Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  This may be stating the obvious, but when a black rhino wakes up to find itself tied up in rope and surrounded by people pushing and pulling, it’s not particularly pleased about it. Black rhinos are famously irritable – and this one was doubly so.

  How on earth it ended up inside the crate I will never know. I remember lots of shouting and shoving, and the sound of the door slamming shut, but that’s about it. The rest is a big blur. Admittedly, the poor animal wasn’t particularly happy to be in the crate, either, and rammed the inside so hard it split at the seams, but it would all be worth it in the end.

  We caught and processed two more rhinos during the course of the morning and then drove them in convoy – with a police escort in case we were ambushed – on the five-hour journey north. There, in the safe surroundings of Ol Jogi, they were released into their new home.

  The next day, Stephen and I stood on the top of a hill surveying the scene and listening to the distinctive bleeps of their radio transmitters. They were out there, somewhere, in the peaceful vastness of the African bush, though we couldn’t actually see them.

  I had mixed feelings. The rhinos translocated to these fenced sanctuaries will be made as safe as humanly possible. Their new homes are immense – the size of English counties in some cases – but they are still fenced. And the rhinos themselves will have to receive round-the-clock protection. So, in one way, it’s all very artificial. They’re not wild in the sense that rhinos living in a place like Garamba are truly wild.

  But they are wild-ish. And if we’re at the point where we have to choose between wild-ish and extinction, I know which I would choose.

  Soon after leaving Kenya we received news that an intensive search by the brave rangers hanging on in the crossfire found absolutely no evidence of northern white rhinos surviving in Garamba.

  We had gone in search of one of the rarest animals on the planet. But even if we’d managed to get to their home in the war zone, we would have been too late.

  There is, however, one last tiny sliver of hope.

  The northern white rhino may be gone from Garamba, but it hangs on by a thread in captivity. There are three in San Diego Wild Animal Park – two females and a male – which were caught in the wild many years ago. One of the females is infertile, and the other hasn’t been interested in the male’s advances for longer than he can remember, so this population is not breeding. But thanks to the life’s work of a fanatical Czech northern white rhino collector, there are seven at Dvur Králové Zoo, in the Czech Republic (actually, there are seven and a half, because the pure-bred animals share their enclosure with a hybrid called Arthur, whose mother was a northerner but whose father was a southerner). But they haven’t had a calf for nearly a decade.

  Now there is a plan to move four of the Czech seven to that boma at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, in Kenya. Conservationists are hoping against all hope that the wide expanse of African sky, and a last chance to stand on African soil, might encourage the rhinos to breed. It’s a long shot, to say the least, but in the conservation business we simply can’t afford to give up hope.

  Meanwhile, the formalities are under way to declare the northern white rhino extinct in the wild.

  The boma at Ol Pejeta was eerily empty. Kes had a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach that it was game over.

  3

  BITS OF OTHER ANIMALS

  It started with a kiss. Well, not exactly a kiss, but a box of chocolates. We’d been advised to bring an edible offering to ease our way through customs and, sure enough, one box of assorted Belgian chocolates and five minutes later, seven of us and our thirty eight bags were being waved through to the outside world by a man with bits of truffle stuck in his teeth.

  We had arrived in Madagascar.

  Many travellers have commented that Madagascar is unlike anywhere else in the world. And they’re right. It’s hard to be more insightful than that – at least, it’s hard to be more insightful without using an awful lot of trite and unimaginative clichés. You can’t say ‘Madagascar is like somewhere-or-other’ because, quite simply, it isn’t.

  Part African and part Southeast Asian, it’s the kind of place that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shakes you about until you fall head-over-heels in love with its unique and consummate charm. It happened to me and it’s happened to everyone else I know who’s been there. There aren’t many places you can say that about.

  Despite its proximity to the African mainland, the country’s first settlers came from entirely the opposite direction – mainly Indonesia and Malaysia – less than 2,000 years ago. Then others came from Africa, Arabia and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. The French turned up much later (Madagascar was officially declared a French colony in 1896 and wrested back full independence in 1960) and left behind an indelible colonial stamp that lurks around every corner, adding its own unique flavour to the mix like vanilla in a cappuccino. There are French cafés serving coffee and croissants in the capital, men playing boules in village squares and, best of all, badly driven Citroën 2CVs and Renault 4s pretty much everywhere.

  With their own soft, singsong language, and a happy blend of racial diversity and cultural uniformity, the people of Madagascar are uniquely Madagascan.

  Baby ring-tailed lemur: no word has been invented to describe cuteness on such a grandiose scale.

  Yet everyone seems to have been absorbed into this eclectic mix with such alacrity that Madagascar has accomplished an incredibly rare and happy blend of racial diversity and cultural uniformity. The Malagasy don’t have the effervescence of Southeast Asians, the ebullience of Africans or the Gallic ways of the French. With their own soft, singsong language, they are uniquely ‘Madagascan’ (not the correct word – it should be ‘Malagasy’ – but I like it). And while Madagascar is among the poorer countries of the world, its people seem to be some of the happiest. Call me a gullible westerner, but they’re certainly some of the friendliest.

  Here is a country where there are traditional healers and sorcerers in Malagasy villages, and yet finely dressed transsexual ladyboys touting for business in the big city; where people email one another to arrange a meeting under an upside-down baobab tree, where they plan to place sacred offerings; and where the best restaurants serve tender mouthwatering steaks with good wine from around the world, while roadside stalls serve stir-fried locusts with illegal (and quite hazardous) home-made rum.

  I love it.

  What’s not to like about a country whose people passionately and unerringly believe in magic, elect a snappily dressed yoghurt baron for president, and live alongside animals that look as if they have just arrived from outer space?

  (Sadly, Madagascar’s reputation as an otherworldly tropical paradise was knocked just a couple of months after our visit. A serious breakdown in law and order was followed by violent protests and a kind of military coup. The army forced out the elected president, Marc Ravalomanana, and installed the opposition leader, Andry Rajoelina, in his place. One of the many repercussions has been a dramatic rise in criminal networks plundering the country’s national parks for precious hardwoods and wildlife.)

  If a spaceship were to land on earth, the creature most likely to emerge from its cargo doors is an aye-aye. One of the strangest animals on the planet, Douglas Adams reckoned it looks as if it has been assembled from bits of other animals. It has a sort of cat’s body, a bat’s ears, a beaver’s teeth, a long bushy tail like that of a squirrel on steroids, and enormous, bright yellowy-orange eyes even more beady than those of ET. It’s a real-life work of art.

  The aye-aye was probably the strangest animal on our endangered species list, and was certainly one of the hardest to find.

  ‘It looks like someone has tried to turn a bat into a cat,’ Stephen explained to a group of British tourists who asked for his autograph in Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital. ‘And then they stuck a few extra gadgets on it for good measure.’

  The best of all its gadgets, fulfilling something of the role of
a Swiss Army knife, is a skeletally thin middle finger rather like a long dead twig. Little more than skin, tendons and bone, it looks more like a contraption for zapping creatures from another world. Little wonder some Malagasy people believe that if an aye-aye points one of these long middle fingers at them, they are going to die.

  The aye-aye baffled taxonomists for years. It’s such an anatomical jumble that they couldn’t make up their minds what it was and, at first, classified it as a rodent. It was an understandable mistake. With small cheek teeth, no canines and a single pair of enormous incisors that never stop growing, some kind of weird and wonderful rodent would be a logical first guess.

  Now we know better. It’s actually a lemur – albeit such an unusual one that it has been dignified with a zoological family of its very own (known in the scientific world as Daubentoniidae). It’s a nice way of classifying such an enigma because, as Gerald Durrell shrewdly observed, ‘an aye-aye is, quite simply, an aye-aye’.

  This is the kind of creature that would emerge from the cargo doors of a spaceship: an aye-aye.

  E.T. eat your heart out.

  It doesn’t zap extraterrestrials, of course, but what it does do with its long middle finger is almost as implausible. It taps wood. The aye-aye comes out after dark and taps branches and tree trunks as it moves nimbly about the treetops. Using its outsized, leathery ears (which are capable of moving to and fro independently like radar dishes), it listens intently for the faintest whisper of juicy wood-boring grubs that might be hiding inside. As soon as it detects one it starts to gnaw a hole with its front teeth, sending wood shavings flying all over the place. Then it inserts its middle finger, with the delicacy and precision of a surgeon’s probe, and extracts the unfortunate grub from its hidey-hole like a sausage on a stick. It chews off the head first and then spoons out the delicious contents of the still-wriggling body with its middle finger.

  Few other animals (let alone people) can do ‘percussive foraging’, as this is called, so young aye-ayes have to undertake a long apprenticeship to get it right. From their first few clumsy attempts to passing their final exams takes about ten years.

  Aye-ayes have an important role to play in the ecological framework of the forest: they fill a specialised ecological niche that would otherwise be left untouched. They have evolved to fulfil a role that in other parts of the world is undertaken by woodpeckers and squirrels – both of which are absent from Madagascar.

  Aye-ayes also have a positive approach to sexual equality. The females wear the trousers in their world, having first pick of all the best food and exerting dominance over all the males. When a female is on heat she advertises the fact, with a loud and distinctive call, and as many as half a dozen males come running. They tussle with one another and can get quite possessive, even pulling successful rivals off the female while they’re mating. The female loves all the attention and, when she’s mated with as many suitors as she likes, scuttles away through the trees to do the same thing all over again somewhere else.

  It’s a lot of fuss and fornication to produce a single baby aye-aye, weighing no more than 100 grams (4 ounces), some six months later. But it’s worth it. A baby aye-aye will never win a beauty contest – it would look awesomely unlovely in a passport photograph – but there’s no denying that it’s the cutest, most adorable little creature from outer space you’ll ever see.

  Douglas Adams and I dreamed up the idea for Last Chance to See while camping in a dilapidated hut in the middle of the rainforest on a great green hump of an island called Nosy Mangabé.

  That was in 1985, when this idyllic tropical island, just off the northeastern coast of Madagascar, was believed to be the last place on earth where aye-ayes could be found (or more usually not found). Nine of them had been released there some twenty years before, as a precautionary measure at a time when they were believed to be pretty much extinct everywhere else in Madagascar.

  Although no one knew it at the time, aye-ayes still had a few secret hideaways on the mainland and it’s since been discovered that they weren’t quite so rare after all – just very good at hiding.

  In those days, getting to Nosy Mangabé was quite a palaver. I remember we spent months arranging special government permission and, even when we were within sight of the island, it took hours to find something resembling a boat to take us there.

  ‘Only once have I seen a boat significantly worse than the one which took us over to Nosy Mangabé,’ Douglas said later, ‘and that was the boat which, a few days later, took us back. It was basically full of sea.’

  I remember trying to negotiate a price for the seven-kilometre (4½-mile) trip across open sea with Douglas anxiously interrupting to point out that the thing we were about to charter was so old and dilapidated it was almost indistinguishable from driftwood.

  We shared the island with an American photographer, who had already been there for several months. He was on a proper expedition to get something no one else had managed to get – a picture of an aye-aye in the wild. But he dampened our enthusiasm with tales of tramping through the jungle, night after night, mostly in the pouring rain, in the vague hope of seeing an aye-aye let alone photographing one.

  The guide on Nosy Mangabé hadn’t seen two more hopeless aye-aye watchers since Douglas and Mark had been there in the late 1980s.

  So far, he hadn’t had any luck.

  We only had three nights (since aye-ayes are nocturnal they don’t make daytime appointments) and it was raining heavily, so our visit seemed more than a little futile. But, on the second night, soaked to the skin and with our torches fading fast, Douglas and I actually saw an aye-aye on a branch no more than 50 metres (55 yards) from the hut.

  We rushed back, whooping and cheering and analysing every tantalising moment of our ten-second encounter, and burst through the door to tell our friend the American photographer the good news.

  He just stood there in shocked silence.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, eventually. ‘What do you mean you’ve seen an aye-aye? Are you sure? Where? Near the hut? Just now?’ He suddenly looked pale and dropped down to the floor in a grief-stricken heap. ‘Oh my God.’

  We tried to be more considerate, fighting not to tell him in intimate detail how ‘our’ aye-aye had strolled right out into the open on a branch immediately above our heads and then stopped to stare at us with those hypnotic aye-aye eyes before ambling off into thick foliage on the other side of the clearing. We struggled not to tell him that it was one of the most exciting moments of our lives, or that he could have got a front-cover shot.

  We just rummaged around in our bags, looking for something edible to rustle up for supper.

  I heard later that our American friend never did see an aye-aye on Nosy Mangabé and left, several months later, without his world exclusive.

  Some twenty years after that, Stephen and I had a plethora of seaworthy boats to choose from when we rolled up at the remote town of Maroantsetra. We picked a comfortable fibreglass motor launch and travelled along the Antainambalana River, out into the Baie d’Antongil, and past several rusty shipwrecks to a divine sandy cove in the southwestern corner of the island.

  If you had to be stranded on a desert island then this would be the one to go for. Stepping onto Nosy Mangabé is like stepping onto the set of The Beach. With beautiful sandy coves, waterfall grottos, extravagant trees complete with huge buttress roots and hung with strangler figs and orchids, it is cloaked in lowland rainforest from the water’s edge to its 331-metre (1,100-foot) peak.

  But all sense of our intrepidness melted into the soft, golden sand in an instant. In our eagerness to get ashore, we almost tripped over an elderly tourist sunbathing on the beach. And there were other tourists in ‘I Love Madagascar’ T-shirts, or something similar, noisily eating lunch in a wooden shelter among the trees.

  It was one of many moments during my travels with Stephen when I realised just how much had changed since visiting the same wild, idyllic, remote, undisturbed pl
aces with Douglas. They just aren’t quite so wild, idyllic, remote or undisturbed any more.

  But I believe we’re living in the best possible period for watching wildlife in the history – and future – of the planet.

  Think about it. If you were to go back in time – just one hundred years or so – you’d be joining perilous and expensive expeditions lasting several months or even years in an effort to watch little-known wildlife in difficult-to-visit far-flung corners of the world.

  But nowadays, especially since wide-bodied ‘jumbos’ took off in 1970 and travelling by plane has become faster, more comfortable, safer and cheaper, almost everywhere is within easy reach. Admittedly, vast tracts of Siberian wilderness are still a bit of a challenge and swathes of the nature traveller’s map have been gouged out by political instability. But few places are truly inaccessible. A few weeks before filming in Madagascar I had been standing in a snowstorm high up in the Canadian Arctic – just 48 hours after leaving my home in Bristol. I could close my front door after breakfast on Monday and be cruising along the Antarctic Peninsula by late evening on Thursday.

  Alternatively, if you were to go forwards in time – perhaps as little as fifty years – there would almost certainly be less wildlife to watch and, worse still, you wouldn’t be able to see it over the shoulders of all the other people who got there first.

  I’ve been travelling extensively for a quarter of a century, returning to many wildlife hotspots over the years, and my overwhelming impression is of everything being more and more organised and of ever-increasing numbers of people. Where once there was an empty patch of ground now there is a campsite, where there was a campsite now there is a small hotel, and where there was a small hotel now there is a big one.

  I remember the days when I’d moan if I saw a couple of other vehicles in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater, for instance, but nowadays there can be as many as fifty four-wheel-drives and mini-buses parked around the public picnic site alone. When I first started exploring South Africa’s Cape Peninsula National Park, in the late 1980s, it was a haven of peace and tranquillity; now it is swamped by more than 1.3 million visitors every year and, if you’re not careful, you can spend more time queuing behind coaches full of foreigners than watching local wildlife.