Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [89]
For instance, “feeking” describes the process by which the bird cleans its beak of meat after eating, by rubbing it along a branch. “Mutes” are the white trails along cliffs where the bird has been sitting. These are more normally called “bird droppings,” of course, but in falconry talk they’re “mutes.”
“Rousing” is the action of shaking its wings and body, which is generally a sign that the bird is feeling very comfortable and relaxed.
When you train a falcon, you train it by hunger, using it as a tool to manipulate the bird’s psychology. So when the bird has had too much to eat, it won’t cooperate and gets annoyed by any attempts to tell it what to do. It simply sits in the top of a tree and sulks. It is “fed up.”
Richard became extremely fed up that evening, and with reason. It was nothing to do with eating too much, though it had a little to do with what other people liked to eat. A Mauritian friend came around to see him and brought her boss with her, a Frenchman from the nearby island of Réunion who was visiting the island for a few days and staying with her.
His name was Jacques, and we all took an instant dislike to him, but none so strongly as Richard, who detested him on sight.
He was a Frenchman of the dapper, arrogant type. He had lazy, supercilious eyes, a lazy, supercilious smile, and, as Richard later put it, a lazy, supercilious, and terminally stupid brain.
Jacques arrived at the house and stood around looking lazy and supercilious. He clearly did not quite know what he was doing in this house. It was not a very elegant house. It was full of battered, second-hand furniture, and had pictures of birds stuck all over the walls with drawing pins. He obviously wanted to slouch moodily against a wall, but could not find a wall that he was prepared to put his shoulder to, so he had to slouch moodily where he was standing.
We offered him a beer, and he took one with the best grace he could muster. He asked us what we were doing here, and we said we were taping a program for the BBC and writing a book about the wildlife of Mauritius.
“But why?” he said in a puzzled tone. “There is nothing here.”
Richard showed admirable restraint at first. He explained quite coolly that some of the rarest birds in the world were to be found on Mauritius. He explained that that was what he and Carl and the others were there for: to protect and study and breed them.
Jacques shrugged and said that they weren’t particularly interesting or special.
“Oh?” said Richard quietly.
“Nothing with any interesting plumage.”
“Really?” said Richard.
“I prefer something like the Arabian cockatoo,” said Jacques with a lazy smile.
“Do you.”
“Me, I live on Réunion,” said Jacques.
“Do you.”
“There are certainly no interesting birds there,” said Jacques.
“That’s because the French have shot them all,” said Richard.
He turned around smartly and went off into the kitchen to wash up, very, very loudly. Only when Jacques had gone did he return. He stalked back into the room carrying an unopened bottle of rum and slammed himself into the corner of a battered old sofa.
“About five years ago,” he said, “we took twenty of the pink pigeons that we had bred at the centre and released them into the wild. I would estimate that in terms of the time, work, and resources we had put into them, they had cost us about fifteen hundred dollars per bird. But that’s not the issue. The issue is holding on to the unique life of this island. But within a short time all of those birds we had bred were in casseroles. Couldn’t believe it. We just couldn’t believe it.
“Do you understand what’s happening to this island? It’s a mess. It’s a complete ruin. In the Fifties it was drenched with DDT, which found its way straight into the food chain. That killed off a lot of animals. Then the island was hit with cyclones. Well, we can’t help that, but they hit an island that was already terribly weakened by all the DDT and