There was a frisson of panic on their last day on Round Island when the helicopter failed to turn up on time and for a moment it seemed they might be marooned on this intriguing but inhospitable speck of land. Most alarmed was one of their local companions, a young man from the Forestry Department called Zozo who had never been off Mauritius before. Spotting Zozo sitting moodily under a palm tree nearby, Gerald decided to lighten his gloom.
‘Zozo,’ he called.
‘Yes, Mr Gerry?’ said Zozo, peering at him from under the brim of his large solar topee which, Gerald noted, ‘made him look ridiculously like a green mushroom’.
‘It seems as if the helicopter is not coming to rescue us.’
‘Yes, Mr Gerry,’ he agreed soulfully.
‘Well,’ said Gerald, in a kindly, reassuring way, ‘I wanted you to know that, by an overwhelming vote, we have decided to eat you first when the food runs out.’
But all was well, the helicopter eventually arrived, Zozo was spared, and Gerald and John and Margaret returned to Mauritius with their precious Round Island geckos and skinks as a first step in saving them too. ‘As we rose higher and higher, and the island dwindled against the turquoise sea,’ Gerald declared later, ‘I became determined that we must do everything we could to save it.’ It was the beginning of a great endeavour.
With Gerald about to go to America on another fund-raising tour – during which he would make a rendezvous with destiny in the form of Lee – John Hartley became the de facto co-ordinator of the Trust’s operations in Mauritius. His first action was to return almost immediately to catch pink pigeons for a captive breeding programme in Jersey, returning after a month with eight birds, three of which were left in Mauritius with the ones they already had there, and five brought back to Jersey. There was a steady escalation after that. On the recommendation of the Jersey Trust the Mauritius government had established the Black River Aviaries (now known as the Gerald Durrell Endemic Wildlife Sanctuary) to carry out their own bird rescue and breeding programme, and when the International Council for Bird Preservation appointed a young Welsh biologist by the name of Carl Jones to run the Black River centre in 1983 it was Jersey who funded his work, eventually taking over the whole programme. ‘This project was a defining moment for the Trust,’ John Hartley recalled. ‘It was the first project we developed overseas in a serious way over the years and basically we’ve learnt an awful lot of what we now apply elsewhere from the Mauritius model. It is also one of the most successful conservation projects in the world, without doubt.’
Carl Jones had no doubts that Gerald Durrell was the inspiration and driving force. ‘He saw things very simply,’ he was to recall. ‘He knew that captive breeding was just one way of saving animals, but he saw beyond this, and realised we had to develop the interface between captivity and the wild state. I spent a lot of time talking to him about this. He was a great visionary. Recently conservation has moved on into questions of animal consciousness and animal rights and whole ecosystems, and Gerry was interested in all these things. He knew that we had to move with the times. He was a great thinker and to my mind a very great man. He was also his own master. He was outside all the committees and in-fighting that ties up so much of the conservation movement. He wasn’t like some of the bigger conservation organisations who deal only in high-profile animals, put a load of money in and then pull out. He put local people in on the ground and stuck with the project hands-on in situ through thick and thin.’
For Gerald and Lee, much of the 1980s were to be taken up with a succession of international television series on natural history and conservation themes that would take them to almost every point of the globe. The driving force behind this televisual blitz was Canadian production chief W. Paterson Ferns, with whom Gerald had made the highly successful thirteen-part series The Stationary Ark in 1975, and who was now head of a Toronto-based production company, Primedia. By the time Gerald and Pat Ferns’ association came to an end they would have made five television series (four of them with Lee) and a television special together, a total of sixty-five programmes, plus six related books. The production costs reflected the rising scale of the programmes’ ambitions and the increasingly exotic location shooting. The thirteen-part series Ark on the Move was made in 1980 on a shoestring, for a budget equivalent to what Gerald was used to when shooting a single documentary for the BBC. By the time they made their fifth series, each episode was costing the equivalent of the entire first series.
During the early part of 1980 Pat Ferns had been back in contact with Gerald about the possibility of making another thirteen-part documentary television series, entitled Ark on the Move. The new British network Channel 4’s Chief Executive, Jeremy Isaacs, was attracted by the idea of having a major figure in natural history working on the new channel, and as well as commissioning Gerald’s new series, he purchased the previous one, The Stationary Ark. Ark on the Move was a logical sequel to The Stationary Ark, reflecting the shift in Gerald’s conservation thinking since the first series, and his plans to extend captive breeding operations from Jersey to sites overseas. The idea was to base part of the series on Gerald’s animal rescue missions to Mauritius, as described in his book Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons, and to shoot the rest in Madagascar, a species-rich island land-mass in dire ecological straits.
It was Pat Ferns’ view that Gerald and Lee would be perfect to front the new series together, since Gerald knew Mauritius and Lee knew Madagascar, and each would be showing the other familiar ground. Lee, Pat Ferns reckoned, was a quiet but intriguing presence on film. As for Gerald, Ferns knew that properly handled he was a natural. ‘I worked with some of the best television presenters in the world,’ he was to say later, ‘and Gerry was certainly in the first rank. He wasn’t an easy personality but I think he was a first-rate performer with a genuine vision. He was a true storyteller. He loved to regale an audience with a scotch in his hand over dinner or with a lemur on his shoulder in front of a camera. His writing relied on the brilliant simile or metaphor and he was able to translate this into a form of television presentation that captured the comic qualities of his books, while never detracting from the passion of his cause.’
Until Pat Ferns had come along, Gerald’s experience of television had not been particularly happy. The long, hard slog of documentary film-making, with the almost invariable crew acrimony and the front-of-camera pressures, had always put him under great strain, making him self-conscious and constrained, and stifling his natural humour and buoyant charm. But working with Pat Ferns had been different, and in The Stationary Ark he had finally blossomed in front of camera – ‘so full of life and cuddly-cute,’ as one reviewer remarked, ‘that you felt like reaching out and squeezing him.’ So he looked forward to the Ark on the Move shoot, and perhaps others to come, in happy expectation.
‘In this new series,’ Gerald was to write, ‘we were to show not only our breeding successes in Jersey but also our rescue operations in the wild. Also, we wanted to show our new scheme for working with governments all over the world to save their animals and to bring people from these countries to Jersey for training in the complex and difficult art of captive breeding.’ The plan was to visit Mauritius, Rodrigues and Round Island in the Mascarenes, where the Jersey Trust was already working with the government, and then to move on to Madagascar, to see what help they could give there.
In the late autumn of 1980 Gerald and Lee met Pat Ferns and the production team in Toronto as they passed through in the course of a fund-raising tour of North America, and at the end of January 1981 Pat Ferns (executive producer), Michael Maltby (director) and Paula Quigley (producer) arrived in Jersey for three days of pre-production meetings. A week or so later John Hartley and the production team flew to Mauritius to set up the production. Ark on the Move, the first of the new big series, was under way.
There were the usual hiccups and tensions that befall long film shoots involving talented but temperamental people in uncontrollable situations on unpredic
table locations. The Australian film crew were delayed by an air strike, for example, and Gerald and the director began to fall out. But the shooting schedule was kept to, and all the key locations were tackled in turn – Pink Pigeon Wood, Black River Gorges, the Black River Aviaries, and ten days on Rodrigues.
In the last week of March the party moved on to the infinitely bigger island of Madagascar – a strange and intriguing land beset by its own infinitely bigger problems. Lying off the East African coast, a thousand miles long and two and a half times the size of Britain, Madagascar is an island of continental proportions – the fifth largest in the world and home of some of the world’s most remarkable flora and fauna, 90 per cent of it found nowhere else. All of Madagascar’s chameleons (representing two-thirds of the world’s species) and almost half of its birds are unique to the island. Of the four hundred or so known species of reptiles and amphibians, only twelve exist elsewhere. Four-fifths of the plants are found nowhere else, including a plethora of baobab tree (seven different kinds, where Africa only has one). The two dozen kinds of lemur that live there constitute an entirely separate branch of primate evolution, ranging in size from one as big as a five-year-old child to another small enough to fit into a coffee cup. There are woodlice the size of golf balls and moths the size of Regency fans. In short, the island is a natural treasure house – yet four-fifths of it now stood barren.
‘Today’s acute environmental problems are turning Madagascar, an irreplaceable storehouse of evolutionary knowledge, into a wasteland of barren soil,’ Gerald was to lament. ‘Eighty per cent of native forests has already disappeared. The conservation of this Eden’s rich tapestry of natural history is seen as one of the world’s foremost environmental priorities. Indeed, Madagascar has been described as the place with the greatest number of unique species in the greatest danger of extinction.’ It was an island of breathless and eerie beauty, he continued, a complex web of past and present, yet riven with wrenching conflicts between changing cultures and fragile environments.
Shortly after their arrival in Madagascar the party flew to the extraordinary reserve at Berenty, at the southernmost tip of the island. To a naturalist it could be said that Berenty has a significance that verges almost on the mystical. It consists of 450 acres of forest of gigantic old tamarind trees, and is famous above all for its lemurs – ring-tailed lemurs, mouse lemurs, nocturnal lepilemurs and sifakas – primitive primates which, having been displaced elsewhere by monkeys, evolved in Madagascar unbothered by simian competition. At first light on the day following their arrival, Gerald, Lee and the rest of the party went into the forest. At the end of the day Gerald dictated his recollections into his tape-recorder.
The first thing that ran across our path was a sifaka. They are the most beautiful and endearing of all the lemurs; not only are they so graceful, but they are so gentle and they have got such sweet, benign faces. They are the ballerinas of the lemurs. Not only are they graceful in the trees, leaping the most astonishing distances, but when they run on the ground they run on their hind legs, holding up their little black hands as though in horror at some remark that has been made to them, twisting the top half of their body slightly sideways as they run, which gives them a terrifically sort of pansy gallop, which is very amusing to watch. Their movement is so beautiful, as light as thistledown.
The ring-taileds, on the other hand, are more baboon-like. They gallop about like dogs or swagger about with their tails up, and when a troop of perhaps twenty or thirty of them walk down the forest paths here it looks like a sort of medieval pageant with banners up going along.
The animals here are so used to being studied and approached by human beings that they treat you exactly as though you are a part of the scenery. They ignore you and just walk past going about their business, sometimes within a foot of you. We have seen a lot of wonderful things. When I started dictating this, for example, about thirty ring-tailed lemurs just walked across the front of the house and any minute now I expect to get a visit from my little troop of sifakas that come and do their funny waddly walk for me and make me laugh.
From Berenty they drove three hours along a bumpy track in an ancient Land-Rover to visit a government nature reserve near a tiny village called Hazofotsy. The reserve protected a spiny forest unique to southern Madagascar, consisting of Didiereacae trees, which looked like giant cacti covered with formidable spikes. In this prickly and inhospitable terrain lived one of the most beautiful of the Madagascar lemurs, the Verrauxi’s sifaka. A lovely creamy-white in colour, with sooty backs, black faces and huge golden eyes, they leapt and pounced through their thorny world in the most amazing fashion, jumping twenty or thirty feet from one spike to another without ever impaling themselves. For Gerald and his party, though, it was rough going, as he explained into his tape-recorder: ‘As soon as I saw the Spiny Forest I thought to myself that our chances of filming anything at all were very remote. We drove over some roads that were like nothing I had experienced anywhere in the world. They were like ancient river beds which had been under mortar attack for about twenty years.’
That night they slept under the stars – ‘the Southern Cross like a gigantic chandelier in the sky’ – and woke drenched in dew. ‘I looked over to Lee,’ Gerald recorded, ‘and there she was lying, looking like a Pre-Raphaelite painting of the better sort, with all her hair covered with little tiny beads of dew, like a spider’s web.’
The sound-recording equipment and the camera on its tripod seemed to weigh a ton as they were carried through the Spiny Forest. But there were compensations. The spectacle of a Madagascar dawn was one – ‘a very odd shade of greeny-blue’. The seemingly limitless abundance of strange creatures was another – a five-foot-long, yellow-and-black-striped snake ‘like an animated school tie’; a spider the size of a saucer that spun webs the size of cartwheels seemingly thick enough to catch small birds in; a wood-louse (or pill-millipede) the size of a billiard ball; a ‘hissing’ cockroach as big as a lemon and the colour of mahogany that sang with a loud ringing-zinging noise when you picked it up.
After two weeks in Berenty Reserve and the Spiny Forest they travelled north to Ankarafantsika, one of the largest reserves in Madagascar. Sadly, owing to the slash and burn method of agriculture used by the local people, two-thirds of this marvellous reserve had been destroyed. A two-week shoot in the nearby forest reserve at Ampijoroa followed, then an excursion to the lush little tropical island of Nosy Komba, off the north-west coast of Madagascar, where the local lemurs – of a kind called black or Macaco lemur – were held by the local people as sacred, and therefore protected. They were incredibly tame – so tame that they would sometimes sit on top of the camera with their tail hanging down over the lens.
Their final port of call was Perinet, a forestry reserve set aside especially for the largest and most spectacular of the Malagasy lemurs, the indri. The size of a five-year-old child, they are marked panda-fashion in black and white, with huge white tufted ears and big staring golden eyes. ‘They are the aristocrats of the lemurs,’ Gerald was to record, ‘and behave in a way befitting their aristocracy. They rarely get up before ten o’clock and are generally in bed by four in the afternoon. While they are up, however, they delineate their territory by singing.’ Gerald, Lee and the crew went into the forest to find these creatures and to hear their song, as Gerald related into his tape-recorder:
Well, we went into the forest, and although we heard indri we didn’t see any. I’ve decided their marvellous yowling cry sounds exactly like those underwater recordings of the whale song. It really is a most plaintive and musical and beautiful cry. Finally we managed to catch up with some indri and get a recording of their voices, and this we played back. As soon as the recording died away, we waited and thought, ‘No go’, and then suddenly from the trees right next to us there rose up this enormous cry which almost vibrates the forest, it is so marvellously loud and rich – and there was this troop of indri sitting almost in our laps, and we hadn’t even noticed th
em. They are marvellous animals with great, fluffy ears that remind me very much of a koala bear’s, and these huge, rather maniacal-looking tangerine-coloured eyes stare down at you very fiercely. In fact, they are the most gentle, sweet creatures imaginable. And it’s extraordinary how a bulky animal like that can jump through the forest. They just jump from tree to tree like kangaroos, and yet with so little noise. A whole troop can pass you by and the most you may hear is a slight rustle – it’s quite extraordinary, the silence of movement.
Gerald was to reflect later: ‘It was a privilege to share the world with such an animal. But for how long could we do so? If the forests vanish – and they are vanishing – the indri goes with them. The morning before we left, Lee and I walked up the road towards the forest and stood listening to the indris, as the sky turned from green to blue. Their haunting, wonderful, mourning song came to us, plaintive, beautiful and sad. It could have been the very voice of the forest, the very voice of Madagascar lamenting.’
By the end of the first week in May the Madagascar filming was finished and the British Ambassador threw a farewell party for Gerald and the crew which was attended by a number of Malagasy politicians. During their time in Madagascar Gerald and Lee had had meetings with several Ministers, and had talked with their friend and guardian angel on the island, Professor Roland Albignac, a zoologist working for a French research organisation, about ways of brokering a deal with the Madagascar authorities to enable Western scientists to carry out research and assist in conservation programmes. It was during these discussions that the strategy for what eventually became the crucial Madagascar Conference and Accord, signed in Jersey in 1983, was developed.
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