Last Chance to See

about the species,” said Richard. “I just meant the particular mice. Conservation is not for the squeamish. We have to kill a lot of animals, partly to protect the species that are endangered, and partly to feed them. A lot of the birds are fed on mice, so we have to breed them here.”
    He disappeared into a small, warm, squeaking room and reemerged a few seconds later with a handful of freshly killed mice.
    “Time to feed the birds,” he said, heading back toward the Land Rover from hell.
    The best and quickest road to the Black River gorges where the kestrels live is a private one through the Medine sugar estate.
    Sugar, from the point of view of the ecology of Mauritius, is a major problem. Vast swathes of the Mauritius forest have been destroyed to provide space to grow a cash crop which in turn destroys our teeth. This is serious anywhere, but on an island it is a very special problem, because island ecologies are fundamentally different from mainland ones. They even have a different vocabulary. When you spend much time on islands with naturalists, you will tend to hear two words in particular an awful lot:
endemic
and
exotic
. Three, if you count
disaster
.
    An endemic species of plant or animal is one that is native to an island or region and is found nowhere else at all. An exotic species is one that has been introduced from abroad, and a disaster is usually what results when this occurs.
    The reason is this: continental land masses are big. They support hundreds of thousands, even millions, of different species, each of which are competing with one another for survival. The sheer ferocity of the competition for survival is immense, and it means that the species that do survive and flourish are mean little fighters. They grow faster and throw out a lot more seeds.
    An island, on the other hand, is small. There are far fewer species, and the competition for survival has never reached anything like the pitch that it does on the mainland. Species are only as tough as they need to be, life is much quieter and more settled, and evolution proceeds at a much slower rate. This is why you find on Madagascar, for instance, species like the lemurs that were overwhelmed eons ago on the mainland. Island ecologies are fragile time capsules.
    So you can imagine what happens when a mainland species gets introduced to an island. It would be like introducing Al Capone, Genghis Khan, and Rupert Murdoch into the Isle of Wight—the locals wouldn’t stand a chance.
    So what happens on Mauritius, or indeed any island, is that when endemic vegetation or animals are destroyed for any reason, the exotic forms leap into the breach and take over. It’s hard for an Englishman to think of something like privet as being an exotic and ferocious life form—my grandmother has neatly trimmed privet bushes lining her front garden—but in Mauritius it behaves like a bunch of marauding triffids. So does the introduced guava and numerous other foreign invaders, which grow much more quickly and produce many more seeds.
    Black ebony comes from the lowland hardwood forests of Mauritius, and is why the Dutch first colonised the island. There’s hardly any of it left now. The reasons for the forest being cut down include straightforward logging and clearing space for cash crops. And another reason: deer hunting. Le Chasse.
    Vast tracts of forest have been cleared to make room for game parks, in which hunters stand on short wooden towers and shoot at herds of deer that are driven past them. As if the original loss of the forest were not bad enough—and for such a reason—the grazing habits of the deer keep the fragile endemic plants from regrowing, while the exotic species thrive in their place. Young Mauritian trees are simply nibbled to death.
    We passed through huge fields of swaying sugarcane, having first negotiated our way past the sugar estate’s gatekeeper, an elderly and eccentric Mauritian named James who will not let anybody through his gate without a permit, even someone he’s let through every day for ten years but who has accidentally left his permit at home that day. He did this to Carl recently, who since then has been threatening to Super Glue the gate shut in revenge, and it’s quite possible thathe will. Carl is clearly the sort of person who will get as many laughs as he can from a situation by threatening to do something silly and then try and get a few more by actually doing it.
    There had been a more serious