Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  We didn’t see enough of Invercargill to judge, although we certainly felt at home. Many of the streets appeared to be named after British rivers: Tay, Dee, Esk, Don, Thames, Spey and Eye among them. It’s best known for having the only indoor arena for track cycling in the country. Oh, and one of its more famous residents was the inventor of the spiral hairpin.

  Apart from the Southland Quarantine Facility, the only other part of the city I saw was a doctor’s surgery. I’d been feeling ill, and progressively more ill, for several days, so the night before heading for Codfish Island we decided to check that I hadn’t got anything too deadly.

  The doctor couldn’t believe his luck – something a little out of the ordinary, instead of the usual detached retina he sees most often thanks to so many bungee-jumping tourists popping their eyes out on a daily basis.

  ‘Have you been camping or sleeping in rough conditions?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah, good. Here in New Zealand?’

  ‘Yes. But also in Kenya, Uganda and Madagascar. And before that I was in the Australian Outback and Arctic Canada …’

  He raised an eyebrow and hesitated in the way doctors hesitate before pulling open a drawer full of sharp instruments.

  ‘Excellent!’ he said.

  ‘Have you handled any animals in the past couple of months?’

  ‘Um, yes. Rhinos, chimpanzees, several different snakes and lizards, kangaroo rats, lots of lemurs, giant wetas … oh, and a tuatara.’

  ‘Brilliant!’ he said, while raising his eyebrow a little higher as if he were about to open a drawer of even longer and sharper instruments.

  ‘I hope you’re not in a hurry,’ he added gleefully, while actually opening a drawer full of sharp instruments. ‘This could take some time to sort out. Have you ever been diagnosed with malaria, hepatitis, sleeping sickness or bilharzia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘All of them.’

  An hour of prodding and probing and blood-sucking later, I was diagnosed with a mild case of malaria, handed a prescription, and sent on my way.

  Meanwhile, Stephen seemed to have developed an allergy to New Zealand (or, at least, to certain parts of New Zealand).

  We didn’t really take much notice the first time it manifested itself. While we were filming wetas on Matiu-Somes Island, in Wellington Harbour, one of the giant insects had urinated on his hand, which promptly came up in a raging red rash.

  We still didn’t take it too seriously when he developed a distinctly different blotchy red rash right across his neck, after stroking a kiwi in the Kauri Forest.

  As soon as the blotchy red rash had disappeared, his other hand was scratched by Sirocco – a humanoid kakapo on Codfish Island – and an eye-catching white welt promptly took its place. But we put that down merely to a general allergy to sleeping in anything resembling rough accommodation and a world without wi-fi.

  The morning after my doctor’s appointment he came down to breakfast with a bright red bloodshot eye, and we started to piece the puzzle together. The bloodshot eye must have been a reaction to Don’s mealworms, or perhaps even to the Chatham Island black robins. We’ll never know for sure.

  But we agreed that next time he had to fill in one of those forms that asks ‘any known allergies?’ he’d have to write ‘Yes – New Zealand.’

  Meanwhile, Stephen was reluctantly turning his mind to what was in store for the next few days. I’d already warned him that the accommodation, or wooden hut, was pretty basic and that we would be sharing.

  He was none too pleased.

  ‘If we’re roughing it for four nights can we at least take a bottle of vodka with us?’ he asked at breakfast. ‘In fact, why don’t we take more than one? Or better still let’s just take some anaesthetic, to knock me out.’

  I laughed, but he wasn’t joking.

  ‘Will we be the only people on Codfish?’ he asked, gradually easing himself in to the reality that we had to go. He was surprisingly excited about the prospect of meeting a kakapo, but unsurprisingly unexcited about the prospect of sleeping in a hut with me in order to do it.

  ‘No, there will be some Department of Conservation rangers and a team of volunteers,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh God. Not volunteers. It’ll be full of worthy, stringy people in ponytails. Will we have to sit around a campfire and sing songs and tell stories?’

  Codfish Island – and not a single worthy, stringy person with a ponytail in sight.

  ‘Don’t be daft. It won’t be like that at all.’

  ‘I’d like to talk about how Jesus came into my life …’ he mocked in a pseudo-volunteer voice. ‘I’m a vegan you know. Oh do pass the rice cakes.’

  Codfish Island is a cartographic speck off the extreme southern end of New Zealand. A 1,400-hectare (3,460-acre), bush-covered, predator-free nature reserve, a few kilometres off the wild west coast of Stewart Island, it is the kakapo capital of the world.

  During our visit Codfish was home to no fewer than 75 of the last surviving kakapo: 38 breeding females, 6 non-breeding females and 31 males.

  Nowhere else in the world had females. It was quite an alarming thought: all the eggs were in one basket, almost literally.

  The Codfish bunkhouse, our home for the next four nights. It reminded Stephen of being in prison.

  There were another fifteen birds living on Anchor Island, in Dusky Sound, Fiordland, but they were all male (all the females had been moved to the relative safety of Codfish in 2007, during an emergency evacuation launched after a stoat had been spotted on the island).

  There were no kakapo in captivity (they don’t do well in confined spaces), so that made a grand total of just ninety.

  It was a far cry from centuries ago, when kakapo were counted in millions and so common all over New Zealand that people used to claim you could shake a tree and three or four of them would fall out.

  Clearly we didn’t learn any lessons from the passenger pigeon, after all.

  The good news was that the situation had improved, albeit just a little. When Douglas and I went to look for kakapo in 1989, the population had reached an all-time low of just forty birds – and many people had pretty much given up hope.

  In the twenty years since then, the population had doubled, plus a little bit.

  There should have been six of us going to Codfish – director, cameraman, soundman, assistant producer, Stephen and I. But in the end we were given permission for only four to go. Two had to stay behind.

  Stephen generously volunteered to stay, unless they could build a comfortable hotel during the course of the morning. But clearly they couldn’t.

  So we waved goodbye to Emily (our assistant producer) and Don (the soundman) in Invercargill and the remaining four set off in a Piper Cherokee 6 plane for a beach at Mason Bay, on Stewart Island. We landed on the sand and jumped straight into a waiting helicopter, James Bond-style, for the final leg of the journey.

  ‘It reminds me of being in prison,’ said Stephen as we walked into the wooden hut on Codfish that would be our home for the rest of the week. ‘What you in for, then?’ he asked in a Ronnie Barker voice, as if we were in Porridge. ‘Did you do it? Which bunk do you want?’

  It was actually quite a comfortable hut, with proper beds, mattresses and even pillows. Perhaps I wouldn’t need to anaesthetise Stephen after all.

  We sorted out our kit and went to the main bunkhouse to meet our fellow castaways. There were nine of them altogether – Chris, Ness, Jo, Errol and Dana were the rangers, and Jake, Norm, Sari and Kristina were the volunteers.

  There wasn’t a single ponytail in sight. Stephen looked mightily relieved.

  At the height of the kakapo breeding season, the bunkhouse and dormitories would be overflowing with more than forty rangers and volunteers. It sounded like a lot, but these were the lucky few: apparently, there was a waiting list of more than 700 people keen to volunteer to help save the old night parrot of New Zealand.

&nb
sp; There was a lot to be done and each person had an important role.

  Dana, for example, was a crack shot with a rifle and her job was to shoot branches out of the trees to put at all the kakapo feeding stations. Her main target was the rimu tree, a gargantuan conifer endemic to New Zealand, which is the kakapo’s favourite source of food on Codfish: they tend to breed only when the rimu produce copious crops of fruit and seeds – every two to five years.

  Dear old Ralph twenty years younger, with Arab the freelance kakapo-tracker.

  Sari helped to prepare pellets for the ‘smart hoppers’, which are basically high-tech bird tables designed specifically for kakapo to ensure that each bird gets exactly the right amount of food. The molly-coddled parrots were never allowed to go hungry – nothing in the world of kakapo conservation is left to chance. Then Sari filled her cavernous rucksack with all the food (it was so heavy I could barely lift it off the ground) and set off into the forest to deliver her wares.

  Ness, Chris and several of the others had the job of keeping an eagle eye on the birds themselves. They regularly checked for signs of life and activity, though rarely actually got to see any of the birds in their care.

  ‘Sometimes I get to see a male called Nog,’ Ness told us. ‘He is quite often at his feeding hopper when I approach and lets me get to within a few metres of him. Then he gives me a resigned look as if to say “Oh dear, I’m supposed to run away at this point, aren’t I?” And with that he hunches up and begrudgingly waddles off into the forest.’

  The strangest and unlikeliest job goes to a Spanish consultant, who visits Codfish for a couple of weeks every year. He comes, if that’s the right word, to masturbate the male kakapo. The idea is to collect semen for examination and artificial insemination. It’s a job that takes him around the world, working on a wide range of hapless endangered species, but it’s one that must be unbelievably difficult to explain at dinner parties.

  We talked about him, in particular, discussed the rangers’ gruelling rota (one month on and two weeks off throughout the year) and pored over an old weather-beaten map of the island.

  The various beaches, outcrops, ravines and paths had some interesting names – dreamed up, we presumed, by people who had spent too much time cut off from the rest of the world. Dirty Habits, Longdrop, Cleavage, Po Zone, Mudwiggle, Eric, Wounded Knee, Humbug, Arnie’s Mistake, Far Canal and Hell were some of the best.

  But who are we to criticise? If they’d been named by the unimaginative ornithologists who’d already come up with ‘Chatham Island pigeon’, the map would probably have featured the likes of Big Round Rock, Sandy Beach, Forest Walk and North-west-Corner-of-Codfish-Island-with-a-Tall-Tree Point.

  That night at dinner we listened quietly to one of the strangest conversations we’d ever heard.

  The rangers and volunteers on Codfish were utterly, wholly, almost obsessively devoted to saving the kakapo. They ate, slept and talked kakapo 24 hours a day (well, they didn’t actually eat them – but you know what I mean). Each and every bird was important and they knew all about their likes and dislikes, their movements and their foibles.

  All the birds had names – often borrowed from the rangers and volunteers themselves. So it was surprisingly difficult to tell whether the topic of conversation was a kakapo or a person.

  ‘Lisa mated with Basil last night.’

  ‘Ah, that’s great. I think he’s had his eye on her for quite a while.’

  ‘Is Rachel coming tomorrow? I wonder if she’ll remember to bring spare batteries for my head torch.’

  ‘Yes, I’m going to ask her to spend the night with Felix, because I don’t think he’s feeling very well.’

  ‘Why, what’s wrong?’

  ‘He hasn’t been booming much the last week or so.’

  ‘Good idea. Is Rachel coming with Lionel? Are they still together?’

  ‘That reminds me – Nora has been visiting Lionel’s track-and-bowl system for three nights in a row, which is a good sign.’

  ‘I thought Lionel fancied Ellie.’

  ‘No, not at all. She only has eyes for Luke.’

  ‘Did Ellie have dinner with Chris when they were on the mainland?’

  And so it went on.

  Every time I caught Stephen’s eye across the table we started to chuckle. Goodness knows what everyone at the Department of Conservation must have thought of us. We laughed more during our visit to the other side of the world than we did during all of our other travels put together.

  After a while, I couldn’t resist joining in the conversation by asking about an old friend of my own.

  ‘How’s Ralph?’ I asked the table at large.

  Ralph was a male kakapo found on Stewart Island, in January 1987, and moved to Codfish the following year. Douglas and I met him in 1989 and I’d often wondered how he had been doing (all right, I admit it, the rangers and volunteers weren’t alone in falling under the kakapo’s spell).

  ‘Ralph?’ laughed Ness, one of the rangers. ‘Ralph is hopeless.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, feeling sorry for my old friend, and suddenly rather protective.

  ‘Oh, he’s all right,’ she added, sensing my reaction. ‘He’s still here, but he’s not all that keen on booming. As far as we know, the last time he mated was in 1999, with Suzanne. But then she laid infertile eggs.’

  Mark took full credit for dear old Ralph’s new lease of life.

  ‘Maybe he’s just past it?’ one of the volunteers suggested. ‘He has lots of girls around him, but doesn’t seem that interested.’

  ‘Or perhaps they are put off by his arthritic leg?’ interrupted another.

  There were murmurings of agreement around the table.

  It seemed as if dear old Ralph was a bit of a lost cause, though I was happy just knowing that he was still alive and all right after all these years.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. Kakapo are believed to live to a hundred years or more and may, indeed, be among the longest-lived birds in the world. In fact, none of the kakapo known to scientists has yet died of old age and the chances are that some of the youngsters will outlive the people who are trying to protect them. Perhaps it’s because they do everything more slowly than other birds: they are the tuatara of the bird world.

  It’s hard to explain, but it felt really good to be sharing Codfish with Ralph a second time around.

  Then something extraordinary happened. That evening, after supper, Ness set off in the dark for one of her regular night patrols. We saw her again at breakfast, looking tired but clearly overjoyed.

  She could hardly contain her excitement and started talking as soon as she burst through the door.

  ‘Guess what? You’ll never believe it. I can’t believe it myself. It’s amazing.’

  ‘What?’ we all asked, wondering what on earth had happened.

  ‘It’s Ralph. He was booming last night. Not just a feeble pretence at booming, but a real, heartfelt, professional boom. For the first time in … in … goodness knows how long. It’s like he’s found a whole new lease of life. It’s amazing.’

  We all agreed that it was indeed absolutely amazing. And, naturally … I took full credit.

  That night I was woken by Stephen muttering in the bunk opposite.

  ‘Oh God, I need to have a pee,’ he said, to no-one in particular. ‘I’m really going to have to have a pee.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I sympathised, half asleep. ‘Can’t you wait until morning?’

  ‘Nooooo. I’ve been lying here for an hour, trying to convince myself that I can, but I can’t.’

  It was pelting with rain outside. Our waterproofs were by the fire in the main hut and the toilet was 100 metres (330 feet) up a dirt track in the forest.

  ‘Do you think he’ll be out there?’ asked Stephen, nervously.

  ‘Probably. In fact, isn’t that him skrarking now?’

  Stephen groaned. He sat on the side of his bed, huffing and puffing and tying up his bootlaces. We both listened
to the unmistakable high-pitched screaming and squealing coming from the darkness outside the hut. It sounded like something out of The Blair Witch Project.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Stephen, again. ‘It’s going to ambush me. It’s definitely going to attack me. Do you think I could pee out of the window?’

  ‘No, you bloody well can’t!’

  ‘Maybe I’ll just pee in my bed, then.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been doing.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  ‘Of course I am! I’m just very careful not to drink too much in the evenings so I don’t have to go outside after dark.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Oh God. Now I have to run the effing gauntlet of an effing man-eating parrot.’

  He cautiously opened the hut door and peered through a tiny gap into the pouring rain and the gloom.

  Sirocco, the effing man-eating parrot, looking innocent.

  Sirocco looking like a mentally challenged dachshund, Mark looking well and truly ravished, and Stephen looking nervous.

  ‘Right,’ he said, melodramatically. ‘I’m going. I’m going outside … I may be some time.’

  The effing parrot in question was Sirocco, the closest thing to a man-eating parrot you are ever likely to see. An incorrigible 11-year-old, he literally terrorised the camp.

  Sirocco had never mated with another kakapo, but had tried many times to mate with people.

  The situation had become so bad that the entire compound was fenced to keep him and his over-amorous intentions well and truly out. The main aim was to give all the rangers and volunteers a safe passage up to the toilet, where he had inconveniently set up his track-and-bowl system, and between the dormitories and the bunkhouse.

  So his human protectors were imprisoned inside this little fenced enclave, while Sirocco had the run of the whole of the rest of the island.

  But it didn’t work. Within hours of the fence being finished, he had discovered (or made) a hole underneath – a hole that has yet to be discovered by anyone else. Fence or no fence, he was spending as much time on the inside as he pleased – and that happened to be rather a lot.