Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  The Cook Strait giant weta had been extinct on the mainland for over a century (although a small number had just been released into Karori Sanctuary – incidentally, with the insect-eating tuatara, thus bringing about an interesting scenario in which one endangered species is likely to be eating another).

  So Matiu-Somes offers a crucial beacon of hope.

  Let me pre-empt you here. I’m pretty sure I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: who cares? Who cares if a tuatara does eat the odd weta? In fact, who cares if a tuatara were to eat every single weta? Why go to all this bother to save an insect the size of a mouse? A polar bear, yes; a tiger, of course; an elephant, without a doubt. But a giant weta? Surely, if a flightless, jumpless, spiky-legged grasshopper were to become extinct no one would really care? Would anyone really notice?

  Well, before I answer the question, let me tell you a story.

  A few years ago the European Space Agency’s Chief Scientist, Dr Bernard Foing, called for a Noah’s Ark to be established on the moon. He wanted the ark to be a repository for the DNA of every single species of plant and animal, in case something unimaginably awful were to happen to earth (like the planet being destroyed by an asteroid or, worse, environmentally unfriendly George Bush returning as US President).

  Presumably, the idea was to send a handful of volunteers to the moon first: their main aim in life would have been to survive long enough to carry all the DNA back down to the brand-new, unadulterated, uncontaminated, unsullied world we wouldn’t recognise as home.

  But here’s the rub: would we really want to take every species with us? Couldn’t we leave out the Ebola virus, for example? Come to think of it, couldn’t we leave out all the viruses responsible for common colds? Perhaps one of the volunteers could accidentally break the vials containing malarial mosquito and tsetse fly DNA?

  Visiting Peter Jackson, the man behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and his mind-boggling collection of Lancaster bombers.

  And who is going to make such difficult decisions?

  If it were up to one of my neighbours, she’d leave out all spider DNA; a friend would exclude venomous snakes; and I’d be tempted to forbid any DNA linked to horses (I know this will upset lots of people, and I’m really sorry, but I’m scared of anything with hooves and a mane – I’m in seventh heaven swimming with sharks but nothing would persuade me to climb on to the back of a cantankerous horse).

  Indeed, if we’re striving for perfection, why stop there? Perhaps we could be selective about the human gene pool, too? We could remove all the genes that make company directors advocate the use of more than one layer of packaging for their products; any newspaper editor who thinks a blue-eyed stripeless white tiger born in captivity is worthy of news but tiger conservation is not; anyone in Bangkok involved in training orang-utans to kick-box; and everyone responsible for Britain’s transport policy.

  The potential list is endless.

  But of course we can’t do that. It would be the biological equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

  The point is this: if you buy into conservation then it’s all or nothing. You can’t just elect to save the nicest animals, or the biggest, or the cutest. You have to save the lot. Or at least try to.

  Do you remember the old game called Pickasticks, in which you would drop a handful of giant wooden toothpicks into a pile and then try to pull them out, one by one, without disturbing the others? Sometimes you could do it, but very often you would disturb another stick or, worse still, the whole lot would collapse. Well, interfering with a complex food web is rather like playing a game of Pickasticks, except with higher stakes. If you let an animal like the giant weta become extinct, its disappearance will inevitably have an impact on all the other wildlife in the ecosystem: it’s just that no one can predict if that impact will be quite subtle or nothing short of disastrous.

  There are plenty of other reasons for saving the giant weta, of course, but more of those later.

  After months of immersion in my world of tents and tuataras, wilderness and wetas, Stephen introduced me to a little bit of his world.

  While we were in Wellington, we spent a day with Academy Award-winning film director, producer and screenwriter Peter Jackson.

  I was expecting the man I’d seen in magazines and on televised award ceremonies – short, long-haired, bearded and, well, quite portly. But instead the man behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy was short, long-haired, bearded and as thin as a rake.

  ‘I changed my diet from hamburgers to yoghurt and muesli and it seemed to work,’ he told us, quite simply.

  He arrived wearing his trademark knee-length shorts, long socks and hiking boots. He looked more like a zoologist about to rugby tackle a New Zealand fur seal in order to take a stool sample, than a film director, and was about as far removed from my idea of Hollywood as it was possible to get.

  He is a kiwi to the core and has resisted the inevitable pressures and temptations to leave his native country for Tinseltown. He filmed The Lord of the Rings in New Zealand and wanted British countryside to represent the fictional Middle-earth. And he found perfectly unspoilt ‘British’ habitats right on his own doorstep.

  ‘Why would I want to film anywhere else?’ he laughed. ‘You can drive for half an hour in New Zealand and you will pass through Surrey woodland, Dorset heathland, Cairngorms pine forest and even Exmoor or Dartmoor. The Britishness of the countryside here is hard to miss.’

  Americanness is everywhere, too, apparently. When the Lord of the Rings films were still a figment of his imagination, he filmed The Frighteners (starring Michael J. Fox) in his treasured home country, cleverly convincing an unsuspecting world that the central character – a psychic architect – was communicating with ghosts in a Midwestern town in the United States.

  Peter is an avid collector and he was keen to show us one of his favourite collections.

  Most of us have a back bedroom or a garden shed for our hobbies. He has a squadron of aircraft hangars and workshops. We passed through a small office and entered a huge open warehouse the size of Heathrow Airport. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it was at least the size of a big part of Heathrow Airport. And, besides, it led to another even bigger warehouse, then another, and another.

  They were all chock-full of F.E.2s, B.E.2s and more than enough other World War I planes to rival most world-class museum collections. Some were original and had been painstakingly and caringly restored, while others were absolutely perfect replicas built from scratch.

  Many were still in bits and they languished among a battery of tanks, machine guns, bombs, armoured cars, buses and enough other paraphernalia to equip a small army. Make that a big army.

  New Zealand’s answer to a native mammal.

  Shrink the whole lot down to Airfix model size and his collection would still have been many times bigger than the one my brother and I amassed at home when we were kids – and we spent all our pocket money on the collection, which was the envy of all our friends.

  There were people everywhere, too, tinkering with bits of wood, tightening bolts and poring over complex plans. Peter Jackson’s hobby employs more than fifty staff.

  Finally, we entered the biggest aircraft hangar of the lot. This was where work and pleasure began to overlap.

  We walked past a few Sopwith Camels and a couple of Vickers F.B.12s (at least, I think that’s what he said) and there, like a scene from The Dam Busters, was a squadron of Lancaster bombers.

  Actually, they really were about to appear in a scene from The Dam Busters, and were clearly his pride and joy. Peter was working on a remake of the original 1955 film, for which Stephen had already written the script, and I listened quietly as they discussed their joint venture like a couple of eager and enthusiastic schoolboys with a new computer game.

  Later in the day we went to visit Peter’s film production company, which happens to be called Weta.

  ‘You must like wetas a lot to name your company after them,’ I suggested.
‘Why not something a little more charismatic and inspiring – like Kakapo?’

  ‘I don’t like wetas at all,’ he shuddered.

  ‘In fact, I’m scared stiff of them. I have a friend who once drank a glass of water that had been sitting on his bedside table in the dark. There was a weta in the water and he swallowed it whole. I can’t think of anything worse.’

  He visibly winced.

  ‘But I must admit I do like the fact that the weta looks as if it is from another world. That appeals to me a lot.’

  (We later discovered that he had been quietly funding the weta project in the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary.)

  We pulled up outside the Weta offices and Peter suddenly vanished. We found him hiding behind a bush: he’d spotted a Lord of the Rings tour bus, spilling its slightly obsessive fans onto the pavement just a few metres away. Little did they know that their idol, the man responsible for the second, eighth and fifteenth highest-grossing films of all time, not to mention their two-week tour of Lord of the Rings film locations, had been almost within touching distance.

  We spent a happy few hours discussing what seemed to be an eternal list of new projects in the pipeline, including a forthcoming film of Alice Sebold’s book The Lovely Bones and a joint project with Steven Spielberg to make a film of The Adventures of Tintin.

  Then I asked what, to me, was the obvious question.

  ‘How do you fit it all in?’

  Peter looked nonplussed.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, you’ve achieved more in the film industry than almost anyone else alive. You have a young family and huge, all-engrossing hobbies. And you still have time to spend a relaxing day with us. You make it all seem so easy. How do you fit more hours into a typical day than the rest of us? What’s the secret?’

  He shuffled from one foot to the other, looking surprisingly shy.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ he said.

  ‘But you’re two years younger than me,’ I persisted. ‘I work really hard, I play hard, I’m never really idle, and yet you’re making me feel as if I’ve frittered the past fifty years away.’

  ‘Oh dear, sorry,’ he said with a smile. ‘I suppose if you want to do something bad enough you just make time.’

  He laughed.

  Stephen laughed too.

  Super-achievement is such a normal way of life for them, I don’t think they had a clue what I was talking about.

  Even the national bird of New Zealand, the kiwi, is in danger.

  ‘Not only is it the national bird,’ Stephen pointed out, ‘it is also an honorary mammal and, in relation to body size, it lays the largest egg – an eye-watering six times larger than a chicken’s egg. I looked it up in Kiwipedia (pun intended).’

  ‘Why is it an honorary mammal?’ I asked sarcastically, testing his knowledge.

  Stephen smiled, knowing exactly what I was up to.

  ‘Because it fills a similar niche to badgers and hedgehogs back home,’ he said. ‘Because it has distinctive cat-like whiskers at the base of its bill to help it navigate at night. And because, unlike most other birds, it has a highly developed sense of smell – it literally sniffs out its food with proper nostrils at the end of the bill.’

  ‘And what does it eat?’

  In Trounson Kauri Park with James, a freelance kiwi-tracker, and a freelance kiwi.

  ‘Um, I know, I know. Don’t tell me. It eats grubs and worms, which it finds in between all the bits of leaf litter.’

  Stephen’s swotting had become an ongoing joke between us. The original idea was for me to be telling him about all the wildlife we encountered, or for a local expert to tell us both, but he had decided early on in our travels that he didn’t like being kept in the dark. He wanted to be an expert, too.

  As always, he had speed-read Wikipedia the night before – and was able to remember and recite every single word.

  Kiwis only come out at night and aren’t the easiest birds to find. The best way, as we quickly discovered, was with the help of an English setter called Percy.

  Percy lived in Trounson Kauri Park, a beautiful forest of huge native conifers, called kauris, tucked away in a far distant corner of North Island. He lived there with his owner and trainer, James Fraser.

  James is a freelance kiwi-tracker, Percy is a freelance kiwi-tracking dog and Trounson is home to the North Island brown kiwi.

  This happens to be the most resilient and common of the five different species of kiwi (though it’s probably a little misleading to say ‘common’ since the population has declined by more than ninety per cent in the past century).

  We met James and Percy early one morning at the entrance to a wooden boardwalk that winds its way through the marshy, fern-rich kauri forest.

  Percy was raring to go. Running backwards and forwards, sideways one way and then sideways the other way, with his tightly muzzled nose almost touching the ground and his tail pointing high into the air, he covered more ground than the rest of us put together.

  Within half an hour he had found something. From a distance it looked a bit like a compost heap – a mound of vegetation about a metre (three feet) high.

  There were three large holes around the base. Percy stuck his head inside one, James stuck his head inside another and so I stuck my head inside the third. I switched on my head-torch and peered into the gloom. There, just around the corner and no more than 30 centimetres (1 foot) away from the end of my nose, was a big ball of brown feathers. It was a kiwi. I couldn’t see its head or beak, but it was definitely a kiwi.

  James saw it, too, but decided that it was too difficult to reach. We would have to find another. With Stephen’s help, we tugged and pulled Percy out of his hole and set off again into the forest.

  James and Percy ran ahead and, in no time at all, we could hear a bark and a shout. We leapt off the boardwalk, ran through the mud and ferns and found them both with their heads deep inside another mound of vegetation piled over a tangle of tree roots.

  Just as we skidded to a halt, James pulled a big brown ball of feathers and mud out of the burrow by its legs.

  Percy, the freelance kiwi-tracking dog.

  ‘Can I hold it?’ I asked.

  Stephen looked a bit shocked – that was his question and he was just about to ask it.

  James showed me what to do: hold the surprisingly calm bird upside down, by the legs, and then lift it up with my other arm. It was easy. There was no kicking, no pecking and virtually no struggling.

  It was about the size of a chicken, but several times heavier. While the bones of most birds are light and hollow to help them fly, kiwi bones are heavy and filled with marrow to help them walk and run. It had a ring on one leg and James examined it closely: it had been banded as an adult in 1997 and hadn’t been seen since.

  Its feathers were unlike any feathers I had seen before. They looked unkempt, more like a bundle of shaggy loose hair, as if they hadn’t been preened in years. And there were no obvious wings. After an evolutionary lifetime of predator-free bliss, like so many birds in New Zealand the kiwi has lost the ability to fly. All that remains of its wings are two rather pathetic vestigial stumps with claws on the end.

  ‘Is it a male or a female?’ asked Stephen.

  ‘This one is a female,’ said James. ‘They are bigger than the males. Her mate will be around here somewhere, though. They tend to spend their whole lives together as a monogamous couple.’

  Queenstown from the fish-bowl.

  ‘You mean no flings with other kiwis?’

  ‘No! Kiwi relationships can last for twenty years or more, though I have to admit we have observed the occasional divorce or two.’

  ‘I think the secret to their marital bliss is not spending too much time together,’ I added. ‘They keep in touch, by calling while they are out and about, but only meet up every two or three days.’

  ‘Keeps the relationship fresh,’ confirmed Stephen.

  Suddenly the kiwi made a sound like som
eone trying to stifle a sneeze. Its whole body shuddered, and surprised me so much I nearly dropped it.

  James laughed.

  ‘It’s just clearing its nostrils,’ he said. ‘It has to blow through them once in a while, to get rid of all the soil it has sniffed in while feeding.’

  I stared into the eyes of the big brown ball, as it lay peacefully on my arm, and gently stroked its feathers. It stared back and blinked.

  I’ll never forget the way that kiwi looked at me. It was a look of absolute innocence and incomprehension – one that we were to see many more times during our wildlife encounters in New Zealand.

  Halfway through the trip we had a day off in Queenstown, the adventure capital of the world.

  Now, Stephen is not averse to a bit of exercise. Throughout our travels, he always took a seven-kilometre (four-mile) walk before breakfast, often in the dark and long before the rest of us had even thought about getting up (unless, of course, we were in a jungle or on the savannah and so his chances of being eaten alive by an anaconda or a lion were greater than the chances of dying from being unfit).

  But there’s no denying one simple fact: he’s not really one for adventure sports.

  ‘How about a bit of mountain biking?’ I suggested, hopefully.

  ‘I would rather suck turds from a dead octopus than go mountain biking,’ he groaned.

  ‘Or river boarding?’

  ‘What the hell is river boarding? Whatever it is, I don’t like the sound of it – it’s bound to involve getting wet.’

  ‘Okay, let’s try paragliding.’

  ‘Ha! If I were to go paragliding I guarantee that I will not be alone in my pants.’

  ‘All right. I know. Why don’t we go abseiling?’

  ‘Nature makes all kinds of humans – and I am definitely not the kind to go jumping off cliffs,’ said Stephen, in a voice that was drawing the conversation to a close. ‘I need to be in a first-class restaurant within striking distance of a lavatory.’