Last chance to see

Rare, or Medium Rare?

Richard Lewis is a man who has worked out a foolproof way of getting snappy answers to his questions.

He drives his Landrover (well, not actually his Landrover, but the Landrover of anyone foolhardy enough to lend him one) with what can only be described as pizzazz along Mauritian roads that were built with something less than pizzazz in mind. The roads are often narrow and windy, and where they are tarmacked, the Tarmac tends to finish with an abrupt six-inch drop at the edge. Richard drives along these with a pizzazz that borders dangerously on élan, and when he asks you a question he turns and looks at you and doesn't look back at the road again until you've answered. Mortal terror is not the best state of mind in which to try and frame intelligent answers, but you have to try.

We had managed OK with `How was the flight? (`Fine!') and 'How was the meal? (`Fine!') and 'Feeling jet-lagged? (°We're fine!'), but then we got to what he clearly regarded as being the crunch, so to speak

`Why are you coming all the way to Mauritius to look for some crappy old fruitbat? The Landrover veered frighteningly.

One of the first things you need to know about Richard Lewis, indeed the thing you need to know about him, is that he's an ornithologist. Once you know that, everything else more or less falls into place.

'I just couldn't figure it out,' he protested, twisted half round in his seat to harangue us. `You're going to Rodrigues? To look for a fruitbat? It's not even particularly rare.'

`Well, it's all relative,' protested Mark. 'It may not be particularly rare by Mauritian standards, but it is the rarest fruitbat in the...'

`Why don't you stay here on Mauritius for heaven's sake?'

`Well...'

`What do you know about Mauritius? Anything?'

`Well,' I said, `I know that... er, there's a lorry coming...'

`Never mind about that. I'll take care of the lorries. What do you know about Mauritius?

`I know that it was originally colonised by the Dutch, and when they left it was taken over by the French who lost it to Britain after the Napoleonic Wars. So it's an ex-British colony, part of the Commonwealth. The inhabitants speak French or Creole. The law is basically English and you're, er, supposed to drive on the left...'

`All right, you've read the guide book. But do you know about the birds here? Don't you know about the pink pigeon? The echo parakeet? Don't you know about the Mauritius kestrel?'

'Yes, but...'

`Then why are you going off to the stupid island of Rodrigues to look for some ridiculous fruitbat? We've got a bunch of them here at the captive breeding centre if you really want to see one. Common as muck, stupid things. You'd be much better off staying here and seeing some real stuff. Jesus!'

He had suddenly caught an inadvertent glimpse of the road ahead of us and had to yank hard on the steering wheel to avoid an oncoming truck.

Tell you what,' he said, turning round again. `How long have you got? Two weeks??

'Yes,' said Mark hurriedly.

`And you were planning to spend two days here and then fly to Rodrigues to spend, what, ten days, searching for the world's rarest fruitbat?'

`Yes.'

'OK. Here's what you do instead. You stay here for ten days, and then go off to Rodrigues for two days. Right?

`Will we find it in two days?'

Yes.'

`How do you know??

'Because I'll tell you exactly where to find it. Take you ten minutes. Take a couple of photos, go home.'

Oh.

'So you're staying here, right??

'Er...'

We were swaying erratically along, more or less in the middle of the road. Another truck hove into sight ahead of us, frantically flashing its lights. Richard was still looking round at us.

`Agreed?' he insisted. `You'll stay?'

'Yes! Yes! We'll stay!'

`Right. Good. I should think so too. You'll get to meet Carl then as well. He's brilliant, but completely mad. Jesus!'

The brilliant but completely, mad. Carl Jones is a tall Welshman in his late thirties, and there are those who say of him that his sheer perverse bloody-mindedness is the major thing that stands in the way of the almost total destruction of the ecology of Mauritius . It was Carl that Mark had contacted to make the arrangements for our trip, and it had been quite apparent from the first moment that we set foot on Mauritius that he was a man to contend with. When we told the immigration official at the airport that we would be staying `with someone called Carl Jones at somewhere called Black River ,' it had produced the unexpected and unnerving response of hysterical laughter, and also a friendly pat on the back.

When Carl met us at Richard's house, he greeted us with a scowl, leant in the doorframe, and growled, 'I hate media people.' Then he noticed our tape recorder and suddenly grinned impishly.

`Oh! Is that on? he asked.

`Not at the moment.'

`Turn it on, quick, turn it on!'

We turned it on.

`I really hate media people!' he boomed at it. `Did you get that? Do you think it'll come out all right?'

He peered at the recorder to make sure the tape really was running.

`You know I once did an interview for Woman's Hour on the radio,' he said, shaking his head in wonderment at the folly of a malign and silly world. `I hate media people, they take up all my time and don't pay me very much - but anyway... the interviewer said to me that he was sick of boring scientists and could I tell him about my work but be sure to mention women and babies. So I told him that I preferred women field assistants to men, that we reared lots of baby birds, and that women were better at looking after baby birds because they were more sensitive and all that. And it went out!'

This rendered him speechless with laughter and he tottered helplessly out of the room and was not seen again for hours.

'That was Carl,' said Richard. `He's great. He's really brilliant. Honestly. Don't worry about him being a complete sod.'

We quickly discovered that we had fallen in with a bunch of passionately obsessed people. The first obsession for Carl and for Richard was birds. They loved them with an extraordinary fervour, and had devoted their entire adult lives to working in the field, often in awful conditions and on horribly low budgets, to save rare birds, and the environments they live in, from extinction. Richard had trained in the Philippines , working to save the Philippines monkey-eating eagle, a wildly improbable looking piece of flying hardware that you would more readily expect to see coming in to land on an aircraft carrier than nesting in a tree. From there he had, in 1985, come to Mauritius , where the entire ecology of an island formerly famous for its abundant beauty is in desperate trouble.

They work with a manic energy that is disconcerting for a while until you begin to appreciate the enormity of the problems facing them, and the speed with which those problems are escalating. Ecologically speaking, Mauritius is a war zone and Carl, Richard and others - including Wendy Strahm, an equally obsessed botanist - are like surgeons working just behind the front line. They are immensely kind people, often exhausted by the demands that their caring makes on them. Their impatience often erupts into a kind of wild black humour because, faced with so much that is absolutely critical, they can't afford the time for anything that is merely very, very urgent.

The focus of their work is Carl's captive breeding centre in the village of Black River , and Richard took us along to see it the next day.

We screeched to a halt outside the gate set in a six foot high stone wall and went in.

Inside was a large sandy courtyard, ringed with low wooden buildings, large aviaries and cages. The warm air was rich with the sounds of flapping and cooing and sharp, bracing smells. Several very, very large tortoises were roaming about the centre of the yard completely free, presumably because virtually anybody would be able to beat them to the gate if they suddenly decided to make a break for it.

There you are,' said Richard, pointing at a large cage off to one side in which someone appeared to have hung a number of small broken umbrellas, 'Rodrigues fruitbats. You can relax now, you've seen 'em. Look at them later, they're boring. They're nothing to what else we've got here. Pink pigeons for a start... this place has got some of the rarest, sexiest birds in the world. And you want to see the real stars? I'll see if Carl's in. He should be the one to show you.'

He took us for a quick hunt, but Carl wasn't there. There was, however, someone who was besottedly in love with him. Richard beckoned us in.

`This is Pink,' he said.

We looked.

Pink gazed at us intently with his two large, deep brown eyes. He fidgeted a little with his feet, clawing at his perch, and seemed tense, expectant, and slightly irritated to see us.

`Pink's a Mauritius kestrel,' said Richard, `but he's basically weird.'

`Really?' said Mark. `Doesn't look it.'

'What does he look like to you?

'Well he's quite small. He's got sleek brown outer plumage on his wings, mottled brown and white breast feathers, impressive set of talons...'

`In other words you think he looks like a bird.'

'Well, yes...'

`He'd be shocked to know you thought that.'

'What do you mean?

`Well, one of the problems with breeding birds in captivity is that they sometimes have to be reared by humans, which leads to all sorts of misunderstandings on the bird's part. When a bird hatches from its egg it doesn't have much of a clear picture of what's what in the world, and it falls in love with the first thing that feeds it, which in Pink's case was Carl. It's called "imprinting" and it's a major problem because you can't undo it. Once he's made up his mind that he's a human, he...'

'He actually thinks he's a human?' I asked.

'Oh yes. Well, if he thinks Carl's his mother it more or less follows, doesn't it? They may not be brilliant, but they're logical. He's quite convinced he's a human. He completely ignores the other kestrels, hasn't got time for them, they're just a bunch of birds as far as he's concerned. But when Carl walks in here he goes completely berserk. It's a problem because, of course, you can't introduce an imprinted bird into the wild, it wouldn't know what the hell to do. Wouldn't nest, wouldn't hunt, it would just expect to go to restaurants and stuff. Or at least, it would expect to be fed it wouldn't survive by itself.

`However, he does have a very important function in the aviary.

You see, the young birds that we've hatched here don't come to sexual maturity at the same time, so when the females start getting sexy, the males are not ready to handle it. The females are bigger and more belligerent and often beat the males up. So when that happens, we collect semen from Pink, and...'

'How do you do that? asked Mark.

'In a hat.'

'I thought you said in a hat.'

`That's right. Carl puts on this special hat, which is a bit like a rather strange bowler hat with a rubber brim, Pink goes mad with desire for Carl, flies down and fucks the hell out of his hat.'

`What?

'He ejaculates into the brim. We collect the drop of semen and use it to inseminate a female.'

`Strange way to treat your mother.'

'He's a strange bird. But he does serve a useful purpose in spite of being psychologically twisted.'

Setting up the captive breeding centre on Mauritius is one of Carl's major failures. in fact it is the result of probably the most spectacular and brilliant failure of his life.

`They always thought I would be a failure when I was a boy,' he told us when he turned up later, incredibly late for something. 'I was hopeless, a complete write-off. Never did any work, wasn't interested in anything at all. Well, anything other than animals. Nobody at my school in Wales thought it was very useful being only interested in animals, but I had about fifty of them, to my father's despair, in cages all over the backyard. Badgers and foxes, wild Welsh polecats, owls, hawks, macaws, jackdaws, everything. I even managed, just as a schoolboy, to breed kestrels in captivity.

'My headmaster said it was nice that I had an interest, but I would never get anywhere because I was a lousy scholar. One day he called me into his study and said, 'Jones," he said, "this just isn't acceptable. You spend your whole life going around looking under hedges. You spend no time doing your school-work. You're a failure. What are you going to do with yourself?"

'I said - and remember, this was in Wales , "Sir, I want to go to tropical islands and study birds."

'He said, "But to do that you have to be either rich or intelligent and you're neither."

'I took this as some kind of encouragement, finally managed to pass a few exams, went to college, and when I was an undergraduate I went to a lecture in Oxford by Professor Tom Cade, who's a world authority on falcons. He told us how in America they were working with peregrine falcons by breeding them in captivity and releasing the young back into the wild.

'I couldn't believe it. This was incredibly exciting. Here were these people going out and actually doing something. Then he said that in the Indian Ocean on an island called Mauritius there was a very rare bird, perhaps the rarest of all falcons, called the Mauritius kestrel, which was, at the moment, doomed to extinction, but that it could possibly be saved by captive breeding. And it suddenly came to me that all this work I'd been doing in my back yard as a kid, fiddling round with birds, could actually be used to save a whole species from becoming extinct.

'I was overwhelmed by excitement and I . thought, Christ, I must see if I can do something about this. So in the summer I went to America and studied a number of the projects there, saw how they were doing it, and promised myself that if I possibly could, I'd go to Mauritius and work to save the Mauritius kestrel.

`And they said, "Well, Carl, it's all very well you wanting to go to Mauritius but there's lots of problems out there and you can't save these birds. There just aren't enough of them. just one breeding pair and a couple of other individuals. And with all the local problems and no facilities, it just can't be done. There's a small project there, but it's got to be closed down. It's just throwing good resources after bad."

'But I got the job. The job was to close the project down. That was the job I came here to do, ten years ago, close the whole thing down, what there was of it. None of this was even here then,' he said, looking around at the captive breeding centre in which they had raised over forty Mauritius kestrels for gradual reintroduction to the wild, two hundred pink pigeons, and even a hundred Rodrigues fruitbats. `I suppose I have to admit,' he said with a naughty smile, `that I've been a complete failure.'

As he finished his story his hand dropped to his knee and he happened to catch sight of his watch. Instantly a distraught expression came into his face and he jumped to his feet, clapping his hand to his head. He was late for a fund raising meeting.

We heard him complain regularly and bitterly during our time on Mauritius that he was no good at administration or politics, and yet to keep his work going he had to spend an awful lot of time doing both. He had constantly to work raising money, justifying and accounting for the money he gets to the people he gets it from, and negotiating with the various international conservation bodies who seem to watch over his shoulder all the time. As far as he's concerned it just prevents him from doing the work he's best able to do, and he wishes they'd leave him alone and let him get on with it. Or rather, give him the money and then leave him alone and let him get on with it. The whole project, to save the fragile and unique ecology of Mauritius , is run on a pathetically meagre budget, and money - or the lack of it - is the bane of Carl's life. He left in a harassed fluster.

`You'd think that everyone involved in conservation work would be on the same side,' said Mark after he'd gone, 'but there's just as much squabbling and bureaucracy as there is in anything else.'

`You're telling me,' said Richard. `And it's always the workers out in the field who get mucked about by it. Look at these rabbits.'

With a contemptuous wave of his hand he showed us a cage in which a few perfectly ordinary looking rabbits sat twitching at us.

`There's an island near here - a very, very important island as far as wildlife is concerned - called Round Island . There are more unique species of plants and animals on Round Island than there are on any equivalent area on earth. About a hundred, hundred and fifty years ago somebody had the bright idea of introducing rabbits and goats to the island so if anybody got shipwrecked there they'd have something to eat. The populations quickly got out of hand and it wasn't until the mid-seventies that they managed to get rid of the goats. Then just a few years ago a team from New Zealand came to exterminate the rabbits, until someone realised that they were exterminating a rare breed of French rabbit that didn't exist any more in Europe and it should therefore be transferred to mainland Mauritius and preserved in some way, i.e. by us.

`As far as I'm concerned,' continued Richard, 'we could just put them in the pot. They're just ordinary rabbits. Also, since then someone has come along and said, "That's a load of rubbish - these aren't that particular variety."

`So we've just got to sit here feeding these rabbits until the rabbit experts have decided whether they're valuable or not. It's a waste of our time and resources. I mean just feeding all these animals is a problem. They all need something different and you have to work out what it is.

These Rodrigues fruitbats you've come to see, we have to feed them on a mixture of fruit and powdered dog food reconstituted with milk. They used to be fed a diet rich in banana which did them no good at all and only gave them a nervous tic.' He shrugged.

`I don't know what you've got against them,' said Mark, 'I think they're great animals.'

'I've nothing against them. They're great. They're just common that's all.'

Mark protested, `It's the rarest fruitbat in...'

'Yeah, but there are hundreds of them,' insisted Richard.

`Hundreds means they're severely endangered!' said Mark.

'Do you know how many echo parakeets there are in the wild? exclaimed Richard, 'Fifteen! That's rare. Hundreds is common. When you come to Mauritius and you see things in such a last ditch state, everything else becomes unimportant. It becomes unimportant because we're witnessing here a species which could be saved if people put their minds to it, and if it does go extinct it will be our fault because we never got around to saving it. There's fifteen of them left. We've got the kestrels up and the pigeons up purely because of the effort we've put into them, the money and the personnel. The parakeets? We're working very, very hard to save them, and if we don't manage it they will be gone for ever, and we have to worry about somebody else's rabbits.'

He shook his head, and then calmed down.

`Listen,' he said to Mark. `You're right. The Rodrigues fruitbat is a very important animal, and we are working to protect it. It's lost a lot of its habitat because the people of Rodrigues live by subsistence farming which means that they've done a lot of forest clearance. The bat population is so reduced that one big cyclone - and we get them here - could wipe them out. But the Rodriguans have suddenly realised that it's actually damaging their own interests to cut down the forest, because it's reducing their water supply. If they want to preserve their watersheds they have to preserve the forests, which means the bats get somewhere to live. So they're in with a chance. By the world's standards they're severely endangered, but by the standards of these islands where every indigenous species is endangered, they're doing fine.'

He grinned.

`Want to see some endangered mice? he said.

'I didn't think mice were an endangered species yet,' I said.

'I didn't say anything about the species,' said Richard. 'I just meant the particular mice. Conservation is not for the squeamish. We have to kill a lot of animals, partly to protect the species that are endangered, and partly to feed them. A lot of the birds are fed on mice, so we have to breed them here.'

He disappeared 'into a small, warm, squeaking room and re-emerged a few seconds later with a handful of freshly killed mice.

`Time to feed the birds,' he said, heading back towards the Landrover from hell.

The best and quickest road to the Black River gorges where the kestrels live is a private one through the Medine sugar estate.

Sugar, from the point of view of the ecology of Mauritius , is a major problem. Vast swathes of the Mauritius forest have been destroyed to provide space to grow a cash crop which in turn destroys our teeth. This is serious anywhere, but on an island it is a very special problem, because island ecologies are fundamentally different to mainland ones. They even have a different vocabulary. When you spend much time on islands with naturalists you will tend to hear two words in particular an awful lot: `endemic' and 'exotic'. Three if you count 'disaster'.

An 'endemic' species of plant or animal is one that is native to an island or region and is found nowhere else at all. An 'exotic' species is one that has been introduced from abroad, and a disaster is usually what results when this occurs.

The reason is this: continental land masses are big. They support hundreds of thousands, even millions, of different species, each of which is competing with another for survival. The sheer ferocity of the competition for survival is immense, and it means that the species that do survive and flourish are mean little fighters. They grow faster and throw out a lot more seeds.

An island, on the other hand, is small. There are far fewer species, and the competition for survival has never reached anything like the pitch that it does on the mainland. Species are only as tough as they need to be, life is much quieter and more settled, and evolution proceeds at a much slower rate. This is why you find on, for instance, Madagascar , species like the lemurs that were overwhelmed aeons ago on the mainland. Island ecologies are fragile time capsules.

So you can imagine what happens when a mainland species gets introduced to an island. It would be like introducing AI Capone, Genghis Khan and Rupert Murdoch into the Isle of Wight - the locals wouldn't stand a chance.

So what happens on Mauritius , or indeed any island, is that when endemic vegetation or animals are destroyed for any reason, the exotic forms leap into the breach and take over. It's hard for an Englishman to think of something like privet as being an exotic and ferocious life form - my grandmother has neatly trimmed privet bushes lining her front garden - but in Mauritius it behaves like a bunch of marauding triffids. So does the introduced guava and numerous other foreign invaders, which grow much more quickly and produce many more seeds.

Black ebony comes from the lowland hardwood forests of Mauritius , which is why the Dutch first colonised the island. There's hardly any of it left now. The reasons for the forest being cut down include straightforward logging, clearing space for cash crops, and another reason: deer hunting. Le Chasse.

Vast tracts of forest have been cleared to make game parks, in which hunters stand on short wooden towers and shoot at herds of deer that are driven past them. As if the original loss of the forest were not bad enough - and for such a reason - the grazing habits of the deer keep the fragile endemic plants from regrowing, while the exotic species thrive in their place. Young Mauritian trees are simply nibbled to death.

We passed through huge fields of swaying sugar cane, having first negotiated our way past the sugar estate's gate keeper, an elderly and eccentric Mauritian called James who will not let anybody through his gate without a permit, even someone he's let through every day for ten years but who has accidentally left his permit at home that day. He did this to Carl recently, who since then has been threatening to superglue the gate shut in revenge, and it's quite possible that he will. Carl is clearly the sort of person who will get as many laughs as he can from a situation by threatening to do something silly and then try and get a few more by actually doing it.

There was a more serious 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 round 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 and 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 its 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 which have been swapped around like that have a much higher success rate.

Richard yanked the Landrover 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, so 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 round.

`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 which are equipped with metal green architect-designed `trees' which, 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 particular paints they had for painting lichen on trees. I mean it's bloody ridiculous, who are these people? OK. 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 'Teeking' 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 co-operate 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 round to see him and brought her boss with her, a Frenchman from the nearby island of Reunion 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 obviously wanted 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 making a programme 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 Reunion ,' 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 smartly and went off into the kitchen to wash up, very, very loudly. Only when Jacques had gone did he return. He stalked back into the room carrying an unopened bottle of rum and slammed himself into the corner of a battered old sofa.

`About five years ago,' he said, 'we took twenty of the pink pigeons that we had bred at the centre and released them into the wild. I would estimate that in terms of the time, work and resources we had put into them they had cost us about a thousand pounds per bird. But that's not the issue. The issue is holding on to the unique life of this island. But within a short time all of those birds we had bred were in casseroles. Couldn't believe it. We just couldn't believe it.

'Do you understand what's happening to this island? It's a mess. It's a complete ruin. In the fifties it was drenched with DDT which found its way straight into the food chain. That killed off a lot of animals. Then the island was hit with cyclones. Well, we can't help that, but they hit an island that was already terribly weakened by all the DDT and logging, so they did irreparable damage. Now with the continued logging and burning of the forest there's only ten per cent left, and they're cutting that down for deer hunting. What's left of the unique species of Mauritius is being overrun by stuff that you can find all over the world - privet, guava, all this crap.

`Here, look at this.'

He handed the bottle to us. It was a locally brewed rum called Green Island .

`Read what it says on the bottle.'

Underneath a romantic picture of an old sailing ship approaching an idyllic tropical island was a quotation from Mark Twain, which read, 'You gather the idea that Mauritius was made first and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after Mauritius .'

'That was less than a hundred years ago,' said Richard. `Since then just about everything that shouldn't be done to an island has been done to Mauritius . Except perhaps nuclear testing.'

There is one island in the Indian Ocean , close to Mauritius , which is miraculously unspoilt, and that is Round Island . In fact it isn't a miracle at all, there's a very simple reason for it, which we discovered when we talked to Carl and Richard about going there.

You can't,' said Carl. `Well, you can try, but I doubt if you'd manage it.'

°Why not?' I asked.

'Waves. You know, the sea,' said Carl. 'Goes like this.' He made big heaving motions with his arms.

`It's extremely difficult to get on,' said Richard. 'It has no beaches or harbours. You can only go there on very calm days, and even then you have to jump from the boat to the island. It's quite dangerous. You've got to judge it exactly right or you'll get thrown against the rocks. We haven't lost anybody yet, but...'

They almost lost me.

We hitched a ride on a boat trip with some naturalists going to Round Island, anchored about a hundred yards from the rocky coastline and ferried ourselves across in a dinghy to the best thing that Round island has to offer by way of a landing spot - a slippery outcrop called Pigeon House Rock.

A couple of men in wetsuits first leapt out of the dinghy into the tossing sea, swam to the rock, climbed with difficulty up the side of it and at last slithered, panting on to the top.

Everyone else in turn then made the trip across in the dinghy, three or four at a time. To land, you had to make the tricky jump across on to the rock, matching the crests of the incoming waves to the top of the rock, and leaping just an instant before the wave reached its height, so that the boat was still bearing you upwards. Those already on the rock would be tugging at the dinghy's rope, shouting instructions and encouragement over the crashing of the waves, then catching and hauling people as they jumped.

I was to be the last one to land.

By this time the sea swell was getting heavier and rougher, and it was suggested that I should land on the other side of the rock, where it was a lot steeper but a little less obviously slippery with algae.

I tried it. I leaped from the edge of the heaving boat, lunged for the rock, found it to be every bit as slippery as the other side, merely much steeper, and slithered gracelessly down it into the sea, grazing my legs and arms against the jagged edges. The sea closed over my head. I thrashed about under the surface trying desperately to get my head up, but the dinghy was directly above me, and kept bashing me against the rockface whenever I tried to make for the surface.

OK, I thought, I've got the point. This is why the island is relatively unspoilt. I made one more lunge upwards, just as those on shore succeeded at last in pushing the boat away from me. This allowed me to get my head up above water and cling on to a crack in the rock. With a lot more slipping and sliding and thrashing in the heavy swell I managed finally to manoeuvre myself up to within arm's reach of Mark and the others, who yanked me urgently up and on to the rock. I sat in a spluttering, bleeding heap protesting that I was fine and all I needed was a quiet corner to go and die in and everything would be all right.

The sea had been swelling heavily for the two or three hours it had taken us to reach the island and it seemed as if my stomach had heaved something approaching my entire body weight into the sea, so by this time I was feeling pretty wobbly and strung out and my day on Round island passed in rather a blur. While Mark went with Wendy Strahm, the botanist, to try and find some of the species of plants and animals that exist only here on this single island, I went and sat in the sun near a palm tree called Beverly and felt dazed and sorry for myself.

I knew that the palm tree was called Beverly because Wendy told me that was what she had christened it. It was a bottle palm, so called because it is shaped like a Chianti bottle, and it was one of the eight that remain on Round Island , the only eight wild ones in the world.

Who on earth, I wondered, as I sat next to Beverly in a sort of companionable gloom, gets to name the actual islands?

I mean, here was one of the most amazing islands in the world. It looked utterly extraordinary, as if the moon itself was rising from the sea - except that where the moon would be cold and still, this was hot and darting with life. Though it appeared to be dusty and barren at first sight, the craters with which the surface was pocked were full of dazzling white-tailed tropicbirds, brilliant Telfair's skinks and Guenther's geckos.

You would think that if you had to come up with a name for an island like this you'd invite a couple of friends round, get some wine and make an evening of it. Not just say, oh it's a little bit round, let's call it ` Round Island '. Apart from anything else it isn't even particularly round. There was another island just visible on the horizon, which was much more nearly round, but that is called Serpent Island , presumably to honour the fact that, unlike Round island, it hasn't got any snakes on it. And there was yet another island I could see which sloped steadily from a peak at one end down to the sea at the other, and that, unaccountably, was called Flat Island . I began to see that whoever had named the islands probably had made a bit of an evening of it after all.

The reason that Round island has remained a refuge for unique species of skinks, geckos, boas, palm trees, and even grasses that died out long ago on Mauritius is not simply that it is hard for man to get on to the island, but that it has proved completely impossible for rats to get ashore. Round Island is one of the largest tropical islands in the world (at a bit over three hundred acres) on which rats do not occur.

Not that Round Island is undamaged - far from it. A hundred and fifty years ago, before sailors introduced goats and rabbits on to the island, it was covered in hardwood forest, which the foreign animals destroyed. That is why from a distance and to the untutored eye, such as mine, the island appeared to be more or less barren at first sight. Only a naturalist would be able to tell you that the few odd-shaped palms and clumps of grass dotted about the place on the hot, dry, dusty land were unique and unspeakably precious.

Precious to whom? And why?

Does it actually matter very much to anyone other than a bunch of obsessed naturalists that the eight bottle palm trees on Round Island are the only ones to be found in the wild anywhere in the world? Or that the Hyophorbe amarfcaulis (a palm tree so rare that it doesn't have any name other than its scientific one) standing in the Curepipe Botanic Gardens in Mauritius is the only one of its kind in existence? (The tree was only discovered by chance while the ground on which it stands was being cleared in order to construct the Botanic Gardens. It was about to be cut down.)

There is no `tropical island paradise' I know of which 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 any more.

So it can come as a shock to realise that the world we hear described by travellers 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 small islands have been so important to our understanding of life. On the Galapagos islands , for instance, animals and plants which shared the same ancestors began to change and adapt in different ways once they were divided from each other 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 which 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 of 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 learnt 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 round 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 any more. Ever. As a result of the extinction of 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 fruitbat, but first of all we went to look at something that 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 called Raymond Aquis was teaching at a school in Rodrigues and gave his class pictures of about ten plants that were 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 round it to stop it being cut down.

Immediately 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 cure hangovers and gonorrhoea. 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 Kew Gardens is 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 fruitbats 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.