Last Chance to See

the dodo, we are sadder and wiser.
    We finally made it to Rodrigues, a small island dependency of Mauritius, to look for the world’s rarest fruit bat, but first we went to look at something Wendy Strahm was very keen for us to see—so much so that she rearranged her regular Rodrigues-visiting schedule to take us there herself.
    By the side of a hot and dusty road there was a single small bushy tree that looked as if it had been put in a concentration camp.
    The plant was a kind of wild coffee called
Ramus mania
, and it had been believed to be totally extinct. Then, in 1981, a teacher from Mauritius named Raymond Aquis was teaching at a school in Rodrigues and gave his class pictures of about ten plants thought to be extinct on Mauritius.
    One of the children put up his hand and said, “Please, sir, we’ve got this growing in our back garden.”
    At first it was hard to believe, but they took a branch of it and sent it to Kew, where it was identified. It was wild coffee.
    The plant was standing by the side of the road, right by the traffic and in considerable danger because any plant in Rodrigues is considered fair game for firewood. So they put a fence around it to keep it from being cut down.
    As soon as they did this, however, people started thinking, “Aha, this is a special plant,” and they climbed over the fence and started to take off little branches and leaves and pieces of bark. Because the tree was obviously special, everybody wanted a piece of it and started to ascribe remarkable properties to it—it would, for example, cure hangovers and gonorrhea. Since not much goes on in Rodrigues other than home entertainments, it quickly became a very sought-after plant, and it was rapidly being killed by having bits cut off it.
    The first fence was soon rendered useless and a barbed-wire fence was put around that. Then another barbed-wire fence had to be put around the first barbed-wire fence, and then a third barbed-wire fence had to be put around the second till the whole compound covered a half-acre. Then a guard was installed to watch the plant as well.
    With cuttings from this one plant, botanists at Kew Gardens are currently trying to root and cultivate two new plants, in the hope that it might then be possible to reintroduce them into the wild. Until they succeed, this single plant standing within its barbed-wire barricades will be the only representative of its species on earth, and it will continue to need protecting from everyone who is prepared to kill it in order to have a small piece. It’s easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo, we are now sadder and wiser, but there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.
    At dusk that day we stood by the side of another road,where we had been told we would have a good view, and watched as the world’s rarest fruit bats left their roost in the forest and flapped across the darkening sky to make their nightly forage among the fruit trees.
    The bats are doing just fine. There are hundreds of them.
    I have a terrible feeling that we are in trouble.

M ARK’S
E PILOGUE
    WAS THIS REALLY OUR LAST chance to see these animals? Unfortunately, there are too many unknowns for there to be a simple answer. With strenuous efforts in the field, the populations of some have actually begun to rise. But it is clear that if those efforts were suspended for a moment, the kakapos, the Yangtze river dolphins, the northern white rhinos, and many others would vanish almost immediately.
    Not that a large population necessarily guarantees an animal’s survival, as experience has shown many times in the past. The most famous example is the North American passenger pigeon, which was once the commonest bird that ever lived on earth. Yet it was hunted to extinction in little more than fifty years. We didn’t learn any lessons from that experience: ten years ago, there were 1.3 million elephants inAfrica, but so many have been killed by poachers that today no more than 600,000 are left.
    On the other hand, even the smallest populations can be brought back from the brink. Juan Fernandez fur seal numbers dropped from millions to fewer than one hundred by 1965; today, there are three thousand. And in New Zealand in 1978, the population of Chatham Island robins was down to one pregnant female, but the dedication of Don Merton and his team saved the species from extinction and there are now more than fifty.
    The kakapo may also