Last Chance to See

brilliant failure of his life.
    “They always thought I would be a failure when I was a boy,” he told us when he turned up later, incredibly late for something. “I was hopeless, a complete write-off. Never did any work, wasn’t interested in anything at all. Well, anything other than animals. Nobody at my school in Wales thought it was very useful being only interested in animals, but I had about fifty of them, to my father’s despair, in cages all over the backyard. Badgers and foxes, wild Welsh polecats, owls, hawks, macaws, jackdaws, everything. I even managed, just as a schoolboy, to breed kestrels in captivity.
    “My headmaster said it was nice that I had an interest, but I would never get anywhere because I was a lousy scholar. One day he called me into his study and said, ‘Jones,’ he said, ‘this just isn’t acceptable. You spend your whole life going around looking under hedges. You spend no time doing your schoolwork. You’re a failure. What are you going to do with yourself?’
    “I said—and remember, this was in Wales—‘Sir, I want to go to tropical islands and study birds.’
    “He said, ‘But to do that you have to be either rich or intelligent and you’re neither.’
    “I took this as some kind of encouragement, finally managed to pass a few exams, went to college, and when I was an undergraduate I went to a lecture in Oxford by Professor Tom Cade, who’s a world authority on falcons. He told us how in America they were working with peregrine falcons bybreeding them in captivity and releasing the young back into the wild.
    “I couldn’t believe it. This was incredibly exciting. Here were these people going out and actually
doing
something. Then he said that in the Indian Ocean on an island called Mauritius there was a very rare bird, perhaps the rarest of all falcons, called the Mauritius kestrel, which was, at the moment, doomed to extinction, but that it could possibly be saved by captive breeding. And it suddenly came to me that all this work I’d been doing in my backyard as a kid, fiddling around with birds, could actually be used to save a whole species from becoming extinct.
    “I was overwhelmed by excitement, and I thought, Christ, I must see if I can do something about this. So in the summer I went to America and studied a number of the projects there, saw how they were doing it, and promised myself that if I possibly could, I’d go to Mauritius and work to save the Mauritius kestrel.
    “And they said, ‘Well, Carl, it’s all very well you wanting to go to Mauritius, but there’s lots of problems out there and you can’t save these birds. There just aren’t enough of them. Just one breeding pair and a couple of other individuals. And with all the local problems and no facilities, it just can’t be done. There’s a small project there, but it’s got to be closed down. It’s just throwing good resources after bad.’
    “But I got the job. The job was to close the project down. That was the job I came here to do, ten years ago, close the whole thing down, what there was of it. None of this was even here then,” he said, looking around at the captive breeding centre in which they had raised more than forty Mauritius kestrels for gradual reintroduction to the wild, two hundred pink pigeons, and even a hundred Rodrigues fruit bats. “I suppose I have to admit,” he said with a naughty smile, “that I’ve been a complete failure.”
    As he finished his story, his hand dropped to his knee andhe happened to catch sight of his watch. Instantly a distraught expression came over his face and he jumped to his feet, clapping his hand to his head. He was late for a fund-raising meeting.
    We heard him complain regularly and bitterly, during our time on Mauritius, that he was no good at administration or politics, and yet to keep his work going he had to spend an awful lot of time doing both. He constantly had to work raising money, justifying and accounting for the money he gets to the people he gets it from, and negotiating with the various international conservation bodies who seem to watch over his shoulder all the time. As far as he’s concerned, all of this just prevents him from doing the work he’s best able to do, and he wishes they’d leave him alone and let him get on with it. Or rather, give him the money and then leave him alone and let him get on with it. The whole project, to save the fragile and unique ecology of Mauritius, is run on a