Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [87]
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.
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. So 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, and is why the Dutch first colonised the island. There’s hardly any of it left now. The reasons for the forest being cut down include straightforward logging and clearing space for cash crops. And another reason: deer hunting. Le Chasse.
Vast tracts of forest have been cleared to make room for game parks, in which hunters stand on short wooden towers and shoot at herds of deer that are driven past them. As 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.
We passed through huge fields of swaying sugarcane, having first negotiated our way past the sugar estate’s gatekeeper, an elderly and eccentric Mauritian named 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. He did this to Carl recently, who since then has been threatening to Super Glue 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.
There had been 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.
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. This means that now, whenever Carl has to change the coloured bands the kestrels wear around 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.
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 laid from its nest back to the breeding centre, confident that the kestrel would simply lay some more. In 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 the shell, then portions of the shell are sealed. If it is not losing enough, then portions of the shell are meticulously sanded to make it more porous. It is best if