We spent a couple of days with Deni Purwandana, Field Officer for the Komodo Survival Programme, and the man charged with understanding how the dragon population ticks. Information is crucial for conservation. Deni had worked with Komodo dragons since 2002 and knew more about them than almost anyone else alive. Perhaps that was why he always carried a stick.
He was quite a small man and the thought of him wandering around Komodo on his own made me think of a duck walking into a Chinese restaurant. But Deni lived and breathed Komodo dragons. The more I got to know him, the more he struck me as the kind of person who could make a crash-landing on Komodo and survive alone for three months with no problem at all.
Stephen got straight to the point.
Stephen reckoned the island of Komodo looked surprisingly Welsh or Scottish.
‘Do you actually like Komodo dragons?’ he asked.
Deni laughed.
‘I have to be honest,’ he began. ‘I didn’t really like them at first. But I grew to like them after a couple of years and now I’m almost fond of them. I’m definitely proud to be working with them. They are uniquely Indonesian and part of our heritage.’
Komodo itself was an extremely pleasant surprise. It was nothing like the scorched, dry and dusty island in my distant memory. The hills undulated like the great heavy folds of a lizard’s skin, but they were luxuriantly green. It happened to be the end of the rainy season and that made all the difference.
‘The landscape looks surprisingly Welsh or Scottish,’ remarked Stephen as we stepped onto the wooden jetty.
But you don’t go to Wales or Scotland to catch a Komodo dragon. Deni had set a huge trap under a tree and there was a large male dragon inside.
It took four of us to sit on the giant lizard, with its feet trussed up like a rodeo calf and its slobbering mouth taped firmly shut. I was holding onto its tail – the same tail that could knock a fully grown buffalo off its feet. I gripped as tightly as I could, but still struggled with the mind-boggling surge of power every time it thrashed about. We had little choice but to be heavy-handed and I felt a little guilty. But I consoled myself with the thought that this research would at least benefit the dragons in the long run.
Deni took a few measurements (it was 2.63 metres/8.5 feet long), injected a bar code into its shoulder (which, at a later date, could be read like a bar code in a supermarket), and then attached a radio transmitter to its back (like a miniature rucksack).
‘Right,’ he said, when he had finished. ‘We’re ready. I’m going to count to three and I want everyone to let go straight away and make a run for it. Okay?’
We all mumbled a yes.
‘Here we go. One… two… three!’
Stephen and I let go and ran so fast it didn’t even take measurable time. But the dragon barely moved. Gradually it gained confidence, grasping the fact that it was free, and then celebrated by lunging at us with a spine-tingling hiss.
By this time, we were surrounded by at least a dozen other Komodo dragons and we’d run out of places to hide. They were everywhere, coming at us from all directions. Every time a twig snapped, we’d turn around and there would be another one.
There were several rangers with us and they used sticks to push them away whenever they ventured too close. There was no brutality involved – just a strong push was all it took. But they would always come back for more, and, eventually, we decided to retreat to the safety of the boat.
It was our last night on Komodo and we were anchored offshore, having a celebratory drink on deck. As the sun disappeared below the horizon, thousands upon thousands of large flying foxes, or fruit bats, streamed out of their roost in the mangroves.
Stephen was decidedly unmoved.
‘They’re like rats in leather jackets,’ he grumbled. ‘Just because they’re mammals you’re getting all excited. I’ll tell you something – the starlings wheeling and turning near my house in Norfolk are far more impressive.’
‘I hate to admit it,’ I said, ‘but you do have a point. If Komodo dragons were mammals, I think most people would probably like them a lot more, too.’
‘Yes, we do tend to be very narrow-minded,’ Stephen agreed. ‘They’re as ugly as sin, but, like all animals I suppose, they’re very good at being themselves. You’ve got to respect their sort of Komodo dragonness, haven’t you?’
Sitting on a Komodo dragon – all in the name of research.
6
SINGING THE BLUES
Look at a map of North America and, down in the bottom left-hand corner, you will see a long stretch of land that looks rather like a giant chilli. This is Baja California – my favourite place in the whole world.
Stretching 1,300 kilometres (808 miles) south from the California border, this wild corner of Mexico is a whale-watching Mecca. You can see a greater variety of whales here in a couple of weeks than you can anywhere else on the planet.
I’ve been exploring Baja since the late 1980s, diving with sharks, snorkelling with turtles, surveying blue whales from the air, photographing lots of other whales and dolphins from boats, and much, much more. I couldn’t cope without my annual pilgrimage. It is always utterly breathtaking.
Stephen and I decided to begin our little expedition to this ‘Mexican Galápagos’ with one of the greatest wildlife encounters on earth: a touchy-feely meeting with a friendly grey whale.
We were starting with greys because they are widely regarded as the friendliest of all the world’s whales. The grey whale is so friendly, in fact, that I was quietly confident in getting Stephen as close to one as anyone could possibly get, without actually calling themselves Jonah and climbing inside its mouth.
We met at the southern end of California – in San Diego, to be precise, right on the border with the northern end of Baja. It was the first time we had seen one another for a little over a month and I must admit it was quite a shock.
Baja California – Mark’s favourite place in the whole world.
The Stephen Fry sitting at the hotel bar, sipping a vodka and soda, definitely wasn’t the same Stephen Fry I’d started travelling with a year or so before. It wasn’t even the same Stephen Fry I’d seen at the end of the last shoot.
There wasn’t as much of him as there was before.
While we had been in Madagascar, Stephen decided – quite suddenly – to lose weight. I remember the moment quite clearly: it was just as we started to eat dinner one night in Antananarivo. He ceremoniously drank his last glass of wine, returned his bread roll to the bread basket, and that was that. The following morning he started a crack-of-dawn walking regime that continues to this day, and the kilograms started to fall off. In the four months between Madagascar and San Diego, he had lost an impressive 29 kg (64 pounds) altogether.
The trimmer and slimmer Stephen looked years younger and a heck of a lot healthier.
He was on cloud nine. Rarely had I seen him quite as euphoric as he was at the prospect of meeting a whale face to face. He was even wearing his ‘lucky whale shorts’, bought especially for the occasion, which were dotted with spouting humpback whales (at least, I think they were humpbacks – I didn’t like to look too closely). It was the wrong species, but definitely the right idea.
Grey whales are inveterate travellers, commuting along the entire length of the western North American coastline, and back again, each year. The round-trip distance between their summer feeding grounds in the north and their winter breeding grounds in the south can be as much as 20,000 kilometres (12,400 miles), making their journey one of the longest migrations of any mammal.
In a grey whale’s lifetime of about 80 years, that’s the equivalent of swimming all the way to the moon and back – twice.
The vast majority of grey whales spend every summer in the icy Arctic waters of the Bering, Chukchi and western Beaufort seas, where they have three main objectives: eat, eat and eat.
Grey whales are messy eaters, feeding in the sediment on the sea bed. They use their mouths like vacuum cleaners, su
cking up tiny animals called benthic amphipods, as well as considerable amounts of water, sand, mud and stones. No one knows why, but most of them feed by rolling onto the right side – they are right ‘handed’ – although a few roll to the left.
They have about five months to put on enough body weight to survive the rest of the year without another proper meal.
Early in October, the Arctic weather begins to worsen and the fat and blubbery whales prepare to leave. Their migration south is organised like a military manoeuvre: the pregnant females are first to go, followed by non-pregnant females, then mature males, immature females next and, finally, the immature males.
Stephen’s ‘lucky whale shorts’, bought especially for the occasion.
They file through Unimak Pass, a narrow gap between islands in the Aleutian chain, and head south along the coasts of British Columbia, Washington State, Oregon, California and beyond. With hardly a break, they average about 125 kilometres (78 miles) a day, and the entire journey takes them a couple of months.
They are heading for the Pacific side of Baja, which happens to be the winter home of practically the entire world population of grey whales. Safely sheltered from the pounding surf of the open ocean, thousands of them gather to socialise, mate and calve in a string of lagoons beside the desert.
The pregnant females are the first to arrive and they give birth to their gargantuan calves in the shallow backwaters of these lagoons, while many of the other whales are still on their way south.
The calves drink huge quantities of their mothers’ fat-laden milk and gain weight rapidly. It’s a relentless race against time. Within a few months they have to be fit and ready for their first journey north, to the Arctic feeding grounds, where the grey whale’s annual cycle begins all over again.
But the most remarkable thing about grey whales is their willingness to forgive and forget.
They were hunted ruthlessly in the second half of the 19th century, and again in the early 20th century. Yankee whalers entered the Baja lagoons in small wooden rowing boats and harpooned grey whale calves, knowing that their mothers would come within range to protect them. And protect them they did – chasing the whaling boats, lifting them out of the water like big rubber ducks, ramming them with their heads and dashing them to pieces with their tails.
One of the friendliest animals on the planet – a baby grey whale.
They would ‘fight like devils’, so the Yankee whalers dubbed them ‘devilfish’. But despite their best efforts to fight back, they were hunted to the verge of extinction. Thank goodness, with official protection, they have made a remarkable comeback in the years since. The current population is about 21,000 – roughly the same as it was in the days before whaling.
Nowadays, the very same whales, once notorious for their ferocity in the face of danger, positively welcome whale-watching tourists into their breeding lagoons. Somehow, they seem to understand that we come in peace and, far from smashing our small open boats to smithereens, welcome us with open flippers.
We don’t deserve it – but they have forgiven us for all those years of greed, recklessness and cruelty. They trust us, when we don’t really deserve to be trusted.
Mark trying to write the book, while the others are drinking beer in the makeshift bar.
Yes, Stephen, we are going to be sleeping in ‘those bloody huts’.
It would be tempting to say that Stephen is having a whale of a time, but that would be far too trite.
We drove across the border from San Diego to Tijuana, increasingly notorious for its drug wars and assassinations, and continued south for an hour or so to the little town of Ensenada. From there we hitched a two-hour ride on a Cessna Caravan to San Ignacio Lagoon.
‘It makes you wonder about evolution, doesn’t it?’ observed Stephen, looking out of the window at the desolate and rugged desert stretched out below. ‘I mean, what animal would emerge from the sea onto dry land like this godforsaken place – and decide to stay? Obviously, not a particularly bright one.’
We landed on a sandy airstrip near the lagoon and, after a bumpy 45-minute drive in an ancient yellow school bus, eventually rocked up at a solar- and wind-powered eco-lodge nestled right on the shore.
‘Oh my God to the power of ten!’ exclaimed Stephen. ‘What an absolutely magical place.’
‘Oh my God to the power of a hundred!’ he said a moment later. ‘We’re not going to be sleeping in those bloody huts, are we?’
We were. A row of small wooden cabins, roughly the size and shape of the beach huts found at many English seaside resorts, stretched out along the back of the beach. This was Cortez Camp – our home for the rest of the week. In fact, it was perfectly comfortable: my cabin had a shelf, a small window, a nail for a coat-hook, and a couple of single beds.
One of the disadvantages of being a zoologist is the constant lack of sleep. You always have to get up early in the morning and if you dare to mention the possibility of a lie-in to other zoologists they treat you with contempt for the rest of the day.
After a while, you just learn to sleep fast and keep quiet.
But one of the great advantages of whale-watching is that the whales are just as active after mid-morning coffee, or lunch, or even afternoon tea, as they are at the crack of dawn. So we started straight away.
The next few days were a blur of leaping, laughing, spouting, stroking, playing and patting. We had so many mind-bendingly close encounters with grey whales, we actually lost count.
On one occasion, we had a colossal calf literally leaning against the side of our small fibreglass boat. It lay there in ecstasy while we scratched it on the back and tickled it under the chin. It was as trusting and playful as a kitten.
Stephen ooh-ed and aah-ed over this 5-metre (16½-ft) long baby in much the same way as he had ooh-ed and aah-ed over the minuscule Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur in Madagascar.
‘Ooh!’ he said when the baby opened its mouth.
‘Aah!’ he said when it looked him straight in the eye.
Suddenly, a huge cloud of bubbles erupted from the water underneath the boat. There was a slight swishing sound and a gigantic, bowed head appeared right alongside – giving me such a jump I almost swallowed my tongue. It was Mum, all 15 metres (49 feet) of her. She had been keeping a watchful eye on her calf, and no doubt on us, from the hidden depths.
Mark in his element.
I couldn’t help thinking it was like watching the Mother Ship appear in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Another whale stayed with us for ages. Mottled grey, with a low dorsal fin instead of a hump and a series of ‘knuckles’ down the length of its tail, it was covered in barnacles. Grey whales are so heavily infested with barnacles – a large grey may carry several hundred kilograms of them – that, from a distance, they look suspiciously like rocks.
I managed to pull a whale louse from the middle of a barnacle cluster on its head. Named by early whalers, who had similar creatures crawling around in their own hair, whale lice are actually crustaceans rather than insects. My louse looked like a miniature crab (it was about a centimetre/half an inch long) that had been run over by a steamroller, and used its strong claws to cling on to the end of my finger. I had to prize it off before putting it back on the whale’s head (I know it’s only a louse but I felt responsible for its wellbeing).
Every time our new-found friend dropped out of sight, we stared into the murky water contemplating its next move. On several occasions, it surfaced so unexpectedly – and with such a loud explosion of breath – that we almost leapt out of the boat.
It was incredibly inquisitive and, most of the time, it was hard to tell who was supposed to be watching whom. It frequently spyhopped – towering above us as it lifted its head as high as 3 metres (10 feet) out of the water to take a closer look.
Then we had a group of no fewer than six adult whales lolling and rolling around next to the boat. We were surrounded. Every time they spouted we were showered and soaked in salty w
hale breath, and every time they rolled the swell almost tipped us over. For a heart-stopping moment, one lifted us up, ever so gently, and lowered us back into the water; another nudged us with the end of its snout and then energetically pushed us round in circles like a cat playing with a mouse.
At one point, filming stopped as the entire crew downed tools to pat, tickle and kiss the friendly whales around us. No one could resist.
Just a brief flirtation with a whale is often all it takes to turn normal, quiet, unflappable people into delirious, jabbering extroverts. On whale-watching trips almost everyone becomes the life and soul of the party. I have seen grown men and women dance around the deck, break into song, burst into tears, slap one another on the back and do all the things that normal, quiet, unflappable people are not supposed to do.
I have done them myself and laughed as I watched Stephen and the crew falling under the spell. I knew that their lives would never be quite the same again.
There is something about whales that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and makes you think about them morning, noon and night. At the risk of sounding theatrical, emotional and (heaven forbid) unscientific, they make you feel good.
After a really close encounter, it is hard to remain emotionally stable for several weeks afterwards. Eventually, the jabbering and the delirium subside, but you are still left with a good feeling that never really wanes. There is an immense and lasting satisfaction in simply knowing that the whales are out there, wild and free.
By now, if you haven’t already seen a whale, you may be wondering if six months on the road with Stephen has had some weird and deleterious effect on me. I wouldn’t blame you. If I had read this thirty years ago, before my first close encounter with a whale, I would have been wondering exactly the same thing.
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