Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  ‘Okay. Let’s do lunch.’

  ‘Excellent idea. Decision made. It’s a bit early, but shall we go straight away?’

  We sat at a table in the window of a lovely restaurant overlooking Lake Wakatipu, watching the world go by.

  Unfortunately, the world went by pretty damn quickly – mainly on rollerblades, skateboards and mountain bikes.

  ‘Just think,’ said Stephen sarcastically. ‘Some people go to the theatre and have dinner with friends, when they could be building up a phenomenal sweat and chafing the insides of their thighs on a bloody mountain bike. I’m sorry, but what is wrong with these people?’

  He stared out of the window in utter despair.

  ‘They just don’t seem to be able to sit still. And they’re giving me indigestion.’

  So we wined and dined and moaned our day off in Queenstown, until we’d run out of time for a last-minute bungee-jump or the chance to sit astride an inflatable yellow banana and be towed behind a speedboat.

  But the next day we had an adventure of our own. We explored Fiordland, a vast and breathtaking tract of mountainous terrain in the southwest corner of South Island.

  Admittedly, we didn’t explore it on a mountain bike or on foot, as most New Zealanders tend to do. But then much of Fiordland has never been explored at ground level: there are few roads and even those peter out quickly in the foothills.

  Instead, we explored it from a four-seater Eurocopter AS350 – one of those little helicopters with a bubble cockpit that makes you feel as if you are sitting inside a fish-bowl.

  We were incredibly lucky: it was a perfect crystal-clear day. The view from the fish-bowl, as our pilot Richard Black wheeled and turned through the unbelievably staggering scenery, was almost too dreamy to be real. We circled rugged mountain tops reaching high into fluffy white clouds, swooped along green U-shaped valleys carved out by million-year-old glaciers, cruised down immense rivers, hovered in front of thunderous waterfalls that dropped hundreds of metres down weather-scuffed cliff faces, and simply marvelled at the sheer splendour of it all.

  I remember Douglas Adams described Fiordland as like ‘the whole of Norway scrunched up a bit, hurtled ten thousand miles round the world and filled with birds’.

  Mark after seeing the 27th-largest lake in New Zealand.

  Stephen and I struggled to add our own impressions of the panorama stretched out below us, but mere words didn’t seem to do it justice.

  ‘To try to describe Fiordland would be about as futile as throwing an orang-utan at a charging rhino,’ Stephen offered.

  ‘It’s like something Salvador Dalí would dream up,’ I tried. ‘Those snow and ice formations look like enormous great cathedrals built by a mad architect.’

  ‘If this is New Zealand, just imagine what Old Zealand must have been like.’

  Stephen muttered something about having to stand on a chair to get height at his home in Norfolk, and Richard laughed at our futile attempts. This was effectively his office and he’d seen it all and heard it all before.

  With Dark Side of the Moon erupting into their headsets, the view from the helicopter made Mark and Stephen burst into spontaneous applause.

  His solution was to stick to mere facts. Like every New Zealander, he loved record-breaking detail and gave us a running commentary about the highest, the lowest, the longest and the shortest.

  ‘That’s the 27th-largest lake in New Zealand,’ he said matter-of-factly, nodding towards a veritable seascape to our left.

  ‘And that over there,’ he continued, ‘is the 11th-tallest mountain in Fiordland.’

  The undisputed winner of all the records we heard during our travels in New Zealand, incidentally, was this little snippet: ‘This is the place where freshwater and saltwater run closer together in a residential area than anywhere else in the world.’ It doesn’t get much better than that.

  While exploring Fiordland, we made a brief stop at a place called Kakapo Castle, which used to be the display ground of one of the last surviving kakapo in the whole of mainland New Zealand. Perched high on a precipitous ridge, with a view to die for, it was a fitting site for the kakapo’s final stand.

  Before New Zealand was inhabited by people, Fiordland was home to hundreds of thousands of kakapo.

  But then Pandora’s box of mammalian predators was emptied into the innocent land, and suddenly there were tens of thousands.

  Then there were thousands, then hundreds. Then there were dozens.

  Just two years before Douglas and I visited Kakapo Castle in 1989 there were no kakapo left at all – no kakapo anywhere on mainland New Zealand.

  Stephen and I paid homage to that long-lost kakapo and climbed back into our helicopter to see some more of one of the most breathtaking, awe-inspiring and humbling parts of the world either of us had ever seen. We peered out of the fish-bowl goggle-eyed and lapsed into silent contemplation.

  We were still engrossed in the surreal world around us when Richard rummaged in a bag behind his seat (holding the joystick between his knees, and conspicuously not looking where we were going, as all the best helicopter pilots seem to do) and produced an iPod. He plugged it into a socket on the control panel and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon erupted into our headsets.

  I glanced at Stephen and we both burst into spontaneous applause. Suddenly, we were in an imaginary spacecraft, wheeling and turning over a fantasy make-believe world.

  We landed all too soon, at a place called Milford Sound, and the two of us fell out of the cockpit, laughing and whooping and cheering.

  We’d just had one of the best possible hours on God’s good earth.

  The Godfather of the kakapo world is a tough old-timer called Richard Henry Junior.

  His namesake, the original Richard Henry, pioneered kakapo conservation in the 1890s and was the first person to shout from the rooftops that the old night parrot of New Zealand needed help. It was Henry who had the brilliant idea of moving a handful of survivors to island havens for safekeeping – an idea that has become the mainstay of endangered species conservation in New Zealand and a blueprint for conservation efforts on islands as far afield as Mauritius and the Galápagos.

  Henry was years ahead of his time, but, thank goodness, a charismatic biologist called Don Merton had taken up the cudgel to continue his work.

  And so it was, in 1975, at the end of a long day’s search for the last surviving kakapo on mainland New Zealand, that Don found himself precariously balanced on a narrow terrace high above the Gulliver River, in Fiordland. He was with some kakapo-trackers and their kakapo-tracking dogs and, against all the odds, they had picked up the scent of a real-life surviving kakapo.

  In fact, they had cornered the kakapo, a male, against the edge of a cliff. The kakapo glanced down towards the valley floor 1,000 metres (3,300 feet) below, trying to remember whether or not it could fly, and wondering whether to give it a try. As it teetered on the brink, Don looked at the kakapo and read its mind. He threw himself towards the precipice, in a goalie’s dive, and caught the surprised bird with both hands.

  It proved to be a timely save. The bird was named Richard Henry and, almost prophetically, turned out to be the last known surviving kakapo on the mainland.

  For a flightless parrot, Richard Henry has done an impressive amount of travelling. He was initially placed on Maud Island, for safekeeping, where he spent a happy seven years. Then he was transferred to Little Barrier Island, where Douglas Adams and I actually heard him booming in 1989. Six years after we ‘met’, he was sent back to Maud for another six years and became enamoured with a female kakapo (originally from Stewart Island) called Flossie. Then, nearing the end of his island odyssey, he spent a couple of years on Chalky Island.

  Finally, in 2004, he was taken to his retirement home on Codfish, where he still lives – more than three decades after being rescued in Fiordland by Don’s goalie dive.

  He is thought to be more than a hundred years old now and, though he is partially blind
, seems to be in good health. He has three offspring from his time with Flossie and they all live together on the same island. Maybe, between them, they will be able to perpetuate the precious genes of the mainland race.

  ‘A little-known aspect of the birds of New Zealand is that they all appear to have been named by ten-year-olds,’ observed Stephen one day.

  ‘I’ll give you some examples at random,’ he said. ‘The kakapo (our hero bird, of course), the kokako, the kaka, the takahe, the cocky-poo. Okay, I made the last one up, but did you ever hear a list of bird names more guaranteed to make a ten-year-old (and me) laugh? How about calling one of them a kakakokikakapoopookakakokikokipoo? In Britain all we’ve been able to come up with is “tit”. Which is pretty good but nothing like as good as kakakokikakapoopookakakokikokipoo. It’s another aspect of New Zealand bird life that I hope will appeal to the younger generation and maybe get them interested in conservation, too.’

  We were making a brief stop to look for a distant relative of the kakapo, a notorious mountain-dwelling parrot called the kea, which chose its own name. In fact, it calls it out loud and clear – a raucous ‘keee-aa, keee-aa, keee-aa’ – which is great for identification purposes and saves ornithologists all the bother of coming up with a name themselves. It hasn’t yet learnt to say its scientific name, Nestor notabilis, but these things take time.

  The kea is widely lauded as the most intelligent bird in the world. You’re probably expecting me to say, at this point, that it’s the Stephen Fry of the bird world. But I won’t. Stephen always maintains that, despite never-ending claims to the contrary, he’s not unnaturally intelligent – he’s merely fortunate enough to have an outstandingly retentive memory. It’s an interesting theory, with which I wholeheartedly disagree. He is exceedingly intelligent and has an outstandingly retentive memory.

  The reason why you couldn’t take a kea onto an aeroplane as hand luggage – its beak would be considered a dangerous weapon.

  The kea isn’t only intelligent, though. It is also charismatic, curious, bold, destructive and reckless. And it’s one of the few large birds in New Zealand that hasn’t forgotten how to fly.

  The words ‘travelling light’ don’t compute when you’re with a film crew. This was the absolute bare minimum kit the team could get away with for a long weekend in the Chatham Islands. Apparently.

  If you ever want to see one, go to a busy public place. They tend to loiter around ski resorts, alpine picnic sites and car parks, partly because these offer an easy source of junk food and partly because that’s where they can get up to most mischief.

  Open windows, boot lids and rucksacks provide them with an endless source of pleasure. They carry away any unguarded items of clothing or jewellery and hide them behind rocks, where they sort them in order of size so meticulously that it’s hard to believe they don’t suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder.

  You couldn’t take a kea on an aeroplane as hand luggage because its beak would be considered a dangerous weapon. Like a cross between a pair of pliers, a screwdriver and a can opener, it is implausibly powerful and manipulative. And it has claws to match.

  So perhaps it’s not surprising that keas make excellent car thieves. They don’t steal entire cars, of course, but only for the simple reason that they can’t reach the pedals. Instead, they steal bits of cars: they are particularly adept at peeling off rubber wiper blades and door seals. They do it with such determination and regularity that it’s hard not to imagine them hoarding enough bits to build their own hybrid cars somewhere in the mountains. Just a couple of hubcaps and a wing mirror and they’re done …

  They can open all manner of containers. A popular pastime among people living in the wilder parts of New Zealand, where there is little else to do, is to try and design a kea-proof container. No one has done it yet, needless to say, so clearly it’s a pastime that will keep them busy for many years to come.

  Ski huts are a particular favourite with naughty keas. They wait for unwary skiers to leave their doors or windows open, then dive inside to shred all the mats, mattresses and pillows. They enjoy a bit of skiing themselves, too, using the steepest chalet roofs as their ski runs.

  At one ski chalet a gang of keas famously posted a sentry outside the main door. Every time it looked as if someone was about to leave, the sentry alerted the others and they started kicking snow from the roof over the door. The skier got covered in snow and all the keas rolled about cackling.

  Did I mention, by the way, that the kea is another endangered species? Did I really need to? This is New Zealand, after all.

  We went to see them at a car park by the entrance to the 1.3-kilometre (0.8-mile) long Homer Tunnel. Several of the surprisingly large birds surrounded our car as soon as we pulled up, like the people who force you to have your windscreen cleaned before you’ve come to a complete stop at red traffic lights.

  Much like the adrenalin junkies in nearby Queenstown, the keas in the car park didn’t stand still. Peering and poking, ducking and diving, they behaved like armed magpies on steroids. One even tobogganed down the windscreen of the car next to us – twice.

  They were gorgeous birds, basically olive-green with bright flashes of red, yellow and orange, and awfully endearing.

  After watching them for a while, we were struck by the fact that only a couple were really badly behaved. They were the mischief-makers, while the others watched from the sidelines and egged them on.

  One of the ring-leaders stole a man’s baseball cap from the passenger seat of a bright red Vauxhall Astra and, while it was being chased across the car park by the rightful owner, his wife and their daughter, all the other keas just turned the other way. If they could have shuffled their feet, twiddled their thumbs or whistled nonchalantly that’s exactly what they would have done. They looked about as innocent as juvenile delinquents caught smoking behind the bike shed.

  The thief meanwhile, perched on a high rock with the baseball cap in its beak, stared back with a disdainful look that said ‘Oh yeah, and what are you going to do about it?’

  We watched them for absolutely ages.

  There was just one problem: we still had the ‘effing robin’ (Stephen’s words, not mine) to see before our final destination in kakapo country. Stephen was convinced that it was going to be an anticlimax.

  ‘Stopping off to see the kea first is a bit like seeing a really good movie,’ he said, ‘and then being forced to fly 800 kilometres (500 miles) to sit through all the adverts.’

  But I was confident. There is much more to the Chatham Island robin than I’d led him to believe.

  We flew to the Chatham Islands in an old Convair CV-580 that looked as if it had been built by the first inhabitants of this isolated archipelago some 500 years earlier.

  We were checked in by Chris, a vivacious and no-nonsense woman with a brightly coloured cravat; she would have made an outstanding drama teacher. Our bags were loaded onto the plane by Chris, too, this time without the cravat but with a support belt (one of those harnesses to stop the discs in your back, or your intestines, from popping out when they’re not supposed to). And Chris was our flight attendant, complete with a navy blue flight attendant’s jacket.

  We were among a handful of passengers squashed in between piles of old crayfish boxes, which were hidden under expansive sheets of bright blue tarpaulin like bodies travelling back from a war zone.

  Chris shouted safety instructions above the ear-splitting noise of the two turboprop engines and then made us tea and coffee (the flight had been delayed for nearly half an hour while we all helped her search for the kettle, which had gone missing).

  It was the beginning of our fourth month travelling together and, by the time we landed, I think Stephen and I must have morphed into one another.

  As soon as we stepped into the ramshackle little airport on the main island, the first thing I did was to check to see if there was mobile reception. There wasn’t. I glanced over at Stephen to see if he’d had any luck with his ars
enal of mobiles, and caught him peering through binoculars at some Chatham Island oystercatchers on the runway.

  ‘There’s no mobile reception,’ I said.

  ‘Ah well,’ he replied, indifferently. ‘It’s only for a few days. Anyway, are those Chatham Island oystercatchers on the runway?’

  He glanced away from his binoculars and gave me a wry smile as we briefly made eye contact.

  He looked at the birds again.

  After more than three months on the wildlife trail, Stephen could recognise a Chatham Island oystercatcher from 100 metres away.

  Little Mangere island - a tiny speck, but the only home of the black robin for 90-odd years.

  ‘Aren’t they among the rarest birds in the world?’ he asked. ‘I think there may be fewer than a hundred left and they’re found nowhere else.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Er, um, I don’t know. I think I just read it somewhere.’

  ‘You’ve been swotting on Wikipedia again, haven’t you?’

  ‘No I haven’t. Well, maybe I had a quick look. I can’t really remember.’

  Rather alarmingly, as well as morphing into one another temperamentally, we also seemed to be slipping into what Stephen describes as ‘involuntary chromatic synchronisation’. To the rest of us this means that, for some weird and inexplicable reason, after months of travelling together we started to wear exactly the same coloured clothes.

  We had developed a form of sub-conscious colour coordination, like a newly formed 1980s boy band.

  ‘Do you happen to be menstruating today,’ joked Stephen on the morning we flew to the Chathams, implying that we were a couple of girls in sync. We’d both reported for duty wearing navy blue shorts and light green T-shirts. We looked like molly-coddled twins dressed by an overly doting mother.