Last Chance to See

and
get
me!” “Where are you?” “Come and
get
me!” “Where the hell are you?” “Come and
get
me!” “Look, do you want me to come or not?” “Come and
get
me!” “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” “Come and
get
me!” “Go and stuff yourself” is roughly how it would go in human terms.
    As it happens, the male has a wide variety of other noises it can make as well, but we don’t know what they’re all for. Well, I only know what I’m told, of course, but zoologists who’ve studied the bird for years say they don’t know what it’s all in aid of. The noises include a high-frequency, metallic, nasal “ching” noise, humming, bill-clicking, “scrarking” (scrarking is simply what it sounds like—the bird goes “scrark” a lot), “screech-crowing,” piglike grunts and squeals, ducklike “warks,” and donkeylike braying. There are also the distress calls that the young make when they trip over something or fall out of trees, and these make up yet another wide range of long-drawn-out, vibrant, complaining croaks.
    I’ve heard a tape of collected kakapo noises, and it’s almost impossible to believe that it all comes just from a bird, or indeed any kind of animal. Pink Floyd studio outtakes perhaps, but not a parrot.
    Some of these other noises get heard in the later stages of courtship. The chinging, for instance, which doesn’t carry so well, is very directional and can help any females that have been aroused by night after night of booming (it sometimes goes on for seven hours a night for up to three months) to find a mate. This doesn’t always work, though. Females in breeding condition have been known to turn up at completely unoccupied bowls, wait around for a while, and then go away again.
    It’s not that they’re not willing. When they are in breeding condition, their sex drive is extremely strong. One female kakapo is known to have walked twenty miles in one night to visit a mate, and then walked home again in the morning. Unfortunately, however, the period during which the female is prepared to behave like this is rather short. As if things aren’t difficult enough already, the female can only come into breeding condition when a particular plant, the podocarp for instance, is bearing fruit. This only happens every two years. Until it does, the male can boom all he likes, it won’t do himany good. The kakapo’s pernickety dietary requirements are a whole other area of exasperating difficulty. It makes me tired just to think of them, so I think we’ll pass quickly over all that. Imagine being an airline steward trying to serve meals to a plane full of Moslems, Jews, vegetarians, vegans, and diabetics when all you’ve got is turkey because it’s Christmastime, and that will give you the idea.
    The males therefore get extremely overwrought sitting in their bowls making noises for months on end, waiting for their mates, who are waiting for a particular type of tree to fruit. When one of the rangers who was working in an area where kakapos were booming happened to leave his hat on the ground, he came back later to find a kakapo attempting to ravish it. On another occasion the discovery of some ruffled possum fur in the mating area suggested that a kakapo had made another alarming mistake, an experience which is unlikely to have been satisfying to either party.
    The net result of all these months of excavating and booming and walking and scrarking and being fussy about fruit is that once every three or four years the female kakapo lays one single egg which promptly gets eaten by a stoat.
    So the big question is: How on earth has the kakapo managed to last
this
long?
    Speaking as a non-zoologist confronted with this bird, I couldn’t help but wonder if nature, freed from the constraints of having to produce something that would survive a great deal of competition, wasn’t simply making it up as it went along. Doodling in fact. “How about sticking this bit in? Can’t do any harm, might be quite entertaining.”
    In fact, the kakapo is a bird that in some ways reminds me of the British motorbike industry. It had things its own way for so long that it simply became eccentric. The motorbike industry didn’t respond to market forces because it wasn’t particularly aware of them. It built a certain number of motorbikes and a certain number of people bought them and that was that. It didn’t seem to matter much that they werenoisy, complicated to maintain, sprayed oil all over