ÑThe best and quickest road to the Black River gorges where the kestrels live is a private one through the Medine sugar estate.
Sugar, from the point of view of the ecology of Mauritius is a major problem. Vast swathes of the Mauritius forest have been destroyed to provide space to grow a cash crop which in turn destroys our teeth.
ÑThis is serious anywhere, but on an island it is a very special problem, because island ecologies are fundamentally different to mainland ones. They even have a different vocabulary. When you spend much time on islands with naturalists you will tend to hear two words in particular an awful lot: 'endemic' and 'exotic'. Three if you count 'disaster'.
Ñ An 'endemic' species of plant or animal is one that is native to an island or region and is found nowhere else at all. An 'exotic' species is one that has been introduced from abroad, and a disaster is usually what results when this occurs.
Ñ The reason is this: continental land masses are big. They support hundreds of thousands, even millions, of different species, each of which are competing with each other for survival. The sheer ferocity of the competition for survival is immense, and it means that the species that do survive and flourish are mean little fighters. They grow faster and throw out a lot more seeds.
Ñ An island on the other hand, is small. There are far fewer species, and the competition for survival has never reached anything like the pitch that it does on the mainland. Species are only as tough as they need to be, life is much quieter and more settled, and evolution proceeds at a much slower rate.
ÑThis is why you find on, for instance, Madagascar, species like the lemurs that were overwhelmed aeons ago on the mainland. Island ecologies are fragile time capsules.
So you can imagine what happens when a mainland species gets introduced to an island. It would be like introducing Al Capone, Genghis Khan and Rupert Murdoch into the Isle of Wight - the locals wouldn't stand a chance.
Ñ So what happens on Mauritius, or indeed any island, is that when endemic vegetation or animals are destroyed for any reason, the exotic forms leap into the breach and take over. It's hard for an Englishman to think of something like privet as being an exotic and ferocious life form - my grandmother has neatly trimmed privet bushes lining her front garden - but in Mauritius it behaves like a bunch of marauding triffids.
ÑSo does the introduced guava and numerous other foreign invaders, which grow much more quickly and produce many more seeds.
Black ebony comes from the lowland hardwood forests of Mauritius, which is why the Dutch first colonised the island. There's hardly any of it left now.
ÑThe reasons the forest being cut down include straightforward logging, clearing space for cash crops, and another reason: deer hunting. Le Chasse.
Vast tracts of forest have been cleared to make game parks, in which hunters stand on short wooden towers and shoot at herds of deer that are driven past them.
ÑAs if the original loss of the forest were not bad enough - and for such a reason - the grazing habits of the deer keep the fragile endemic plants from regrowing, while the exotic species thrive in their place. Young Mauritian trees are simply nibbled to death.
Ñ We passed through huge fields of swaying sugar cane, having first negotiated our way past the sugar estate's gate keeper, an elderly and eccentric Mauritian called James who will not let anybody through his gate without a permit, even someone he's let through every day for ten years but who has accidentally left his permit at home that day.
ÑHe did this to Carl recently, who since then has been threatening to superglue the gate shut in revenge, and it's quite possible that he will. Carl is clearly the sort of person who will get as many laughs as he can from a situation by threatening to do something silly and then try and get a few more by actually doing it.
Ñ There was a more serious confrontation a little while earlier when Carl and Wendy arrived with a party of officials from the World Bank from whom they were negotiating some financial support. James wouldn't let them in on the grounds that they had two cars and he was only authorised to let in one.
Ñ James also reports to Carl and Richard regularly about the movements of the kestrels, not because they've asked him to but just because, other evidence to the contrary, he likes to help. If he hasn't actually seen any kestrels he'll still, in a friendly and encouraging sort of a way, say that he has.
ÑThis means that now, whenever Carl has to change the coloured bands the kestrels wear round their legs, he makes a point of putting on a different colour so that he will know James is lying if he claims to have seen a kestrel with a band that doesn't exist.
Ñ The kestrel we were going to see had been trained to take mice in 1985. The purpose of feeding kestrels in the wild was to bump up their diet and encourage them to lay more eggs. If a kestrel was well fed then Carl could take the first clutch of eggs the bird lay from its nest and back to the breeding centre, confident that the kestrel would simply lay some more.
ÑIn this way they were increasing the number of eggs that might hatch, but there was a limit to the number of birds available to sit on them, so they had to be incubated artificially. This is a highly skilled and delicate task and requires constant monitoring of the egg's condition. If an egg is losing weight too rapidly, by evaporation of liquid through its shell, then portions of the shell are sealed.
ÑIf it is not losing enough, then portions of the shell are meticulously sanded to make it more porous. It is best if an egg can have one week under a real bird and the other three in the incubator - eggs which have been swapped around like that have a much higher success rate.
ÑRichard yanked the Landrover to a halt on the edge of the forest near the bottom of the gorge and we piled out of it. The air was brisk and clear, and Richard strode about the small clearing making an odd assortment of calling noises.
Within a minute or two the kestrel came zipping through the forest and perched itself up in a high tree overlooking a large hemispherical rock.
ÑSince the bird is adapted to living in the forest rather than the open land, it does not hover like many falcons, but can instead fly at great speeds unerringly through the forest canopy, where it catches its food of geckos, smaller birds and insects. For this it relies on having fantastically keen and fast eyesight.
Ñ We watched it for a while and it watched us intently. In fact it watched everything that moved, glancing rapidly in one direction after another with constant attention.
Ñ 'See the way it's so interested in everything it can see?' said Richard. 'It lives by its eyes, and you have to remember that when you keep them in captivity. You must make sure they have a complex environment. Birds of prey are comparatively stupid. But because they've got such incredible vision you've got to have things that will keep them occupied visually.
Ñ 'When we originally started breeding birds of prey in captivity we brought in some very skittish birds and whenever anybody went past the aviary the birds just went mad, and we thought they must be upset by the disturbance, and someone came up with the bright idea of what's called a skylight and seclusion aviary.
Ñ'All four walls were opaque and just the roof was open so that there was no disturbance for the birds. But what we found was that we'd overdone it. The offspring that were born in those environments were basket cases because they hadn't got the sensory input they needed. We'd got it completely the wrong way round.
'I mean, animals may not be intelligent, but they're not as stupid as a lot of human beings.
Ñ'You look at the primate areas in some zoos which are equipped with metal green architect-designed 'trees' which, in a minimalist sort of way, reproduce the shape of the tree, but don't actually include any of the features that a monkey might find interesting about a tree: leaves and bark and stuff. It may look like a tree to an architect, but architects are a lot more stupid than monkeys.
Ñ'We just got a brochure through from the States for exactly this - fibreglass trees. The whole brochure was designed to show us how proud they were of what they could sell us here in Mauritius, and showing the particular paints they had for painting lichen on trees. I mean it's bloody ridiculous, who are these people? OK. Let's feed the bird. You watching?'
Ñ The bird was watching. It's hard to avoid saying that it was watching like a hawk. It was watching like a kestrel.
Richard swung his arm back. The kestrel's head followed his movement precisely. With a wide underarm swing Richard lobbed the small mouse high up into the air. For a second or so, the kestrel just watched it, jittering its legs very slightly on the branch as it engaged in monumental feats of differential calculus.
ÑThe mouse reached the top of its steep parabola, its tiny dead weight turning slowly in the air.
At last the kestrel dropped from its perch, and swung out into the air as if on the end of a long pendulum, the precise length, pivotal position and swing speed of which the kestrel had calculated.
ÑThe arc it described intersected sweetly with that of the falling mouse, the kestrel took the mouse cleanly into its talons, swept on up into another nearby tree and bit its head off.
'He eats the head himself,' said Richard, 'and takes the rest of the mouse to the female in the nest.'
Ñ We fed the kestrel a few more mice, sometimes throwing them in the air, and sometimes leaving them on the hemispherical rock for it to dive for at its leisure. At last the bird was fed up and we left.
The term 'fed up' actually comes from falconry. Most of the vocabulary of falconry comes from middle English, and zoologists have adopted a lot of it.
Ñ For instance 'feeking' describes the process by which the bird cleans its beak of meat after eating, by rubbing it along a branch. 'Mutes' are the white trails along cliffs where the bird has been sitting. These are more normally called 'bird droppings' of course, but in falconry talk they're 'mutes'. 'Rousing' is the action of shaking its wings and body, which is generally a sign that the bird is feeling very comfortable and relaxed.
Ñ When you train a falcon you train it by hunger, using it as a tool to manipulate the bird's psychology. So when the bird has had too much to eat it won't co-operate and gets annoyed by any attempts to tell it what to do. It simply sits in the top of a tree and sulks. It is 'fed up'.
ÑRichard became extremely fed up that evening, and with reason. It was nothing to do with eating too much, though it had a little to do with what other people liked to eat. A Mauritian friend came round to see him and brought her boss with her, a Frenchman from the nearby island of Reunion who was visiting the island for a few days and staying with her.
Ñ His name was Jacques, and we all took an instant dislike to him, but none so strongly as Richard, who detested him on sight.
He was a Frenchman of the dapper, arrogant type. He had lazy supercilious eyes, a lazy, supercilious smile and, as Richard later put it, a lazy, supercilious, and terminally stupid brain.
Ñ Jacques arrived at the house and stood around looking lazy and supercilious. He clearly did not quite know what he was doing in this house. It was not a very elegant house. It was full of battered, second-hand furniture, and had pictures of birds stuck all over the walls with drawing pins.
ÑHe obviously wanted to slouch moodily against a wall, but could not find a wall that he was prepared to put his shoulder to, so he had to slouch moodily where he was standing.
We offered him a beer, and he took one with the best grace he could muster. He asked us what we were doing here, and we said we were making a programme for the BBC and writing a book about the wildlife of Mauritius.
Ñ 'But why?' he said, in a puzzled tone. 'There is nothing here.'
Richard showed admirable restraint at first. He explained quite coolly that some of the rarest birds in the world were to be found on Mauritius. He explained that that was what he and Carl and the others were there for: to protect and study and breed them.
Ñ Jacques shrugged and said that they weren't particularly interesting or special.
'Oh?' said Richard, quietly.
'Nothing with any interesting plumage.'
'Really?' said Richard.
'I prefer something like the Arabian cockatoo,' said Jacques with a lazy smile.
'Do you.'
Ñ 'Me, I live on Reunion,' said Jacques.
'Do you.'
'There are certainly no interesting birds there,' said Jacques.
'That's because the French have shot them all,' said Richard.
He turned around smartly and went off into the kitchen to wash up, very, very loudly. Only when Jacques had gone did he return.
ÑHe stalked back into the room carrying an unopened bottle of rum and slammed himself into the corner of a battered old sofa.
'About five years ago,' he said, 'we took twenty of the pink pigeons that we had bred at the centre and released them into the wild. I would estimate that in terms of the time, work and resources we had put into them they had cost us about a thousand pounds per bird.
Ñ'But that's not the issue. The issue is holding on to the unique life of this island. But within a short time all of those birds we had bred were in casseroles. Couldn't believe it. We just couldn't believe it.
Ñ 'Do you understand what's happening to this island? It's a mess. It's a complete ruin. In the fifties it was drenched with DDT which found its way straight into the foodchain. That killed off a lot of animals. Then the island was hit with cyclones. Well, we can't help that, but they hit an island that was already terribly weakened by all the DDT and logging, so they did irreparable damage.
Ñ'Now with the continued logging and burning of the forest there's only ten per cent left, and they're cutting that down for deer hunting. What's left of the unique species of Mauritius is being overrun by stuff that you can find all over the world - privet, guava, all this crap.
'Here, look at this.'
He handed the bottle to us. It was a locally brewed rum called Green Island.
Ñ 'Read what it says on the bottle.'
Underneath a romantic picture of an old sailing ship approaching an idyllic tropical island was a quotation from Mark Twain, which read, 'You gather the idea that Mauritius was made first and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.'
Ñ 'That was less than a hundred years ago,' said Richard. 'Since then just about everything that shouldn't be done to an island has been done to Mauritius. Except perhaps nuclear testing.'
