Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [84]
“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—”
“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?”
“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.”
Setting 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. 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 backyard. Badgers and foxes, wild Welsh polecats, owls, hawks, macaws, jackdaws, everything. I even managed, just as a schoolboy, to breed kestrels in captivity.
“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?’
“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.’
“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.
“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. And it suddenly came to me that all this work I’d been doing in my backyard as a kid, fiddling around with birds, could actually be used to save a whole species from becoming extinct.
“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.
“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