Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [85]
“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 more than forty Mauritius kestrels for gradual reintroduction to the wild, two hundred pink pigeons, and even a hundred Rodrigues fruit bats. “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 over his face and he jumped to his feet, clapping his hand to his head. He was late for a fund-raising meeting.
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. He constantly had 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, all of this 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. Or 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.
“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.”
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. 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. 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 anymore in Europe and it should therefore be transferred to mainland Mauritius and preserved in some way, i.e., by us.
“As far as I’m concerned,” continued Richard, “we could just put them in the pot. They’re just ordinary rabbits. Also, someone has come along since then and said, ‘That’s a load of rubbish—these aren’t that particular variety.’
“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.
“These Rodrigues fruit bats 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.
“I don’t know what you’ve got against them,” said Mark. “I think they’re great animals.”
“I’ve nothing