Last Chance to See

Kakapo Castle,” he says, looking up and squinting at us in the cold, bright sunlight. “It is the last known kakapo booming site in the whole of mainland New Zealand. This shallow pit in the earth here is part of a track and bowl system.”
    I’ll explain what a track and bowl system actually is in a moment. All there is to see here is the roughly dug shallow pit in the ground. It’s untidy and a little overgrown. Looking around again at the breathtaking landscape spread out around us, I feel bewildered. We have flown so far into this shattering immensity of land, and all to find these small sad scrapings in the earth and no egg, just a potato.
    I make some lame remark along these lines. Mark frowns at me and a cloudy look comes over Don’s face.
    “Oh no,” says Don, “I wasn’t expecting an egg. Not an egg. Not here. Oh no, not at all.”
    “Oh,” I say, “I thought when you picked up the potato …”
    Mark says out of the corner of his mouth, “Don explained all this in the helicopter.”
    “I couldn’t hear anything in the helicopter.”
    “You won’t find eggs in a track and bowl system, you see,” says Don patiently. “It’s just the courtship and mating area. I put the sweet potato there myself when I last came up here, last year. If there was a kakapo in the area, it would have eaten the potato.” He picks it up again and hands it to me.
    “There, you see? Not a mark on it. Not a nibble. And it would have trimmed and tidied its booming bowl. They are very meticulous birds. We don’t know what’s happened to the last one here. It may have been killed, possibly by a cat. We think they sometimes can come up this high. Fiordland is full of cats, which is bad news for the kakapo. Though probably not all cats would have a go at a kakapo. Some will have tried—and failed—to savage a kiwi and might therefore steer clear of kakapos. Others might have tried it, found they could get away with it, and done it again. Kakapos are generally unused to defending themselves. They’ll just freeze if they see a cat approach. Though they have powerful legs and claws, they don’t use them for defence. A kiwi, on the other hand, will kick hell out of a cat. Because kiwi fight each other. Put two in a cage together and there’ll be a dead one in the morning.
    “Or the kakapo may simply have died of old age. We don’t know how long they live, though it seems that it might be a long time. Maybe as long as humans. Either way, the kakapo’s not here anymore, I think we can be quite sure of that. There are now no kakapos left in all of Fiordland.”
    He takes the potato back from me, nevertheless, and with a last gesture of hopeless optimism puts it carefully back on the edge of the bowl.
    Until relatively recently—in the evolutionary scale of things—the wildlife of New Zealand consisted of almost nothing but birds. Only birds could reach the place. The ancestors of many of the birds that are now natives of New Zealand originally flew there. There was also a couple of species of bats, which are mammals, but—and this is the point—therewere no predators. No dogs, no cats, no ferrets or weasels, nothing that the birds needed to escape from particularly.
    And flight, of course, is a means of escape. It’s a survival mechanism, and one that the birds of New Zealand found they didn’t especially need. Flying is hard work and consumes a lot of energy.
    Not only that. There is also a trade-off between flying and eating. The more you eat, the harder it is to fly. So increasingly what happened was that instead of having just a light snack and then flying off, the birds would settle in for a rather larger meal and go for a waddle afterward instead.
    So when eventually European settlers arrived and brought cats and dogs and stoats and possums with them, a lot of New Zealand’s flightless birds were suddenly waddling for their lives. The kiwis, the takahes—and the old night parrots, the kakapos.
    Of these, the kakapo is the strangest. Well, I suppose the penguin is a pretty peculiar kind of creature when you think about it, but it’s quite a robust kind of peculiarness, and the bird is perfectly well adapted to the world in which it finds itself, in a way that the kakapo is not. The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, though