Last Chance to See

wondering why it was that I was so intensely keen to find and see a kakapo and so little bothered by all the other birds.
    I think it’s its flightlessness.
    There is something gripping about the idea that this creature has actually given up doing something that virtually every human being has yearned to do since the very first of us looked upward. I think I find other birds rather irritating for the cocky ease with which they flit through the air as if it was nothing.
    I can remember once coming face to face with a free-roaming emu years ago in Sydney zoo. You are strongly warned not to approach them too closely because they can be pretty violent creatures, but once I had caught its eye, I found its irate, staring face absolutely riveting. Because once you look one right in the eye, you have a sudden sense of what the effect has been on the creature of having all the disadvantages of being a bird—absurd posture, a hopelessly scruffy covering of useless feathers, and two useless limbs—without actually being able to do the thing that birds should be able to do, which is to fly. It becomes instantly clear that the bird has gone barking mad.
    Here, to digress for a moment, is a little-known fact: one of the more dangerous animals in Africa is, surprisingly enough, the ostrich. Deaths due to ostriches do not excite the public imagination very much because they are essentially soundignified. Ostriches do not bite because they have no teeth. They don’t tear you to pieces because they don’t have any forelimbs with claws on them. No, ostriches kick you to death. And who, frankly, can blame them?
    The kakapo, though, is not an angry or violent bird. It pursues its own eccentricities rather industriously and modestly. If you ask anybody who has worked with kakapos to describe them, they tend to use words like
innocent
and
solemn
, even when it’s leaping helplessly out of a tree. This I find immensely appealing. I asked Dobby if they had given names to the kakapos on the island, and he instantly came up with four of them: Matthew, Luke, John, and Snark. These seemed to be good names for a group of solemnly batty birds.
    And then there’s the other matter: it’s not merely the fact that it’s given up that which we all so intensely desire, it’s also the fact that it has made a terrible mistake which makes it so compelling. This is a bird you can warm to. I wanted very much to find one.
    I became increasingly morose over the next two or three days, because it became clear to us as we traipsed up and down endless hills in the rain that we were not going to find a kakapo on Little Barrier Island. We stopped and admired kakas, long-tailed cuckoos, and yellow-eyed penguins. We endlessly photographed pied shags. One night we saw a morepork, which is a type of owl that got its name from its habit of continually calling for additional pig flesh. But we knew that if we were going to find a kakapo we would need to go to Codfish Island. We would need Arab the freelance kakapo tracker, and we would need the freelance kakapo tracker’s kakapo-tracking dog.
    And all the signs were that we would not get them. We flew off to Wellington and moped about.
    We understood the dilemma facing the Department of Conservation. On the one hand they regarded protection of the kakapos as being of paramount importance, and thatmeant keeping absolutely everybody who was not vital to the project away from Codfish Island. On the other hand the more people who knew about the animal, the better the chances of mustering more resources to save it. While we were mulling all this over, we were suddenly asked to give a press conference about what we were up to and we happily agreed to this. We talked earnestly and cheerfully to the press about the project. Here was a bird, we explained, that was in its way as extraordinary and unique as the most famous extinct animal of all—the dodo—and it was itself poised on the brink of extinction. It would be far better if it could be famously loved as a survivor than famously regretted, like the dodo.
    This seemed to cause some movement within the Department of Conservation, and it transpired that those within it who supported us won their case. A day or two later and we were standing on the tarmac of Invercargill airport at the very south of South Island, waiting for a helicopter. And waiting for Arab. We had won our case, and hoped, a little nervously, that we were right to do so.
    Also in our party was a