Last Chance to See

be on a slow road to recovery. Soon after we returned to England, we received the following letter from New Zealand:
    P.O. Box 3

Stewart Island
    Dear Douglas and Mark
,
    I hope this reaches you quickly
—
I have some good news from kakapo country on southern Stewart Island. At 08.45 hrs on 25 August 1989 one of our dog handlers, Alan Munn, and his English setter “Ari” located a new female kakapo near Lees Knob, at an altitude of 380 metres. “Jane” weighed 1.25 kg and she scrarked a lot when Alan picked her up. She had just finished moulting but looked in good condition, so in a few days she will be flown to her new home—Codfish Island
.
    Once again, thanks very much for your visit. It certainly helped give those Big Green Budgies some of the attention they deserve
.
    Yours sincerely
,
Andy Roberts (kakapo project manager)

for R. Tindal, District Conservator
,
Department of Conservation, Rakiura
.
    We later received some further good news about the kakapos. Two more females had been found on Stewart Islandand transferred to Codfish, bringing the total kakapo population up to forty-three.
    Meanwhile, on Little Barrier Island, several of the males there have been booming for the first time, including, to everyone’s delight, a nine-year-old called Snark. Born on Stewart Island in 1981, Snark was the only kakapo chick to have been seen by anyone this century.
    But the best news of all was still to come. Just before going to press, a very excited Don Merton telephoned to say that a newly made kakapo nest had just been found on Little Barrier Island. Inside the nest, which was built by a nine-year-old female called “Heather,” was a single kakapo egg.
    Transferring kakapos to Little Barrier and Codfish Islands has been a calculated risk—but it is the only hope of saving the kakapo from extinction. Heather’s nest is the first encouraging sign that the project is actually working, and now everyone is waiting nervously to see if her egg will hatch and if she can raise the chick in her adopted home.
    We also received a letter from Kes Hillman-Smith in Zaïre saying that three baby northern white rhinos have been born in Garamba since we left, bringing the total population up to twenty-five. The enthusiastic park staff have named them Mpiko, meaning “courage”; Molende, meaning “perseverance”; and Minzoto, meaning “a star.”
    It’s important to recognise that not every conservation strategy necessarily works: we are often experimenting in the dark. During the early stages of the Garamba project, a lot of pressure was put on the Zaïrois to have all of their northern white rhinos captured and taken into captivity. The government of Zaïre would not agree to this. They said that the rhinos belong to them and they didn’t want them to go to zoos in other parts of the world. Fortunately, it seems that this was the right decision. Northern white rhinos, it turned out, do not breed well in captivity—the last one was born in 1982—whereas more than ten have been born in the same period in the wild.

    The news from Mauritius has been more mixed. The kestrels are doing well and Carl believes that there could now be as many as a hundred of them in the wild, including twelve breeding pairs. However, the population of truly wild pink pigeons has dropped to fewer than ten. Some of the pigeons that have been bred in captivity are being released again. So far, they have escaped the hunters and appear to be doing well.
    As for the echo parakeets, at least one of them has died since we saw them, though some of the others have been attempting to breed. In November 1989, Carl found a parakeet nest with three eggs inside. One of these mysteriously disappeared soon afterward, so he decided to risk removing the others to the captive breeding centre for safe-keeping. Both eggs hatched successfully and the chicks are fit and well.
    Perhaps most important of all (for non-ornithologists), the wild population of Rodrigues fruit bats has just passed the one thousand mark.
    In contrast, after the BBC radio series had been broadcast, we received a disturbing letter from a couple who had been working in China:
    (address supplied)
    Dear Douglas and Mark
,
    We enjoyed the Yangtze dolphin programme—but listened with a touch of guilt! We recently spent three months working in a number of factories in Nanjing. We had a wonderful time with the people and ate well
.
To honour us when we left, one of them cooked a Yangtze