faintest idea what they were talking about. I decided to start from the premise that it was something to do with satellite dishes and work it out gradually from there. This led to me being in a state of complete incomprehension for about two days before I finally plucked up the courage to admit my ignorance.

A track and bowl system is nothing whatever to do with satellite dishes. It does, however, share with them this feature - that it is likely to be found in high, open places. It's a rather odd name for an extremely odd phenomenon. A track and bowl system doesn't look particularly dramatic, and indeed if you were not a New Zealand zoologist you might pa.s.s one by without even noticing it, but it is the site of one of the most peculiar pieces of behaviour performed by any animal on earth.

The helicopter sweeps out beyond the ridge into the open valley, turns and approaches the ridge again from the other side, lifts on the updraught, turns slightly again - and settles. We have landed We sit in stunned silence for a moment, scarcely believing what we have just landed on. The ridge is only a few yards wide.

It plunges for hundreds of feet on either side, and falls away rapidly in front of us as well.

Bill turns and grins at us. 'No worries,' he says, which I thought they only said in Australia. This is the kind of thought you need to distract you at moments like this.

Nervously we climb out and, tucking our heads under the turning blades, scramble out on to the ridge. Spread out around our promontory is a deep jagged valley plunging away from us on three sides, softening in its contours at its lower levels. Just beyond us it makes a sharp left turn and proceeds by a series of sharp twists and folds to the Tasman Sea, which is a hazy glimmer in the far distance. The few clouds, which are not that far above us, trace the undulations of the valley with their crisp shadows as they make their way slowly along it, and this alone gives us a clear sense of scale and perspective.

When the thudding blades of the helicopter are finally still the s.p.a.cious 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 gra.s.s, the keas explaining who they are to each other. 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 hard 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 counting. Here in Fiordland, which for many thousands of years was the bird's main stronghold, there are now thought to be none left at all.

Don Merton knows more about these birds than anyone else in the world, and he has come along with us partly as our guide, but also because this flight into Fiordland gives him the opportunity to check one more time: has the last kakapo definitely gone?

Our helicopter is perched at such a dizzying angle on the high ridge of rock it looks as if the merest puff of wind will toss it lightly away into the valley far below us. Mark and I walk slowly away from it with a stiff, uneasy gait as if we are aching all over. Any move we make we make first with our heads before daring to move the rest of our bodies. Bill Black grins at, us wickedly for being earthbound city boys.

'No worries,' he says cheerfully. 'Wherever we can land we put down. This is where Don wanted to come so this is where I put him. Wouldn't want to be here if there was a high wind blowing, but there isn't.' He sits on a small rock and lights a cigarette. 'Not right now, anyhow,' he adds and peers off into the distance, happily contemplating the enormous fun we would all have if a gale suddenly whipped up along the valley.

Gaynor feels for the moment disinclined to move too far away. from the chopper, and decides that this might be a good moment to interview Bill. She pulls the tangled coloured cables of the ca.s.sette recorder out of her shoulder bag and jams the tiny headphones over her hair, without ever looking down to the left or the right. She thrusts the microphone at him and uses her other hand to steady herself nervously against the ground.

'I've been flying in Fiordland for fifteen years,' says Bill, when she's ready, 'mostly telecommunications work, and some construction work. Don't do tourists usually. Can't be bothered with that. Otherwise I do a lot of work for the kakapo transfer programme, flying the wardens around to the most inaccessible parts of New Zealand. A helicopter's very useful for that, because it can put down in the most unlikely places. You see that rocky peak over there?

'No!' says Gaynor, still staring fixedly at the ground. 'I don't want to look yet. Just . . . tell me a story. Tell me . .. tell me something funny that's happened to you. Please??

'Something funny, eh? says Bill, and takes a long thoughtful drag on his cigarette as he surveys the valley. 'Well, I once set my hands on fire in the helicopter, because I lit a match without realising my gloves were soaked in petrol. That the sort of thing you had in mind?

Don Merton in the meantime has calmly walked off a few yards, and is peering anxiously at a patch of the scrubby ground. He squats down, and very carefully brushes aside pieces of loose earth and gra.s.s from a shallow depression in the earth. He finds something and picks it up. It is small, roughly oval in shape and pale in colour. He examines it carefully for a while and his shoulders sag dejectedly. He beckons us over to join him. We follow nervously and look at the thing he is holding up between his fingers and regarding with extraordinary sadness. It is a single, slightly elderly, sweet potato. I hardly know what to say.

With a sigh he replaces the sweet potato on the ground.

'We call this place Kakapo Castle,' he says, looking up and squinting at us in the cold, bright sunlight. 'It is the last known kakapo booming site in the whole of mainland New Zealand. This shallow pit in the earth here is part of a track and bowl system.'

I'll explain what a track and bowl system actually is in a moment. All there is to see here is the roughly dug shallow pit in the ground. It's untidy and a little overgrown. Looking round again at the breathtaking landscape spread out around us I feel bewildered. We have flown so far into this shattering immensity of land, and all to find these small sad sc.r.a.pings in the earth and no egg, just a potato.

I make some lame remark along these lines. Mark frowns at me and a cloudy look comes into Don's face.

'Oh no,' says Don, 'I wasn't expecting an egg. Not an egg. Not here. Oh no, not at all.'

'Oh,' I say, 'I 'thought when you picked up the potato. . .'

Mark says out of the corner of his mouth, 'Don explained all this in the helicopter.'

'I couldn't hear anything in the helicopter.'

'You won't find eggs in a track and bowl system, you see,' says Don, patiently. 'It's just the courtship and mating area. I put the sweet potato there myself when I last came up here, last year. If there was a kakapo in the area it would have eaten the potato.' He picks it up again and hands it to me.

'There you see, not a mark on it. Not a nibble. And it would have trimmed and tidied its booming bowl. They are very meticulous birds. We don't know what has happened to the last one here. It may have been killed, possibly by a cat. We think they sometimes can come up this high. Fiordland is full of cats, which is bad news for the kakapo. Though probably not all cats would have a go at a kakapo. Some will have tried - and failed - to savage a kiwi and might therefore steer clear of kakapos. Others might have tried it, found they could get away with it and done it again. Kakapos are generally unused to defending themselves. They'll just freeze if they see a cat approach. Though they have powerful legs and claws they don't use them for defence. A kiwi, on the other hand, will kick h.e.l.l out of a cat. Because kiwi fight each other. Put two in a cage together and there'll be a dead one in the morning.

'Or the kakapo may simply have died of old age. We don't know how long they live, though it seems that it might be a long time. Maybe as long as humans. Either way, the kakapo's not here any more, I think we can be quite sure of that. There are now no kakapos left in all of Fiordland.'

He takes the potato back from me, nevertheless, and with a last gesture of hopeless optimism puts it carefully back on the edge of the bowl.

Until relatively recently - in the evolutionary scale of things - the wildlife of New Zealand consisted of almost nothing but birds. Only birds could reach the place. The ancestors of many of the birds that are now natives of New Zealand originally flew there. There was also a couple of species of bats, which are mammals, but - and this is the point - there were no predators. No dogs, no cats, no ferrets or weasels, nothing that the birds needed to escape from particularly.

And flight, of course, is a means of escape. It's a survival mechanism, and one that the birds of New Zealand found they didn't especially need. Flying is hard work and consumes a lot of energy.

Not only that. There is also a trade off between flying and eating. The more you eat the harder it is to fly. So increasingly what happened was that instead of having just a light snack and then flying off, the birds would settle in for a rather larger meal and go for a waddle afterwards instead.

So when eventually European settlers arrived and brought cats and dogs and stoats and possums with them, a lot of New Zealand's flightless birds were suddenly waddling for their lives. The kiwis, the takahes - and the old night parrots, the kakapos.

Of these 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.

By and large, though, the kakapo has never learnt to worry. It's never had anything much to worry about.

Most birds, faced with a predator, will at least realise that something's up and make a bolt for safety, even if it means abandoning any eggs or chicks in its nest - but not the kakapo. Its reaction when confronted with a predator is that it simply doesn't know what the form is. It has no conception of the idea that anything could possibly want to hurt it, so it tends just to sit on its nest in a state of complete confusion and leaves the other animal to make the next move - which is usually a fairly swift and final one.

it's frustrating to think of the difference that language would make. The millennia crawl by pretty b.l.o.o.d.y slowly while natural selection sifts its way obliviously through generation after generation, favouring the odd aberrant kakapo that's a little twitchier than its contemporaries till the species as a whole finally gets the idea. It would all be cut short in a moment if one of them could say, 'When you see one of those things with whiskers and little bitey teeth, run like h.e.l.l.' 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 only find in discotheques. The ways in which it goes about mating are wonderfully bizarre, extraordinarily long drawn out and almost totally ineffective.