Last Chance to See

confrontation a little while earlier when Carl and Wendy arrived with a party of officials from the World Bank from whom they were negotiating some financial support. James wouldn’t let them in on the grounds that they had two cars and he was only authorised to let in one.
    James also reports to Carl and Richard regularly about the movements of the kestrels, not because they’ve asked him to but just because, other evidence to the contrary, he likes to help. If he hasn’t actually seen any kestrels, he’ll still, in a friendly and encouraging sort of a way, say that he has. This means that now, whenever Carl has to change the coloured bands the kestrels wear around their legs, he makes a point of putting on a different colour so that he will know James is lying if he claims to have seen a kestrel with a band that doesn’t exist.
    The kestrel we were going to see had been trained to take mice in 1985. The purpose of feeding kestrels in the wild was to bump up their diet and encourage them to lay more eggs. If a kestrel was well fed, then Carl could take the first clutch of eggs the bird laid from its nest back to the breeding centre, confident that the kestrel would simply lay some more. In this way they were increasing the number of eggs that might hatch, but there was a limit to the number of birds available to sit on them, so they had to be incubated artificially. This is a highly skilled and delicate task and requires constant monitoring of the egg’s condition. If an egg is losing weight too rapidly, by evaporation of liquid through the shell, then portions of the shell are sealed. If it is not losing enough, then portions of the shell are meticulously sanded to make it more porous. It is best if an egg can have one week under a real bird and the other three in the incubator—eggs that havebeen swapped around like that have a much higher success rate.
    Richard yanked the Land Rover to a halt on the edge of the forest near the bottom of the gorge and we piled out of it. The air was brisk and clear, and Richard strode about the small clearing making an odd assortment of calling noises.
    Within a minute or two the kestrel came zipping through the forest and perched itself up in a high tree overlooking a large hemispherical rock. Since the bird is adapted to living in the forest rather than the open land, it does not hover like many falcons, but can instead fly at great speeds unerringly through the forest canopy, where it catches its food of geckos, smaller birds, and insects. For this it relies on having fantastically keen and fast eyesight.
    We watched it for a while and it watched us intently. In fact, it watched everything that moved, glancing rapidly in one direction after another with constant attention.
    “See the way it’s so interested in everything it can see?” said Richard. “It lives by its eyes, and you have to remember that when you keep them in captivity. You must make sure they have a complex environment. Birds of prey are comparatively stupid. But because they’ve got such incredible vision, you’ve got to have things that will keep them occupied visually.
    “When we originally started breeding birds of prey in captivity, we brought in some very skittish birds, and whenever anybody went past the aviary the birds just went mad, and we thought they must be upset by the disturbance, and someone came up with the bright idea of what’s called a skylight and seclusion aviary. All four walls were opaque and just the roof was open so that there was no disturbance for the birds. But what we found was that we’d overdone it. The offspring that were born in those environments were basket cases because they hadn’t got the sensory input they needed. We’d got it completely the wrong way around.
    “I mean, animals may not be intelligent, but they’re not as stupid as a lot of human beings. You look at the primate areas in some zoos that are equipped with green metal architect-designed ‘trees’ that, in a minimalist sort of way, reproduce the shape of the tree, but don’t actually include any of the features that a monkey might find interesting about a tree: leaves and bark and stuff. It may look like a tree to an architect, but architects are a lot more stupid than monkeys. We just got a brochure through from the States for exactly this—fibreglass trees. The whole brochure was designed to show us how proud they were of what they could sell us here in Mauritius, and showing the