Last Chance to See

particular paints they had for
painting
lichen on trees. I mean, it’s bloody ridiculous, who are these people? Okay. Let’s feed the bird. You watching?”
    The bird was watching. It’s hard to avoid saying that it was watching like a hawk. It was watching like a kestrel.
    Richard swung his arm back. The kestrel’s head followed his movement precisely. With a wide underarm swing, Richard lobbed the small mouse high up into the air. For a second or so, the kestrel just watched it, jittering its legs very slightly on the branch as it engaged in monumental feats of differential calculus. The mouse reached the top of its steep parabola, its tiny dead weight turning slowly in the air.
    At last the kestrel dropped from its perch and swung out into the air as if on the end of a long pendulum, the precise length, pivotal position, and swing speed of which the kestrel had calculated. The arc it described intersected sweetly with that of the falling mouse, the kestrel took the mouse cleanly into its talons, swept on up into another nearby tree, and bit its head off.
    “He eats the head himself,” said Richard, “and takes the rest of the mouse to the female in the nest.”
    We fed the kestrel a few more mice, sometimes throwing them in the air and sometimes leaving them on the hemispherical rock for it to dive for at its leisure. At last the bird was fed up and we left.
    The term “fed up” actually comes from falconry. Most of the vocabulary of falconry comes from middle English, and zoologists have adopted a lot of it.
    For instance, “feeking” describes the process by which the bird cleans its beak of meat after eating, by rubbing it along a branch. “Mutes” are the white trails along cliffs where the bird has been sitting. These are more normally called “bird droppings,” of course, but in falconry talk they’re “mutes.”
    “Rousing” is the action of shaking its wings and body, which is generally a sign that the bird is feeling very comfortable and relaxed.
    When you train a falcon, you train it by hunger, using it as a tool to manipulate the bird’s psychology. So when the bird has had too much to eat, it won’t cooperate and gets annoyed by any attempts to tell it what to do. It simply sits in the top of a tree and sulks. It is “fed up.”
    Richard became extremely fed up that evening, and with reason. It was nothing to do with eating too much, though it had a little to do with what other people liked to eat. A Mauritian friend came around to see him and brought her boss with her, a Frenchman from the nearby island of Réunion who was visiting the island for a few days and staying with her.
    His name was Jacques, and we all took an instant dislike to him, but none so strongly as Richard, who detested him on sight.
    He was a Frenchman of the dapper, arrogant type. He had lazy, supercilious eyes, a lazy, supercilious smile, and, as Richard later put it, a lazy, supercilious, and terminally stupid brain.
    Jacques arrived at the house and stood around looking lazy and supercilious. He clearly did not quite know what he was doing in this house. It was not a very elegant house. It was full of battered, second-hand furniture, and had pictures of birds stuck all over the walls with drawing pins. He obviouslywanted to slouch moodily against a wall, but could not find a wall that he was prepared to put his shoulder to, so he had to slouch moodily where he was standing.
    We offered him a beer, and he took one with the best grace he could muster. He asked us what we were doing here, and we said we were taping a program for the BBC and writing a book about the wildlife of Mauritius.
    “But why?” he said in a puzzled tone. “There is nothing here.”
    Richard showed admirable restraint at first. He explained quite coolly that some of the rarest birds in the world were to be found on Mauritius. He explained that that was what he and Carl and the others were there for: to protect and study and breed them.
    Jacques shrugged and said that they weren’t particularly interesting or special.
    “Oh?” said Richard quietly.
    “Nothing with any interesting plumage.”
    “Really?” said Richard.
    “I prefer something like the Arabian cockatoo,” said Jacques with a lazy smile.
    “Do you.”
    “Me, I live on Réunion,” said Jacques.
    “Do you.”
    “There are certainly no interesting birds there,” said Jacques.
    “That’s because the French have shot them all,” said Richard.
    He turned around