Last Chance to See

Garden of Eden, as if on the Eighth Day God had suddenly got going again and started creating Flymos, secateurs, and those things I can never remember the name of but which are essentially electrically driven pieces of string.
    And there, stepping out onto the lawn, was Mike, the warden’s wife, with a tray full of tea things, which I fell upon with loud exclamations of delight and hello.
    Meanwhile, I had lost Mark altogether. He was standing only a few feet away, but he had gone into a glazed trance which I decided I would go and investigate after I had got to grips with some serious tea. He was probably looking at the birds of which there seemed to be quite a lot in the garden. I chatted cheerfully to Mike, reintroduced myself to her as the vaguely Neanderthal creature she had probably encountered lumbering in a lost daze from the helicopter that morning, and asked her how she coped with living, as she and Dobby had done for eleven and a half years, entirely isolated on this island apart from the occasional nature-loving tourist.
    She explained that they had quite a few nature-loving tourists a day, and the worry was that there were too many of them. It was so horribly easy to introduce predators onto the island by mistake, and the damage would be very serious. The tourists who came on organised trips could be managed quite carefully, but the danger came from people coming over to the island on boats and setting up barbecues on the beach. All it would take would be a couple of rats or a pregnant cat, and the work of years would be undone.
    I was surprised at the thought that anybody thinking of taking a barbecue to an island beach would necessarily think of including a pregnant cat in their party, but she assured me that it could happen very easily. And virtually every type of boat has rats aboard.
    She was a cheerful, sprightly, and robust woman, and I very much suspected that the iron will that had been imposedon the rugged terrain of the island to turn this acre of it into a ferociously manicured garden was hers.
    Gaynor emerged from the neat white clapboard house at this moment with Dobby, whom she had been interviewing on tape. Dobby had originally come to the island eleven and a half years earlier as part of the cat-killing program and stayed on as warden of the reserve, a post from which he was going to have to retire in eighteen months. He was not looking forward to this at all. From where they were standing, in their domain of miniature paradise, a little house in a mainland town seemed desperately constrained and humdrum.
    We chatted for a while more and then Gaynor approached Mark to record a description of the garden onto tape, but he gestured her curtly away and returned to the trance he had been in for several minutes now.
    This seemed rather odd behaviour from Mark, who was usually a man of mild and genial manners, and I asked him what was up. He muttered something briefly about birds and continued to ignore us.
    I looked around again. There certainly were a lot of birds in the garden.
    I have to make a confession here, and it’s going to sound a little odd coming from someone who has traveled twelve thousand miles and back to visit a parrot, but I am actually not tremendously excited by birds. There are all sorts of things about birds that I find interesting, I suppose, but the things themselves don’t really get to me. Hippopotamuses, yes. I’m happy to stare at a hippopotamus till the hippo itself gets bored and wanders away in bemusement. Gorillas, lemurs, dolphins, I will watch entranced for hours, hypnotised as much as anything else by their eyes. But show me a garden full of some of the most exotic birds in the world and I will be just as happy to stand around drinking tea and chatting to people. It gradually dawned on me that this was probably exactly what was happening.
    “This,” said Mark at last in a low, hollow voice, “is …”
    I waited patiently.
    “Amazing!” he said at last.
    Eventually Gaynor prevailed on him to bring himself back from his trance, and he started to talk excitedly about the tuis, the New Zealand pigeons, the bellbirds, the North Island robins, the New Zealand kingfisher, the red-crowned parakeets, the paradise shelducks, and the great crowd of large kakas that was swooping around the garden and jostling one another at the birdbath.
    I felt vaguely depressed and also a little fraudulent at being unable to share his excitement, and that evening I fell to