Last Chance to See

impatience often erupts into a kind of wild black humour because, faced with so much that is absolutely critical, they can’t afford the time for anything that is merely very, very urgent.
    The focus of their work is Carl’s captive breeding centre in the village of Black River, and Richard took us along to see it the next day.
    We screeched to a halt outside the gate set in a six-foot-high stone wall and went in.
    Inside was a large sandy courtyard, ringed with low wooden buildings, large aviaries, and cages. The warm air was rich with the sounds of flapping and cooing and sharp, bracing smells. Several very, very large tortoises were roaming about the centre of the yard completely free, presumably because virtually anybody would be able to beat them to the gate if they suddenly decided to make a break for it.
    “There you are,” said Richard, pointing at a large cage off to one side in which someone appeared to have hung a number of small broken umbrellas, “Rodrigues fruit bats. You can relax now, you’ve seen ’em. Look at them later, they’re boring. They’re nothing to what else we’ve got here. Pink pigeons for a start … this place has got some of the rarest, sexiest birds in the world. And you want to see the real stars? I’ll see if Carl’s in. He should be the one to show you.”
    He took us for a quick hunt, but Carl wasn’t there. There was, however, someone who was besottedly in love with him. Richard beckoned us in.
    “This is Pink,” he said.
    We looked.
    Pink gazed at us intently with his two large, deep brown eyes. He fidgeted a little with his feet, clawing at his perch, and seemed tense, expectant, and slightly irritated to see us.
    “Pink’s a Mauritius kestrel,” said Richard, “but he’s basically weird.”
    “Really?” said Mark. “Doesn’t look it.”
    “What does he look like to you?”
    “Well, he’s quite small. He’s got sleek brown outer plumage on his wings, mottled brown and white breast feathers, impressive set of talons …”
    “In other words, you think he looks like a bird.”
    “Well, yes …”
    “He’d be shocked to know you thought that.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, one of the problems with breeding birds in captivity is that they sometimes have to be reared by humans, which leads to all sorts of misunderstandings on the bird’s part. When a bird hatches from its egg, it doesn’t have much of a clear picture of what’s what in the world, and it falls in love with the first thing that feeds it, which in Pink’s case was Carl. It’s called ‘imprinting,’ and it’s a major problem because you can’t undo it. Once he’s made up his mind that he’s human, he—”
    “He actually thinks he’s a human?” I asked.
    “Oh yes. Well, if he thinks Carl’s his mother, it more or less follows, doesn’t it? They may not be brilliant, but they’re logical. He’s quite convinced he’s a human. He completely ignores the other kestrels, hasn’t got time for them, they’re just a bunch of birds as far as he’s concerned. But when Carl walks in here he goes completely berserk. It’s a problem because, of course, you can’t introduce an imprinted bird into the wild, it wouldn’t know what the hell to do. Wouldn’t nest, wouldn’t hunt, it would just expect to go to restaurants and stuff. Or at least it would expect to be fed. It wouldn’t survive by itself.
    “However, he does have a very important function in the aviary. You see, the young birds that we’ve hatched here don’t come to sexual maturity at the same time, so when the females start getting sexy, the males are not ready to handle it. The females are bigger and more belligerent and often beat the males up. So when that happens, we collect semen from Pink, and—”
    “How do you do that?” asked Mark.
    “In a hat.”
    “I thought you said in a hat.”
    “That’s right. Carl puts on this special hat, which is a bit like a rather strange bowler hat with a rubber brim, Pink goes mad with desire for Carl, flies down and fucks the hell out of his hat.”
    “What?”
    “He ejaculates into the brim. We collect the drop of semen and use it to inseminate a female.”
    “Strange way to treat your mother.”
    “He’s a strange bird. But he does serve a useful purpose in spite of being psychologically twisted.”
    Setting up the captive breeding centre on Mauritius is one of Carl’s major failures. In fact, it is the result of probably the most spectacular and