Last Chance to See

they’ve been around here today. There’s plenty of scent. Boss keeps on finding scent all right, but the scent goes cold. There’s been quite a lot of kakapo activity here recently, but not quite recently enough. He’s very excited, though. He knows they’re definitely around.”
    He made a fuss of Boss for a few moments, and then explained that there were major problems in training dogs to find kakapos because of the terrible shortage of kakapos to train them on. In the end, he said, it was more realistic to train the dogs not to track anything else. Training was simply a long and tedious process of elimination, which was very frustrating for the dog.
    With one last pat, he let go of Boss again, who bounded back off into the bush to carry on snuffling and rummaging for any trace of the one bird he hadn’t been trained not to track. Within a few moments he had disappeared from sight, and his muted bell went clanking off into the distance.
    We followed a path for a while, which allowed us for the moment to keep up with Arab, while he told us a little about other dogs that he had trained to be hunting dogs, for use in clearing islands of predators. There was one dog he was particularly fond of, which was their top hunting dog, a ferocious killer of an animal. They had taken the dog all the way to Round Island, near Mauritius, with them a few years ago to help with a big rabbit-clearance program. Unfortunately, once it got there, it turned out to be terrified of rabbits and had to be taken home.
    It seemed to Arab that most of his recent life had been spent on islands, which was not just a coincidence: island ecologies are so fragile that many island species are endangered, and islands are often used as last places of refuge for mainland animals. Arab himself had tracked many of the twenty-five kakapos that had been found on Stewart Island and airlifted by helicopter in soundproof boxes to Codfish. They always tried to release them in terrain that corresponded as closely as possible to that in which they had beenfound, in the hope that they would reestablish themselves more easily. But it was very hard to tell how many of the birds were establishing themselves, or even how many had survived here.
    The day was wearing on and the light was lengthening. Excitingly, we found some kakapo droppings, which we picked up and crumbled in our fingers and sniffed at in much the same way that a wine connoisseur will savor the bouquet of a fine New Zealand North Island Chardonnay. They have a fine, clean, herbal scent. Almost as excitingly, we found some ferns that a kakapo had chewed at. They clip it and then pull it through their powerful bill so that it leaves a neat ball of curled-up fibre at the end.
    A lot less excitingly, we strongly suspected that the day was going to be completely free of any actual kakapos. As the evening gathered in and a light rain began to fall, we turned and trudged the miles we had come back through the forest. We passed the evening in the hut making friends with the whisky bottle and showing off our Nikons.
    Toward the end of the evening, Arab mentioned that he hadn’t really expected to find a kakapo today at all. They’re nocturnal birds and therefore very hard to find during the day. To stand any chance of seeing one at all, you have to go and search when there is just enough light in the sky to let you actually see the thing but when its scent is still fresh on the ground. About five or six in the morning was the time you wanted to go and look for them. Was that okay with us? He stood up and dragged his beard to bed.
    Five in the morning is the most horrible time, particularly when your body is still desperately trying to disentangle itself from half a bottle of whisky. We dragged ourselves, cold, crabby, and aching, from our bunks. The noise of submachine-gun fire from the main room turned out to be frying bacon, and we tried to revive ourselves with this while the grey morning light began to seep hideously up into the sky outside. I’ve never understood all this fuss people makeabout the dawn. I’ve seen a few and they’re never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you’re in the right frame of mind, which is usually about lunchtime.
    After a lot of sullen fumbling with boots and cameras, we eventually struggled out of the door at about six-thirty and trudged our way back out into the forest. Mark started to point out