ÑRichard Lewis is a man who has worked out a foolproof way of getting snappy answers to his questions.
He drives his Landrover (well, not actually his Landrover, but the Landrover of anyone foolhardy enough to lend him one) with what can only be described as pizzazz along Mauritian roads that were built with something less than pizzazz in mind.
ÑThe roads are often narrow and windy, and where they are tarmacked, the Tarmac tends to finish with an abrupt six-inch drop at the edge. Richard drives along these with a pizzazz that borders dangerously on elan, and when he asks you a question he turns and looks at you and doesn't look back at the road again until you've answered.
ÑMortal terror is not the best state of mind in which to try and frame intelligent answers, but you have to try.
We had managed OK with 'How was the flight?' ('Fine!') and 'How was the meal?' ('Fine!') and 'Feeling jet-lagged?' ('We're fine!'), but then we got to what he clearly regarded as being the crunch, so to speak.
Ñ 'Why are you coming all the way to Mauritius to look for some crappy old fruitbat?' The Landrover veered frighteningly.
One of the first things you need to know about Richard Lewis, indeed the thing you need to know about him, is that he's an ornithologist. Once you know that, everything else more or less falls into place.
Ñ 'I just couldn't figure it out,' he protested, twisted half round in his seat to harangue us. 'You're going to Rodrigues? To look for a fruitbat? It's not even particularly rare.'
'Well, it's all relative,' protested Mark. 'It may not be particularly rare by Mauritian standards, but it is the rarest fruitbat in the ...'
'Why don't you stay here on Mauritius for heaven's sake?'
'Well ...'
Ñ 'What do you know about Mauritius? Anything?'
'Well,' I said, 'I know that ... er, there's a lorry coming ...'
'Never mind about that. I'll take care of the lorries. What do you know about Mauritius?'
'I know that it was originally colonised by the Dutch, and when they left it was taken over by the French who lost it to Britain after the Napoleonic Wars.
Ñ'So it's an ex-British colony, part of the Commonwealth. The inhabitants speak French or Creole. The law is basically English and you're, er, supposed to drive on the left ...'
'All right, you've read the guide book. But do you know about the birds here? Don't you know about the pink pigeon? The echo parakeet? Don't you know about the Mauritius kestrel?'
Ñ 'Yes, but ...'
'Then why are you going off to the stupid island of Rodrigues to look for some ridiculous fruitbat? We've got a bunch of them here at the captive breeding centre if you really want to see one. Common as muck, stupid things. You'd be much better off staying here and seeing some real stuff. Jesus!'
Ñ He had suddenly caught an inadvertent glimpse of the road ahead of us and had to yank hard on the steering wheel to avoid an oncoming truck.
'Tell you what,' he said, turning round again. 'How long have you got? Two weeks?'
'Yes,' said Mark hurriedly.
Ñ 'And you were planning to spend two days here and then fly to Rodrigues to spend, what, ten days, searching for the world's rarest fruitbat?'
'Yes.'
'OK. Here's what you do instead. You stay here for ten days, and then go off to Rodrigues for two days. Right?'
'Will we find it in two days?'
'Oh yes!'
Ñ 'How do you know?'
'Because I'll tell you exactly where to find it. Take you ten minutes. Take a couple of photos, go home.'
'Oh.'
'So you're staying here, right?'
'Er ...'
Ñ We were swaying erratically along, more or less in the middle of the road. Another truck hove into sight ahead of us, frantically flashing its lights. Richard was still looking round at us.
'Agreed?' he insisted. 'You'll stay?'
'Yes! Yes! We'll stay!'
'Right. Good. I should think so too. You'll get to meet Carl then as well. He's brilliant, but completely mad. Jesus!'
Ñ The brilliant but completely mad Carl Jones is a tall Welshman in his late thirties, and there are those who say of him that his sheer perverse bloody-mindedness is the major thing that stands in the way of the almost total destruction of the ecology of Mauritius.
ÑIt was Carl that Mark had contacted to make made the arrangements for our trip, and it had been quite apparent from the first moment that we set foot on Mauritius that he was a man to contend with.
ÑWhen we told the immigration official at the airport that we would be staying 'with someone called Carl Jones at somewhere called Black River,' it had produced the unexpected and unnerving response of hysterical laughter, and also a friendly pat on the back.
Ñ When Carl met us at Richard's house, he greeted us with a scowl, leant in the doorframe, and growled, 'I hate media people.' Then he noticed our tape recorder and suddenly grinned impishly.
'Oh! Is that on?' he asked.
'Not at the moment.'
'Turn it on, quick, turn it on!'
We turned it on.
Ñ an'I really hate media people!' he boomed at it. 'Did you get that? Do you think it'll come out all right?'
He peered at the recorder to make sure the tape really was running.
'You know I once did an interview for Woman's Hour on the radio, he said, shaking his head in wonderment at the folly of a malign and silly world.
Ñ'I hate media people, they take up all my time and don't pay me very much - but anyway ... the interviewer said to me that he was sick of boring scientists and could I tell him about my work but be sure to mention women and babies.
Ñ'So I told him that I preferred women field assistants to men, that we reared lots of baby birds, and that women were better at looking after baby birds because they were more sensitive and all that. And it went out!'
Ñ This rendered him speechless with laughter and he tottered helplessly out of the room and was not seen again for hours.
'That was Carl,' said Richard. 'He's great. He's really brilliant. Honestly. Don't worry about him being a complete sod.'
ÑWe quickly discovered that we had fallen in with a bunch of passionately obsessed people. The first obsession for Carl and for Richard was birds. They loved them with an extraordinary fervour, and had devoted their entire adult lives working in the field, often in awful conditions and on horribly low budgets, to save rare birds, and the environments they live in, from extinction.
ÑRichard had trained in the Philippines, working to save the Philippines monkey-eating eagle, a wildly improbable-looking piece of flying hardware that you would more readily expect to see coming into land on an aircraft carrier than nesting in a tree. From there he had, in 1985, come to Mauritius, where the entire ecology of an island formerly famous for its abundant beauty is in desperate trouble.
Ñ They work with a desperate energy that is disconcerting for a while until you begin to appreciate the enormity of the problems facing them, and the speed with which those problems are escalating. Ecologically speaking, Mauritius is a war zone and Carl, Richard and others - including Wendy Strahm, an equally obsessed botanist - are like surgeons working just behind the front line.
ÑThey are immensely kind people, often exhausted by the demands that their caring makes on them. Their impatience often erupts into a kind of wild black humour because, faced with so much that is absolutely critical, they can't afford the time for anything that is merely very, very urgent.
Ñ The focus of their work is Carl's captive breeding centre in the village of Black River, and Richard took us along to see it on the next day.
We screeched to a halt outside the gate set in a six foot high stone wall and went in.
Ñ Inside was a large sandy courtyard, ringed with low wooden buildings, large aviaries and cages. The warm air was rich with the sounds of flapping and cooing and sharp, bracing smells. Several very, very large tortoises were roaming about the centre of the yard completely free, presumably because virtually anybody would be able to beat them to the gate if they suddenly decided to make a break for it.
Ñ 'There you are,' said Richard, pointing at a large cage off to one side in which someone appeared to have hung a number of small broken umbrellas, 'Rodrigues fruitbats. You can relax now, you've seen 'em. Look at them later, they're boring. They're nothing to what else we've got here. Pink pigeons for a start ... this place has got some of the rarest, sexiest birds in the world.
Ñ'And you want to see the real stars? I'll see if Carl's in. He should be the one to show you.
He took us for a quick hunt, but Carl wasn't there. There was, however, someone who was besottedly in love with him. Richard beckoned us in.
'This is Pink,' he said.
We looked.
ÑPink gazed at us intently with his two large, deep brown eyes. He fidgeted a little with his feet, clawing at his perch, and seemed tense, expectant, and slightly irritated to see us.
'Pink's a Mauritius kestrel,' said Richard, 'but he's basically weird.'
'Really?' said Mark. 'Doesn't look it.'
'What does he look like to you?'
Ñ 'Well he's quite small. He's got sleek brown outer plumage on his wings, mottled brown and white breast feathers, impressive set of talons ...'
'In other words you think he looks like a bird.'
'Well, yes ...'
'He'd be shocked to know you thought that.'
'What do you mean?'
Ñ 'Well, one of the problems with breeding birds in captivity is that they sometimes have to be reared by humans, which leads to all sorts of misunderstandings on the bird's part. When a bird hatches from its egg it doesn't have much of a clear picture of what's what in the world, and it falls in love with the first thing that feeds it, which in Pink's case was Carl.
Ñ'It's called "imprinting' and it's a major problem because you can't undo it. Once he's made up his mind that he's a human, he ...'
'He actually thinks he's a human?' I asked.
Ñ 'Oh yes. Well, if he thinks Carl's his mother it more or less follows, doesn't it? They may not be brilliant, but they're logical. He's quite convinced he's a human. He completely ignores the other kestrels, hasn't got time for them, they're just a bunch of birds as far as he's concerned. But when Carl walks in here he goes completely berserk.
Ñ'It's a problem because, of course, you can't introduce an imprinted bird into the wild, it wouldn't know what the hell to do. Wouldn't nest, wouldn't hunt, it would just expect to go to restaurants and stuff. Or at least, it would expect to be fed. It wouldn't survive by itself.
Ñ 'However, he does have a very important function in the aviary. You see, the young birds that we've hatched here don't come to sexual maturity at the same time, so when the females start getting sexy, the males are not ready to handle it. The females are bigger and more belligerent and often beat the males up. So when that happens, we collect semen from Pink, and ...'
Ñ 'How do you do that?' asked Mark.
'In a hat.'
'I thought you said in a hat.'
'That's right. Carl puts on this special hat, which is a bit like a rather strange bowler hat with a rubber brim, Pink goes mad with desire for Carl, flies down and fucks the hell out of his hat.'
'What?'
Ñ 'He ejaculates into the brim. We collect the drop of semen and use it to inseminate a female.'
'Strange way to treat your mother.'
'He's a strange bird. But he does serve a useful purpose in spite of being psychologically twisted.'
ÑSetting up the captive breeding centre on Mauritius is one of Carl's major failures. In fact it is the result of probably the most spectacular and brilliant failure of his life.
'They always thought I would be a failure when I was a boy,' he told us when he turned up later, incredibly late for something. 'I was hopeless, a complete write-off.
Ñ'Never did any work, wasn't interested in anything at all. Well, anything other than animals. Nobody at my school in Wales thought it was very useful being only interested in animals, but I had about fifty of them, to my father's despair, in cages all over the back yard. Badgers and foxes, wild Welsh polecats, owls, hawks, macaws, jackdaws, everything. I even managed, just as a schoolboy, to breed kestrels in captivity.
Ñ 'My headmaster said it was nice that I had an interest, but I would never get anywhere because I was a lousy scholar. One day he called me into his study and said, 'Jones,' he said, 'this just isn't acceptable. You spend your whole life going around looking under hedges. You spend no time doing your schoolwork. You're a failure. What are you going to do with yourself?'
Ñ 'I said - and remember, this was in Wales, "Sir, I want to go to tropical islands and study birds."
'He said, "But to do that you have to be either rich or intelligent and you're neither."
Ñ 'I took this as some kind of encouragement, finally managed to pass a few exams, went to college, and when I was an undergraduate I went to a lecture in Oxford by Professor Tom Cade, who's a world authority on falcons. He told us how in America they were working with peregrine falcons by breeding them in captivity and releasing the young back into the wild.
Ñ 'I couldn't believe it. This was incredibly exciting. Here were these people going out and actually doing something. Then he said that in the Indian Ocean on an island called Mauritius there was a very rare bird, perhaps the rarest of all falcons, called the Mauritius kestrel, which was, at the moment, doomed to extinction, but that it could possibly be saved by captive breeding.
Ñ'And it suddenly came to me that all this work I'd been doing in my back yard as a kid, fiddling round with birds, could actually be used to save a whole species from becoming extinct.
Ñ 'I was overwhelmed by excitement and I thought, Christ, I must see if I can do something about this. So in the summer I went to America and studied a number of the projects there, saw how they were doing it, and promised myself that if I possibly could, I'd go to Mauritius and work to save the Mauritius kestrel.
Ñ 'And they said, "Well, Carl, it's all very well you wanting to go to Mauritius but there's lots of problems out there and you can't save these birds. There just aren't enough of them. Just one breeding pair and a couple of other individuals. And with all the local problems and no facilities, it just can't be done. There's a small project there, but it's got to be closed down. It's just throwing good resources after bad."
Ñ 'But I got the job. The job was to close the project down. That was the job I came here to do, ten years ago, close the whole thing down, what there was of it. None of this was even here then,' he said, looking around at the captive breeding centre in which they had raised over forty Mauritius kestrels for gradual reintroduction to the wild, two hundred pink pigeons, and even a hundred Rodrigues fruitbats.
Ñ'I suppose I have to admit,' he said with a naughty smile, 'that I've been a complete failure.'
As he finished his story his hand dropped to his knee and he happened to catch sight of his watch. Instantly a distraught expression came into his face and he jumped to his feet, clapping his hand to his head. He was late for a fund-raising meeting.
Ñ We heard him complain regularly and bitterly, during our time on Mauritius, that he was no good at administration or politics, and yet to keep his work going he had to spend an awful lot of time doing both.
ÑHe had constantly to work raising money, justifying and accounting for the money he gets to the people he gets it from, and negotiating with the various international conservation bodies who seem to watch over his shoulder all the time. As far as he's concerned it just prevents him from doing the work he's best able to do, and he wishes they'd leave him alone and let him get on with it.
ÑOr rather, give him the money and then leave him alone and let him get on with it. The whole project, to save the fragile and unique ecology of Mauritius, is run on a pathetically meagre budget, and money - or the lack of it - is the bane of Carl's life. He left in a harassed fluster.
Ñ 'You'd think that everyone involved in conservation work would be on the same side,' said Mark after he'd gone, 'but there's just as much squabbling and bureaucracy as there is in anything else.'
'You're telling me,' said Richard. 'And it's always the workers out in the field who get mucked about by it. Look at these rabbits.'
Ñ With a contemptuous wave of his hand he showed us a cage in which a few perfectly ordinary looking rabbits sat twitching at us.
'There's an island near here - a very, very important island as far as wildlife is concerned - called Round Island. There are more unique species of plants and animals on Round Island than there are on any equivalent area on earth.
Ñ'About a hundred, hundred and fifty years ago somebody had the bright idea of introducing rabbits and goats to the island so if anybody got shipwrecked there they'd have something to eat. The populations quickly got out of hand and it wasn't until the mid-seventies that they managed to get rid of the goats.
Ñ'Then just a few years ago a team from New Zealand came to exterminate the rabbits, until someone realised that they were exterminating a rare breed of French rabbit that didn't exist any more in Europe and it should therefore be transferred to mainland Mauritius and preserved in some way, i.e. by us.
Ñ 'As far as I'm concerned,' continued Richard, 'we could just put them in the pot. They're just ordinary rabbits. Also, since then someone has come along and said "That's a load of rubbish - these aren't that particular variety."
Ñ 'So we've just got to sit here feeding these rabbits until the rabbit experts have decided whether they're valuable or not. It's a waste of our time and resources. I mean just feeding all these animals is a problem. They all need something different and you have to work out what it is.
Ñ 'These Rodrigues fruitbats you've come to see, we have to feed them on a mixture of fruit and powdered dog food reconstituted with milk. They used to be fed a diet rich in banana which did them no good at all and only gave them a nervous tic.' He shrugged.
Ñ 'I don't know what you've got against them,' said Mark, 'I think they're great animals.'
'I've nothing against them. They're great. They're just common that's all.'
Mark protested, 'It's the rarest fruitbat in ...'
'Yeah, but there are hundreds of them,' insisted Richard.
'Hundreds means they're severely endangered!' said Mark.
Ñ 'Do you know how many echo parakeets there are in the wild?' exclaimed Richard, 'Fifteen! That's rare. Hundreds is common. When you come to Mauritius and you see things in such a last ditch state, everything else becomes unimportant.
Ñ'It becomes unimportant because we're witnessing here a species which could be saved if people put their minds to it, and if it does go extinct it will be our fault because we never got around to saving it. There's fifteen of them left. We've got the kestrels up and the pigeons up purely because of the effort we've put into them, the money and the personnel. The parakeets?
Ñ'We're working very, very hard to save them, and if we don't manage it they will be gone for ever, and we have to worry about somebody else's rabbits.'
He shook his head, and then calmed down.
Ñ 'Listen,' he said to Mark. 'You're right. The Rodrigues fruitbat is a very important animal, and we are working to protect it. It's lost a lot of its habitat because the people of Rodrigues live by subsistence farming which means that they've done a lot of forest clearance. The bat population is so reduced that one big cyclone - and we get them here - could wipe them out.
Ñ'But the Rodriguans have suddenly realised that it's actually damaging their own interests to cut down the forest, because it's reducing their water supply. If they want to preserve their watersheds they have to preserve the forests, which means the bats get somewhere to live. So they're in with a chance.
Ñ'By the world's standards they're severely endangered, but by the standards of these islands where every indigenous species is endangered, they're doing fine.'
He grinned.
'Want to see some endangered mice?' he said.
'I didn't think mice were an endangered species yet,' I said.
Ñ 'I didn't say anything about the species,' said Richard. 'I just meant the particular mice. Conservation is not for the squeamish. We have to kill a lot of animals, partly to protect the species that are endangered, and partly to feed them. A lot of the birds are fed on mice, so we have to breed them here.'
Ñ He disappeared into a small, warm, squeaking room and re-emerged a few seconds later with a handful of freshly killed mice.
'Time to feed the birds,' he said, heading back towards the Landrover from hell.
