Last Chance to See

“tropical island paradise” I know of that remotely matches up to the fantasy ideal that such a phrase is meant to conjure up, or even to what we find described in holiday brochures. It’s natural to put this down to the discrepancy we are all used to finding between what advertisers promise and what the real world delivers. It doesn’t surprise us much anymore.
    So it can come as a shock to realise that the world we hear described by travelers of previous centuries (or even previous decades) and biologists of today really did exist. The state it’s in now is only the result of what we’ve done to it, and the mildness of the disappointment we feel when we arrive somewhere and find that it’s a bit tatty is only a measure of how far our own expectations have been degraded and how little we understand what we’ve lost. The people who do understand what we’ve lost are the ones who are rushing around in a frenzy trying to save the bits that are left.
    The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realised that it was a system at all and that it wasn’t something that was just there.
    To understand how anything very complex works, or even to know that there is something complex at work, man needs to see little tiny bits of it at a time. And this is why smallislands have been so important to our understanding of life. On the Galápagos Islands, for instance, animals and plants that shared the same ancestors began to change and adapt in different ways once they were divided from one another by a few miles of water. The islands neatly separated out the component parts of the process for us, and it was thus that Charles Darwin was able to make the observations that led directly to the idea of Evolution.
    The island of Mauritius gave us an equally important but more sombre idea—extinction.
    The most famous of all the animals on Mauritius is a large, gentle dove. A remarkably large dove, in fact: its weight is closest to that of a well-fed turkey. Its wings long ago gave up the idea of lifting such a plumpy off the ground and withered away into decorative little stumps. Once it gave up flying, it could adapt itself very well to the Mauritian seasonal cycle, and stuff itself silly in the late summer and autumn, when fruit is lying rich on the ground, and then live on its fat reserves, gradually losing weight, during the leaner, dry months.
    It didn’t need to fly anyway, since there were no predators that wished it any harm and it, in turn, is harmless itself. In fact, the whole idea of harm is something it has never learned to understand, so if you were to see one on the beach, it would be quite likely to walk right up to you and take a look, provided it could find a path through the armies of giant tortoises parading around the beach. There’s never even been any reason for humans to kill it because its meat is tough and bitter.
    It has a large, wide, downturned bill of yellow and green, which gives it a slightly glum and melancholic look, small, round eyes like diamonds, and three ridiculously little plumes sticking out of its tail. One of the first Englishmen to see this large dove said that “for shape and rareness, it might antagonise the Phoenix of Arabia.”
    None of us will ever see this bird though, because, sadly,the last one was clubbed to death by Dutch colonists in about 1680.
    The giant tortoises were eaten to extinction because the early sailors regarded them much as we regard canned food. They just picked them off the beach and put them on their ships as ballast, and then, if they felt hungry, they’d go down to the hold, pull one up, kill it, and eat it.
    But the large, gentle dove—the dodo—was just clubbed to death for the sport of it. And that is what Mauritius is most famous for: the extinction of the dodo.
    There had been extinctions before, but this was a particularly remarkable animal, and it only lived in the naturally limited area of the island of Mauritius. There were, very clearly and obviously, no more of them. And since only dodos could make a new dodo, there never would be any more of them ever again. The facts were very clearly and starkly delineated for us by the boundaries of the island.
    Up until that point it hadn’t really clicked with man that an animal could just cease to exist. It was as if we hadn’t realised that if we kill something, it simply won’t be there anymore. Ever. As a result of the extinction of