Stolen World

by Jennie Erin Smith

  It was Don Reid who had first noticed the Germans’ Mercedes, with a driver inside, parked on the edge of the forest reserve the night before. Reid demanded that the driver let him inspect the car, whose trunk contained boxes suitable for carrying reptiles, a live chameleon, one dead snake in preserving fluid, and several dead lizards. The driver explained that he was waiting for a group of Germans to emerge from the forest. Reid sent the driver away, and traveled to a gendarme station in a neighboring city, as only gendarmes could make a poaching arrest. Reid ferried them back to Ampijoroa in the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust’s car. There they all waited by the forest until the Germans emerged. The gendarmes had come heavily armed. But Reid had hardly expected they would shoot.

  Reid informed Seipp that two from his group were dead but that Fritz Jürgen Obst had survived. The previous night, as Reid was driving the three wounded, the roads had been terribly bumpy and Obst’s two badly injured companions, bleeding continuously without compresses or first aid, shouted in pain and begged for water in the back of the vehicle; one, delusional, began addressing a nonexistent “Monsieur le docteur.” Obst led them in praying the Our Father, over and over. Half an hour before they reached the hospital, both were dead. Reid left Obst with the Malagasy doctors and drove with the bodies to the morgue.

  In the morning, the German embassy sent a Cessna from the capital to remove Obst. A team of German aid workers was dispatched to Ampijoroa to collect Seipp, who was being held on the roadside by Reid and, now, more gendarmes. The aid workers took Seipp back to Mahajanga, where he was reunited with Obst and flown out of the country. Don Reid waited a few days before telling his bosses in Jersey about the affair.

  Save for a brief and sketchy report in a British newspaper, the international news media paid no attention to the Ampijoroa killings. The whole affair would likely been forgotten, except by the families of the dead, had the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust not written triumphantly about it in its newsletter, three months later, in an article titled “Reptile Rustlers Meet Tragic End.” The rustlers, the article said, had come awfully close to the trust’s colony of plowshare tortoises, the rarest tortoises in the world.

  THE REASON the plowshare tortoises needed a breeding colony was that they were presumed to be all but extinct. In fact the plowshare had always been presumed to be all but extinct, though there was never much consensus as to why.

  The beautiful golden tortoises, called angonoka by locals and Geochelone yniphora officially, spelled “plowshares” by the Americans and “ploughshares” by the British, are the largest of Madagascar’s four tortoise species, and the only ones possessing an elongated lower shell that protrudes like a plowshare, restricting free movement of the tortoises’ heads and necks. The males need the protrusions to batter and flip over one another during the mating season, but they look so acutely uncomfortable that Malagasy families keeping plowshares—usually tethered up in their chicken yards out of a belief that they keep poultry from getting sick—were known to saw them off out of pity.

  The first evidence of the species had been a carapace toted into Paris’s Muséum nationale d’Histoire naturelle in 1885 by a man who’d purchased it from sailors. In the early twentieth century, living plowshares were first observed in a patch of bamboo forests in northwestern Madagascar, near the coastal town of Soalala. They remained little studied after that, but were believed to be terrifically rare. A 1950 report predicted that the species would be completely extinct within a few years, and until 1971, when the geologist James Juvik of the University of Hawaii set out to rediscover the tortoises, that sad prognosis had been the last word on plowshares.

  Juvik found plowshare tortoises in the bamboo thickets around Soalala, but only a handful, and he wondered whether they might be the last of their kind. Juvik could see no reason for populations to be so low. The tortoises were not eaten or exported for food, the way radiated tortoises, a related and more common species, often were. Wild pigs roamed the area, and though Juvik was sure the pigs ate young plowshares and eggs, “this factor alone is probably insufficient in explaining the species’ near extinction,” he wrote in an article describing his trip. “Man’s indirect effect, such as the alteration of the native forest, appears modest in the region, where human densities are low.” Juvik thought the species might simply be dying out, unaided by humans, “undergoing extinction as a natural and inevitable process common to all species,” he wrote. But, in spite of his concerns that populations were dangerously low, Juvik removed six adults of breeding age from Madagascar to the Honolulu Zoo, confident that Hawaii’s tropical climate, combined with the zoo’s record of success breeding other tortoise species, made it the ideal place to conserve them for posterity.

  In the early 1970s, after Juvik’s trip proved that plowshares still existed, the Texan animal dealer Leon Leopard traveled to Madagascar and took home a pair, which eventually ended up in Honolulu, too. A Connecticut dentist imported one from France, where a former colonial administrator had kept it as a pet. The dentist loaned that plowshare to the Bronx Zoo, where his good friend John Behler shared his interest in Madagascan tortoises. But Behler’s keepers saw fit to put the tortoise on sand, which it swallowed too much of and died.

  After the passage of CITES and the Endangered Species Act, there was no longer any legal way to obtain plowshare tortoises from Madagascar. And by then the Honolulu Zoo, the one sizable repository of plowshares outside Madagascar, was not only failing to breed them, it was starting to kill them off. After the zoo’s attempt to electro-ejaculate the males, one died of an infection on its penis. A female had to be sterilized because of an ovarian infection, and another plowshare died of unknown causes. After a decade’s efforts, only one baby plowshare was ever hatched in Honolulu.

  Honolulu gave up on its breeding program. It kept the sterile female and the baby, then sent two to the dentist in Connecticut, one of which died the day after its arrival, and the last three to the Bronx Zoo.

  The dentist, Bill Zovickian, was a tortoise hobbyist well regarded in the zoo community, and he remained very close with John Behler, even after the Bronx Zoo had killed his first plowshare. Zovickian forgave that accident and loaned his new pair to Behler, too, believing that the animals would be likelier to breed if kept in a group. Behler did not put the five plowshares on display in New York, but rather housed them at the zoo’s Wildlife Survival Center, its breeding sanctuary for endangered species, on St. Catherines Island, Georgia. In the winter of 1985, the heating system at St. Catherines failed, and one of Zovickian’s plowshares, the female, froze to death. In the early 1990s, three more died, of unknown causes, and Zovickian demanded his surviving male back.

  Honolulu’s baby plowshare died of a calcium deficiency.

  By 1993, Zovickian’s old male and Honolulu’s sterile female were the only known plowshares in captivity.

  IN MADAGASCAR, meanwhile, the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust was having a surprising degree of success breeding plowshares in semiwild conditions.

  The Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust was not an ordinary zoo, nor was its founder, the legendary author and television personality Gerald Durrell, an ordinary zoo director. Durrell, like many zoo men of his generation, had gotten his start as a freelance animal collector, traveling to Cameroon on a small inheritance and returning with a hundred crates full of antelopes and crocodiles and warthogs for English zoos.

  In the late 1950s, Durrell built a zoo of his own on the Channel Island of Jersey, between England and France. His Jersey Zoo developed into a noble and serious affair, with keen attention paid to breeding endangered species. Durrell was an early adopter of the “ark” philosophy, and also one of the first zoo directors to acknowledge its limitations, realizing by the mid-1970s—a full decade before the rest of the zoo world—that breeding rare animals was far better done, for reasons both political and biological, in their countries of origin.

  So Durrell’s Jersey Zoo formed a trust to fund overseas conservat
ion projects, and in the 1970s began the hard work that saved the kestrels and pink pigeons of the island of Mauritius, and the fruit bats of its neighboring Rodrigues. In the 1980s, after Durrell had married Lee McGeorge, an animal behaviorist who specialized in Madagascar, the trust started exploring the possibility of conservation work in that country, too. The World Wildlife Fund and CITES were especially interested in plowshare tortoises—new studies had estimated the remaining population to be as low as a hundred animals. The WWF would provide the money, and Jersey would handle the rest.

  But while Mauritius was a pleasant place to do conservation work, with the languid feel of a Caribbean island, nearby Madagascar was a mess. A postcolonial Marxist government had expelled the French, driven out foreign investment, redistributed land, and plunged the country into political isolation and seemingly unstoppable economic decline. Madagascar’s environment suffered along with its people, who in their impoverishment began to eat many of the island’s famous endemic species, and reembraced with nationalist zeal the burning of land for grazing, a traditional practice that the French had discouraged. By the 1980s, Madagascar was burned over and bankrupt.

  Still, the Durrells were committed, and so was Don Reid, the man they’d chosen to manage the project. Reid had worked as a bait-and-tackle salesman, and earlier as a reptile keeper at a small English zoo. Reid was the one human being the Durrells could find willing to put up with the discomforts of Madagascar, where in 1987, the year of Reid’s arrival, it was hard for a foreigner to locate toothpaste.

  Reid established camp in Ampijoroa, a village eight to twelve hours north of the capital, depending on road conditions, near one of Madagascar’s largest forest reserves. The Madagascar government had rounded up a group of adult plowshares from chicken yards, and these served as Reid’s breeders.

  To Reid’s surprise, he liked living in a brick-and-raffia hut without running water or a toilet, with only a motorcycle to get around on. He learned French. “I was the only honky for a long way around,” Reid said, and that pleased him.

  Reid’s plowshares mated right away—it was something about the climate, or the forest plants Reid harvested to feed them, or the bamboo and shade palms he put in their pens—whatever it was, they felt at home enough to have sex. In April 1987, a female laid three eggs. “We had absolutely no idea when they would hatch,” Reid said. “We put wire over them to protect them from civets and we waited, waited, waited. And one day in November we went out to have a look and the center of the nest had fallen. I dug the nest up with a spoon and there was just one baby.”

  The next year there were seven nests. By 1990, when Gerald and Lee Durrell first visited the site, more than thirty babies had hatched. The Durrells were thrilled and touched.

  “No matter how comprehensive the reports of man on the ground are, there is nothing like seeing and holding the fruit of your labors,” wrote Gerald in The Aye-Aye and I, his book about the Madagascar trip. “Cupped in our hands, these funny little pie-crust babies represented the future of their race.”

  John Behler of the Bronx Zoo also visited Reid at Ampijoroa in 1990, after which he formally recommended, as a member the IUCN–World Conservation Union’s Madagascar committee, that Jersey send the Bronx Zoo one of its adult male plowshares. Behler wanted a second male for his group on St. Catherines Island, which at the time was still limping along.

  It was a neat trick of Behler’s to recommend, as the chair of a supposedly neutral conservation committee, the donation of a tortoise to his own zoo. But this was easier said than done. The Durrells had been careful to establish that any animals they collected in Madagascar, and their offspring, remained the sovereign property of Madagascar, and that it was the Madagascar government, not Jersey, that determined their fate. Such an agreement was hardly standard practice among zoos, but the Durrells felt that they had done the right thing. “We invented this stipulation as a safeguard because many countries felt that outsiders were only interested in grabbing the fauna and running, as it were,” wrote Gerald in The Aye-Aye and I. The trust saw no reason to export any plowshare tortoises, even to its own zoo in Jersey, when they were doing so well in Madagascar.

  In the early 1990s, Jersey took over complete control of the plowshare project, including its fund-raising, and turned “the world’s rarest tortoise,” which happened to be a very pretty tortoise, into its flagship conservation cause. The plowshare was not, strictly speaking, the world’s rarest tortoise. There were at least ten turtle and tortoise species, most of them in Asia, of which only a handful of individuals survived. And as Madagascar opened up to Western researchers, the discovery of other, isolated populations of plowshares raised estimates to a few hundred animals, or even as many as a thousand. The plowshare was getting less rare by the minute, but donations poured in, affording Don Reid a proper vehicle, a house not made of raffia, and a toilet. The Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust, having secured the goodwill of Madagascar, started new programs for lemurs, jumping rats, aye-ayes, and native fish. The plowshares produced more golden babies every year.

  Then the Germans were killed.

  AT FIRST, the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust had written rather glibly about the Germans’ deaths in its newsletter, referring to Fritz Jürgen Obst, curator-in-charge of the Dresden Zoological Museum and author of several well-regarded books on reptiles, as a “reptile rustler.” The trust also made note of the Germans’ proximity to the plowshare tortoise colony at the time of the shooting, complaining, in what seemed to be a fund-raising plea, that the altercation would drive up the costs of protecting the tortoises. When the surviving Germans responded with outrage—they had never tried to nor intended to steal any of the trust’s plowshare tortoises, they wrote, and they weren’t “reptile rustlers”—the trust, in a subsequent newsletter, apologized. But it stood by its original accusation, which was probably true, that Obst and the others had been removing reptiles from a national park illegally.

  A phone number Don Reid had discovered in one of the dead men’s pockets seemed to confirm that. The number belonged to Olaf Pronk, a Dutch expatriate animal dealer well known to Jersey. Pronk had shown up in Madagascar in late 1988, only a year after Jersey set up its plowshare program, and while the trust aimed to ensure that Madagascar’s endemic reptiles stayed in the country, Pronk found clever ways to assure that they wound up in European terrariums.

  What Obst’s team was doing, collecting without scientific permits, was hardly unheard-of. To export specimens from Madagascar it was far easier for scientists to get an invoice from a licensed animal dealer like Pronk and export them as products of a commercial, not scientific, venture. This was the only way to obtain a good number of specimens. Otherwise, you had to buy computers for the university, house Malagasy exchange students, and perform all kinds of expensive, time-consuming favors, just to get permits for two chameleons. Olaf Pronk had provided Obst’s team with a driver who had a commercial collecting license of his own, an arrangement that went a long way toward solving their problem.

  Some of the most respected herpetologists in the world counted Olaf Pronk among their friends. Curators from the University of Michigan and the American Museum of Natural History stopped by on their frequent visits to Madagascar, and Pronk, about as sophisticated a naturalist as an animal dealer ever was, gave them specimens he recognized as extraordinary. But the conservation groups working in Madagascar—particularly the World Wildlife Fund and Jersey—did not appreciate Pronk’s generosity or sophistication. What they saw were Pronk’s wholesale exports of native fauna. Pronk had almost single-handedly started a chameleon craze in Europe; more recently he had discovered legal loopholes that allowed him to export hundreds of Madagascar Pyxis, little woodland tortoises of a genus considered seriously threatened.

  By Jersey’s reasoning, anyone associated with Olaf Pronk was a reptile rustler.

  THE TRIBUNAL set up to investigate the Ampijoroa killings—whose results the two surviving Germans eagerly awaited—ended
almost as soon as it began. Don Reid was questioned by two or three Malagasy judges, and no one was censured. “The whole thing just sort of blew over,” Reid said.

  In the couple of years that followed, Reid’s plowshare project continued to produce exceptional results, with the females digging as many as seven nests a year. The juveniles were getting stronger—strong enough, almost, to be invulnerable to bush pigs, which meant they could soon be released.

  But Reid felt himself souring on Ampijoroa. He was haunted for a while by the recollection of one of the dying German’s lungs exposed and inflating outside his body. The assignment he’d originally signed on to for one year, back in 1987, had become eight. His assistant had “gotten into drugs,” Reid said, and had to be replaced. In January 1995, Gerald Durrell died, at age seventy, of liver cancer. Durrell’s loss, to Reid and to the zoo world in general, was hard felt.

  Reid contracted malaria repeatedly and missed cricket, his favorite sport. He thought he might be getting a little weird, “going bush,” he said.

  In February 1996, Reid, with the backing of Gerald Durrell’s widow, Lee, who was now in charge of the organization, wrote to Madagascar’s Ministère des Eaux et Forêts to propose a completely new strategy for the plowshares. Splitting the colony was an idea that John Behler of the Bronx Zoo had first floated on a visit two years earlier. Half the tortoises would remain in Madagascar, according to this plan, and the other half would be placed in the control of a zoo or conservation group abroad. In his letter to the government, Reid cited four threats that necessitated such a radical change of course:

  Disease

  Falling trees and storms

  Theft

  Vandalism

  Reid advocated exporting half the tortoises to Mauritius, where Jersey had a permanent conservation station. He also mentioned the idea of moving half the plowshares to the Jersey Zoo, though he conceded the climate would not be ideal for them, or to “other zoos,” which he did not name.