Last Chance to See

DEDICATION

For Douglas Adams.

Co-conspirator and much-missed friend.

With great admiration for all you did for conservation.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword by Stephen Fry

In the Beginning

1 Travelling Case for a Seal

2 Danger: Rebels Coming

3 Bits of Other Animals

4 Dear Old Ralph

5 Poisoned Dagger

6 Singing the Blues

One More Thing…

It’s a Wrap! Last Chance to See Travel Statistics

Last Chance to Help…

Index

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

I first met Douglas Adams some time in 1983. I can’t imagine what we actually did for the first seven months of our friendship – twiddle our thumbs and yawn, I suppose – but at last in January 1984 the first Apple Mac was launched and from then on we visited each other every day to swap and play. Our interests for the next year or so centred entirely around inanimate electronic equipment and its habit of not working – if we gave the natural world a second thought it was when we looked out of the window and wondered if a thunderstorm was brewing. Lightning strikes could cause a power outage or even a spike or surge in the line that might damage our precious toys. So much for nature.

Time passed. One day, much to my surprise, Douglas went off to Madagascar on a peculiar journalistic mission that had to do with a rare species of lemur. On his return I began to notice an alteration in my reliably geeky-nerd companion. He read Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker and gave me copies telling me that my life would be changed. Which it was. What Nils Bohr said of quantum mechanics is true of evolution, ‘if you’re not shocked then you haven’t understood it properly.’

I had been sharing a place in Dalston at this time with a group of friends from university, but we were now at the stage where it was possible to consider splitting up and buying our own flats and houses. I wanted to find a place in Islington, but also felt that I needed time to look around and wait for the perfect property. Perhaps I should rent first? I off-loaded my tedious residential worries on Douglas one afternoon as we sat in his study staring at a Mac and wondering, for the thousandth time, if we could stop it going ‘boing’ and closing down whenever we tried to do something unusual with it.

‘Why don’t you stay here for a year?’ he suggested. ‘You can house-sit for me. I’ve decided to go round the world for twelve months seeking out rare animals.’

‘You’ve de-whatted to go round the what, whatting out whats?’

Douglas explained that his journey to Madagascar had lit a fire within him that would not go out. In the company of a zoologist called Mark Carwardine he had found and photographed the elusive lemur known as the ‘aye-aye’, an experience, together with reading Dawkins, that had made him realise that the technology that now most excited him was the one that had evolved over millions of years and resulted in him and me and ultimately the device that wouldn’t stop going ‘boing’. He really wanted to understand this business of life and extinction. He and Mark had hit it off straightaway and the plan was now to find seven more species like the aye-aye that were in imminent danger of disappearing for ever.

The result was Mark and Douglas’s Last Chance to See, a book and a BBC radio series. While the intrepid pair were travelling the globe, I duly stayed at Douglas’s house fielding the occasional call and request. This was the time before faxes were in general use, let alone emails or texts, so communication and flight reservations and other travel details had to be expedited by landline and telex. It was not unusual to be awoken at three in the morning by a Douglas too excited by what was happening around him to have worked out time differences. ‘Can you telex Garuda Air and tell them we want to change our flight?’ he would yell down the phone. I would copy down the names of islands, ports and towns I had never heard of and make calls to countries I couldn’t point to on the map.

The book was a remarkable success. I do not believe it has ever been out of print, a testament to the importance of the subject and to Douglas and Mark’s natural story-telling abilities, charm, wit and unforced writing styles. Alarm about the environment, issues of conservation, pollution, habitat degradation and species endangerment existed before Last Chance to See, but they were far less the common currency of concern than they are now. Mark and Douglas’s book focused general worry into a particular understanding of the clock that was ticking on the future of wildlife in so many corners of the planet. Every campaign needs heroes, faces that represent the issue at stake. Icons, we would say now. It was typical of Douglas, and as I later found out of Mark too, that their icons should be such strange and (at first glance) unprepossessing animals as the Amazonian manatee, the aye-aye and the kakapo. There is something in the solemn oddity, the idiosyncratic earnestness of these species that tears at the heart with greater urgency and pathos than the more photogenic and glamorous pumas, dolphins and pandas. Nature admits of no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance. We like to think, entirely wrongly, that we, mankind, are nature’s last word, at the summit of evolution, or that animals ‘at the top of the food chain’ are somehow more important than animals at the bottom. Last Chance to See showed us all that a bumbling earth-bound parrot is as good a symbol of the beauty and fragility of the natural world as a soaring condor and that a plug-ugly nocturnal lemur with a twiglet for a middle finger can represent the glory of creation quite as aptly as a meerkat or an orang-utan.

Stephen and Mark on their first trip, to the Amazon.

I was proud to know Douglas, pleased to have been even tangentially connected with his and Mark’s great and pioneering project, but I cannot honestly say that over the following fifteen or so years I gave Last Chance to See much more thought. I re-read it once, I think, and began to develop my own small wildlife interests – involving myself in two films and a book about the spectacled bear in Peru and narrating a handful of the BBC’s Natural World documentaries.

Stephen and Mark: an unlikely duo.

On 11 May 2001 I was shocked and heartbroken to hear of the sudden and wholly unexpected death of Douglas Noel Adams – the DNA at the core of so much that I loved and valued in the world. He was just 49 years old. The years since have passed and every day I have missed Douglas as a friend, teacher and companion. How can I know what to think of iPhones and iMacs, compact cameras, GPS devices and Blu-ray players without Douglas here to offer his unique sideways view?

Then one day in 2007, out of the blue, I had a phone call. Might I consider travelling, with Mark, back to those animals that had formed the principal cast list of Last Chance to See, this time filming the experience for television? I sounded myself out, I sounded Mark out and then I sounded the BBC out. We all seemed to be in agreement that the time was right. Out of the eight species Mark and Douglas had originally chosen it seemed that two were already functionally extinct (the northern white rhino and the Yangtze river dolphin) – in other words, a quarter of their almost random snapshot of vulnerable species had been wiped from the map of creation. Mark told me at our first meeting that he believes whichever eight critically endangered species they had chosen back then the chances are that a quarter would now be extinct.

It fell out that this documentary filming project would have to go hand in hand with another that I was doing for the BBC in which I visited every state of the USA, so for a time I was worried that I would not be able to take on the commitment. Willingness and cooperation on all sides ensured that it could be done, however, and in January 2008 I flew from Miami, Florida to Manaus, Amazonia to join Mark and start work on the first film, which was to feature the Amazonian manatee.

Mark has written these adventures up with that mixture of zoological mastery and human insight that characterises him and raises him so far above the level of most professional naturalists and conservationists. He has been very modest about himself, however. Let me just say that without his energy, enthusiasm, local knowledge and refusal to accept second best, neither Last Chance to See the television series nor this new book could ever have been completed. There is no length to which Mark will not go in order to observe an animal, photograph it and, if needs be, save it from peril. He has put his own life in the severest possible danger time and time again in his work for anti-poacher patrols in Africa and Asia, all at the service of protecting rhinos, elephants and tigers from those who would slaughter them wholesale for gain. The more endangered the species become, the higher the price their horns, tusks and penises command for the ‘traditional medicine’ market in the Far East and the more willing poachers are to kill anyone who comes between them and their route to riches. Mark talks rarely and self-deprecatingly of his courage in putting himself in the line of fire, but it is a more extreme proof of what anyone would observe if they saw Mark in the wild under any circumstances: commitment, passion and extraordinary zest. No matter how many times he has seen an animal before, Mark will want to see it again. He will climb mountains, ford streams and penetrate steamy malaria-infested swamps just for one glimpse. Not only that, but he will encourage, belabour and enthuse any large, sweaty unwilling companions who happen to be lumbering at his side wishing there were better phone signals and air-conditioning available.

I embarked on this whole project honestly believing I had bitten off more than I could chew. I am no physical hero: I am clumsy, overweight, unfit and uncoordinated. The first episode of filming began with me falling off a floating dock and smashing my right humerus. Yet somehow, a year and a quarter later, I had lost much weight and was happily hurling myself into physically demanding conditions that I would have wept and gibbered at before. The life-changing benefits of the filming experience I owe to the animals and to Mark. That he and I never quarrelled is testament to his extraordinary good temper and sweetness of nature. He tolerated the presence of an amateur, idler and dilettante and proved a perfect teacher and matchless travel companion.

Most importantly of course, through Mark I also met and befriended the extraordinary, enchanting and rare creatures that you are about to meet now. I hope the experience inspires you to consider what you might do to help, in however small a way, the work of conservation that goes on around the world to save these and other species from no longer existing.

If this book and our adventures have any purpose it is to help with the conservation conversation. Are the animals worth saving because they hold an important place in the great interconnected web of existence? Are they worth saving because they might one day yield important clues and compounds to help us with medicine or some other useful technology? Or are they worth saving because they are the beautiful achievement of millions of years of natural selection? Extinction is a natural part of creation, this is unquestionably true: yet no matter what one’s views on climate change or global warming, it is impossible, impossible, to deny that man-made alterations to habitat are threatening thousands of plant and animal species across the planet at an unprecedented rate and scale. So the question is perhaps not ‘why should we save them?’ but ‘what right do we have to destroy them?’

Let us never stop talking about the creatures we share the planet with. The first step is to know them a little better.

Stephen Fry

Pouring over an Amazon-sized map in the jungle.

IN THE BEGINNING

No one believed me when I said I was going to the Amazon with Stephen Fry. It must have seemed about as likely as taking Johnny Rotten to the opera, or joining the Dalai Lama for a week of downhill skiing in Holland.

When I mentioned that we were going to a particularly remote corner of the world’s greatest rainforest to look for a large, black, sleepy animal easily mistaken for an unusually listless mudbank, they merely stared at me as if I’d taken leave of my senses.

But, sure enough, the Amazon was the first (and, as it happened, nearly the last) stop on a whirlwind year-long world tour.

Two days after Christmas 2007 we set off on a 145,000-kilometre (90,000-mile) journey to eight different countries on five continents in search of the weird and the wild. Our aim was to come face to face with some of the rarest and most peculiar animals on the planet: from nocturnal ET-like lemurs in Madagascar and tourist-eating dragons in Indonesia to flightless and charmingly gormless parrots in New Zealand and square-lipped rhinos in war-torn Congo.

Along the way, we hoped to meet some of the remarkable people whose fearless and gritty determination, sometimes in the face of tremendous personal danger, is all that has kept most (though, sadly, not all) of these animals from going extinct.

Stephen and I had known one another a little since the late 1980s (enough to say ‘hello’ and ‘how are you?’ and, more recently, ‘can’t you get reception on your iPhone either?’). But we’d barely sat in the same car together, far less shared cabins, huts, tents, far-flung adventures or tropical diseases. Suddenly, for better or for worse, we were being thrown together on a lengthy, often uncomfortable, occasionally quite gruelling and, once or twice, quite traumatic journey that would challenge our evolving friendship, test our patience, put our best-laid plans through the wringer and even cross-examine our medical skills.

‘I must confess I’m quite nervous about this whole enterprise,’ admitted Stephen. ‘I like my creature comforts rather more than I like my creatures.’

But there was method in our madness. We’d decided to retrace the steps I had taken exactly twenty years earlier with a mutual friend – the late Douglas Adams, who very sadly died in May 2001.

In 1985, the Observer Colour Magazine agreed to send Douglas, a comedy writer better known for The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to an otherworldly island in the middle of the Indian Ocean to look for an endangered nocturnal lemur called an aye-aye (exactly the kind of weird and wonderful creature that a writer of humorous science fiction might concoct on a really creative day).

It was a ground-breaking idea. Bear in mind that this was in the good old days, when endangered species and orphaned children could leave their dens or houses in complete safety, without having to pose next to D-list celebrities with falling ratings and crocodile tears. The aye-aye had never met a celebrity before, let alone one of Douglas’s stature (in both senses of the word).

Douglas’s mission was to report on conservation efforts in Madagascar, in his own inimitable style, by taking a unique and imaginative look at some of the wild animals and even wilder people that professional zoologists tend to take for granted. As he explained at the time: ‘My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise.’ My own role, basically, was to arrange plenty of wildlife encounters, help him identify what he was looking at and make sure he came back alive.

Mark and Douglas in Robinson Crusoe’s cave in the Juan Fernandez Islands, off the coast of Chile.

We met for the very first time at the airport in Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo, and spent three hilarious and thought-provoking weeks bumbling through Malagasy jungles and red tape. Against all the odds we came face to face with an aye-aye, undeniably the strangest animal either of us had ever seen, for a fleeting few seconds near the end of the trip.

The best way to tell if you get on with someone is to be thrown together for a couple of hard weeks’ travelling and spend night after night sleeping on a wet concrete floor in the middle of a jungle. We found that we got on extremely well. In fact, we enjoyed the experience so much that we hatched a rather ambitious plan to do it all over again, half a dozen times. We put a big map of the world on a wall, Douglas stuck a pin in everywhere he fancied going, I stuck a pin in where some of the most endangered animals were, and we made a journey out of every place that had two pins.

Three years later we set off.

Actually, to be fair, it wasn’t quite that simple. Arranging all those long-haul trips to remote corners of the globe in the days before adventure travel became as normal as a £4 gallon of petrol, and long before anyone had even heard of email, deserves more than a merry ‘so we set off’. Let me rephrase it. Instead of ‘three years later’ please read ‘after hundreds of unbearably slow clank-clank-clanking telexes, dozens of typewriter-and-Tippex-written letters (most of which never arrived), goodness knows how many barely audible, pre-booked, long-distance phone calls, and thousands of grey hairs later’ … we set off in search of more endangered species.

Intrepid adventurer Douglas in the Amazon.

Eventually, everything was in place: the schedules were set, naturalists the world over were ready and waiting, our passports were stamped with a mind-boggling array of visas, and multitudinous flights, boats and hotels were booked.

Then Douglas called to announce that he hadn’t quite finished his latest novel, and would I mind doing it all over again?

I did do it all over again and, eventually, we had lots of life-changing, awe-inspiring and hair-raising experiences, presented a radio series, wrote a book about our adventures (called Last Chance to See) and became firm friends in the process.

Now history has repeated itself. It’s the same pins in the map, but this time it is Stephen who has been sleeping in the middle of jungles and sharing life-changing, awe-inspiring and hair-raising experiences to find out how all those wild animals – and their protectors – have got along in the years in between.

This is our story.

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