Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [88]
Richard yanked the Land Rover 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. Since 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.
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.
“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.
“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. 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 around.
“I mean, animals may not be intelligent, but they’re not as stupid as a lot of human beings. You look at the primate areas in some zoos that are equipped with green metal architect-designed ‘trees’ that, 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. 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? Okay. Let’s feed the bird. You watching?”
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. The 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. The 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.”
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.
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