Last Chance to See

pathetically meagre budget, and money—or the lack of it—is the bane of Carl’s life. He left in a harassed fluster.
    “You’d think that everyone involved in conservation work would be on the same side,” said Mark after he’d gone, “but there’s just as much squabbling and bureaucracy as there is in anything else.”
    “You’re telling me,” said Richard. “And it’s always the workers out in the field who get mucked about by it. Look at these rabbits.”
    With a contemptuous wave of his hand, he showed us a cage in which a few perfectly ordinary-looking rabbits sat twitching at us.
    “There’s an island near here—a very, very important island as far as wildlife is concerned—called Round Island. There are more unique species of plants and animals on Round Island than there are on any equivalent area on earth. About a hundred, hundred and fifty years ago, somebody had the bright idea of introducing rabbits and goats to the island so if anybody got shipwrecked there, they’d havesomething to eat. The populations quickly got out of hand and it wasn’t until the mid-Seventies that they managed to get rid of the goats. Then just a few years ago a team from New Zealand came to exterminate the rabbits, until someone realised that they were exterminating a rare breed of French rabbit that didn’t exist anymore in Europe and it should therefore be transferred to mainland Mauritius and preserved in some way, i.e., by us.
    “As far as I’m concerned,” continued Richard, “we could just put them in the pot. They’re just ordinary rabbits. Also, someone has come along since then and said, ‘That’s a load of rubbish—these aren’t that particular variety.’
    “So we’ve just got to sit here feeding these rabbits until the rabbit experts have decided whether they’re valuable or not. It’s a waste of our time and resources. I mean, just feeding all these animals is a problem. They all need something different and you have to work out what it is.
    “These Rodrigues fruit bats you’ve come to see, we have to feed them on a mixture of fruit and powdered dog food reconstituted with milk. They used to be fed a diet rich in banana, which did them no good at all and only gave them a nervous tic.” He shrugged.
    “I don’t know what you’ve got against them,” said Mark. “I think they’re great animals.”
    “I’ve nothing against them. They’re great. They’re just common, that’s all.”
    Mark protested, “It’s the rarest fruit bat in—”
    “Yeah, but there are
hundreds
of them,” insisted Richard.
    “Hundreds means they’re severely endangered!” said Mark.
    “Do you know how many echo parakeets there are in the wild?” exclaimed Richard. “Fifteen!
That’s
rare. Hundreds is common. When you come to Mauritius and you see things in such a last-ditch state, everything else becomes unimportant. It becomes unimportant because we’re witnessing here a species which could be saved if people put their minds toit, and if it does go extinct it will be our fault because we never got around to saving it. There’s fifteen of them left. We’ve got the kestrels up and the pigeons up purely because of the effort we’ve put into them, the money and the personnel. The parakeets? We’re working very, very hard to save them, and if we don’t manage it, they will be gone forever, and we have to worry about somebody else’s rabbits.”
    He shook his head, and then calmed down.
    “Listen,” he said to Mark. “You’re right. The Rodrigues fruit bat is a very important animal, and we are working to protect it. It’s lost a lot of its habitat because the people of Rodrigues live by subsistence farming, which means that they’ve done a lot of forest clearance. The bat population is so reduced that one big cyclone—and we get them here—could wipe them out. But the Rodriguans have suddenly realised that it’s actually damaging their own interests to cut down the forest, because it’s reducing their water supply. If they want to preserve their watersheds, they have to preserve the forests, which means the bats get somewhere to live. So they’re in with a chance. By the world’s standards, they’re severely endangered, but by the standards of these islands where every indigenous species is endangered, they’re doing fine.”
    He grinned. “Want to see some endangered mice?”
    “I didn’t think mice were an endangered species yet,” I said.
    “I didn’t say anything