ÑWas this really our last chance to see these animals? Unfortunately, there are too many unknowns for there to be a simple answer. With strenuous efforts in the field, the populations of some have actually begun to rise. But it is clear that if those efforts were suspended for a moment, the kakapos, the Yangtze river dolphins, the northern white rhinos and many others would vanish almost immediately.
Ñ Not that a large population necessarily guarantees an animal's future survival, as experience has shown many times in the past. The most famous example is the North American passenger pigeon, which was once the commonest bird that ever lived on earth. Yet it was hunted to extinction in little more than fifty years.
ÑWe didn't learn any lessons from that experience: ten years ago, there were 1.3 million elephants in Africa, but so many have been killed by poachers that today no more than 600,000 are left.
Ñ On the other hand, even the smallest populations can be brought back from the brink. Juan Fernandez fur seal numbers dropped from millions to fewer than one hundred by 1965; today, there are three thousand.
ÑAnd in New Zealand in 1978, the population of Chatham Island robins was down to one pregnant female, but the dedication of Don Merton and his team saved the species from extinction and there are now more than fifty.
Ñ The kakapo may also be on a slow road to recovery. Soon after we returned to England, we received the following letter from New Zealand:
ÑP.O. Box 3
Stewart Island.
Dear Douglas and Mark,
I hope this reaches you quickly - I have some good news from kakapo country on southern Stewart Island. At 08.45 hrs on 25 August 1989 one of our dog handlers, Alan Munn, and his English setter 'Ari' located a new female kakapo near Lees Knob, at an altitude of 380 metres.
Ñ'Jane' weighed 1.25 kg and she scrarked a lot when Alan picked her up. She had just finished moulting but looked in good condition, so in a few days she will be flown to her new home - Codfish Island.
Once again, thanks very much for your visit. It certainly helped give those Big Green Budgies some of the attention they deserve.
ÑYours sincerely,
Andy Roberts (kakapo project manager)
for R. Tindal, District Conservator, Department of Conservation, Rakiura.
ÑWe later received some further good news about the kakapos. Two more females have been found on Stewart Island and transferred to Codfish, bringing the total kakapo population up to forty-three.
Ñ Meanwhile, on Little Barrier Island, several of the males there have been booming for the first time including, to everyone's delight, a nine-year-old called 'Snark'. Born on Stewart Island in 1981, Snark was the only kakapo chick to have been seen by anyone this century.
Ñ But the best news of all was still to come. Just before going to press, a very excited Don Merton telephoned to say that a newly-made kakapo nest has just been found on Little Barrier Island. Inside the nest, which was built by a nine-year-old female called 'Heather', was a single kakapo egg.
Ñ Transferring kakapos to Little Barrier and Codfish Islands has been a calculated risk - but it is the only hope of saving the kakapo from extinction. Heather's nest is the first encouraging sign that the project is actually working and now everyone is waiting nervously to see if her egg will hatch and if she can raise the chick in her adopted home.
Ñ We also received a letter from Kes Hillman-Smith in Zaire to say that three baby northern white rhinos have been born in Garamba since we left, bringing the total population up to twenty-five. The enthusiastic Park staff have named them 'Mpiko', meaning courage; 'Molende', meaning perseverance; and 'Minzoto', meaning a star.
Ñ It's important to recognise that not every conservation strategy necessarily works: we are often experimenting in the dark. During the early stages of the Garamba project a lot of pressure was put on the Zairois to have all of their northern white rhinos captured and taken into captivity.
ÑThe government of Zaire would not agree to this. They said that the rhinos belong to them and they didn't want them to go to zoos in other parts of the world. Fortunately, it seems that this was the right decision. Northern white rhinos, it turned out, do not breed well in captivity - the last one was born in 1982 - whereas more than ten have been born in the same period in the wild.
ÑThe news from Mauritius has been more mixed. The kestrels are doing well and Carl believes that there could now be as many as a hundred of them in the wild, including twelve breeding pairs. However, the population of truly wild pink pigeons has dropped to fewer than ten. Some of the pigeons that have been bred in captivity are being released again. So far, they have escaped the hunters and appear to be doing well.
Ñ As for the echo parakeets, at least one of them has died since we saw them, though some of the others have been attempting to breed. In November 1989, Carl found a parakeet nest with three eggs inside. One of these mysteriously disappeared soon afterwards, so he decided to risk removing the others to the captive breeding centre for safe-keeping. Both eggs hatched successfully and the chicks are fit and well.
Ñ Perhaps most important of all (for non-ornithologists) the wild population of Rodrigues fruit bats has just passed the one thousand-mark.
ÑIn contrast, after the radio series had been broadcast, we received a disturbing letter from a couple who had been working in China:
Dear Douglas and Mark,
We enjoyed the Yangtze dolphin programme - but listened with a touch of guilt! We recently spent three months working in a number of factories in Nanjing.
ÑWe had a wonderful time with the people and ate well. To honour us when we left, one of them cooked a Yangtze dolphin, so really there should be 201. Sorry about that.
Yours,
(name supplied)
PS. Sorry, it was two dolphins - my husband reminds me that he was guest of honour and had the embryo.
ÑThere is probably little hope of saving the dolphins in the Yangtze river itself, despite all the time and effort invested in protecting them. Perhaps in semi-captivity, in the reserve at Tongling and the new one at Shi Shou, they will stand a chance - though it could never be the same as being wild and free. Meanwhile, of course, the noise and pollution continue.
ÑNo-one knows how many other species are this close to extinction. We don't even know how many species of animals and plants there are altogether in the world. A staggering 1.4 million have been found and identified so far, but some experts believe that there are another 30 million yet to be discovered.
ÑIt's not surprising when you consider that we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about parts of our own planet. Many animals and plants are disappearing even before we are aware of their existence, perhaps hidden away somewhere in the depths of an unexplored sea or in a quiet corner of a tropical rainforest.
Ñ And it's not only the tiny, obscure creatures that have managed to escape our attention. There have been some exciting new discoveries in the rainforests of Madagascar, for example, since Douglas and I were there looking for the aye-aye in 1985.
ÑField researchers have found two new species of lemur: one, called the golden bamboo lemur, has beautiful golden eyebrows, orange cheeks and a rich reddish-brown coat; the other has a shock of golden orange on the top of its head and has been named the golden-crowned sifaka.
Ñ Both lemurs are extremely rare - and virtually unknown. What roles do they play in Madagascar's rainforests? Do they have any direct relevance to our own lives? What are the main threats to their survival? We don't know. They could become extinct before the experts learn enough to save them. Wildlife conservation is always a race against time.
ÑAs zoologists and botanists explore new areas, scrabbling to record the mere existence of species before they become extinct, it is like someone hurrying through a burning library desperately trying to jot down some of the titles of books that will now never be read.
Ñ Extinctions, of course, have been happening for millions of years: animals and plants were disappearing long before people arrived on the scene. But what has changed is the extinction rate. For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every year. But most of the extinctions since prehistoric times have occurred in the last three hundred years.
Ñ And most of the extinctions that have occurred in the last three hundred years have occurred in the last fifty.
And most of the extinctions that have occurred in the last fifty have occurred in the last ten.
Ñ It is the sheer rate of acceleration that is as terrifying as anything else. We are now heaving more than 1000 different species of animals and plants off the planet every year.
There are currently five billion human beings and our numbers are continually growing. We are fighting for space with the world's wildlife, which has to contend with hunting, pollution, pesticides and, most important of all, the loss of habitat.
ÑRainforests alone contain half the world's species of animals and plants, yet an area the size of Austria is being destroyed every year.
There are so many threatened animals around the world that, at the rate of one every three weeks, it would have taken Douglas and me more than three hundred years to search for them all.
ÑAnd if we had decided to include threatened plants as well, it would have taken another 1,000 years.
In every remote corner there are people like Carl Jones and Don Merton who have devoted their lives to saving them. Very often, their determination is all that stands between an endangered species and extinction.
Ñ But why do they bother? Does it really matter if the Yangtze river dolphin, or the kakapo, or the northern white rhino, or any other species live on only in scientists' notebooks?
Well, yes it does. Every animal and plant is an integral part of its environment: even Komodo dragons have a major role to play in maintaining the ecological stability of their delicate island homes.
ÑIf they disappear, so could many other species. And conservation is very much in tune with our own survival. Animals and plants provide us with life-saving drugs and food, they pollinate crops and provide important ingredients for many industrial processes. Ironically, it is often not the big and beautiful creatures, but the ugly and less dramatic ones, which we need most.
Ñ Even so, the loss of a few species may seem almost irrelevant compared to major environmental problems such as global warming or the destruction of the ozone layer. But while nature has considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. No-one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The darker it gets, the faster we're driving.
Ñ There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.
