Eventually, drugged by heat, jet-lag and all the tropical scents, dazzled by sun and colour, and terrified by our driver’s ability to avoid death by inches, we arrived at the rambling, spacious hotel spread out in groves of hibiscus, bougainvillaea and casuarina trees along the blue and placid lagoon, with the strange mini-Matterhorn of Le Morne mountain looming up behind it. Here, we were greeted with gentle, languid charm and wafted to our respective rooms, thirty yards from where the blue sea whispered enticingly on the white beach.
The next day, we went down to meet the McKelveys of Black River, where the captive breeding programmes, sponsored by the International Council for Bird Preservation, the World Wildlife Fund and the New York Zoological Society, has been set up. David and his attractive wife, Linda, greeted us warmly and started telling us some of the trials and tribulations attendant upon trying to track down and capture specimens of the 33 Pink pigeons and the eight kestrels, which were the total population of these, some of the world’s rarest birds, in a thickly forested area the size of Hampshire. That Dave had met with success at all, was a miracle. He was an attractive-looking man in his mid-thirties, with dark hair and blue eyes that beamed with enthusiasm. His somewhat nasal voice seemed just a shade too loud, as if pitched towards that section of the audience farthest back in the hall. He had that nimbleness of wit and phrase that makes the speech of humorous Americans among the funniest and raciest in the world. The rapid, wise-cracking speech, studded with superlatives like a Dalmatian with spots, was in Dave’s case accompanied by the most extraordinary power of mimicry, so that he not only told you how the pigeons flew in overhead and landed and cooed, but imitated them so vividly that you felt you were witnessing the event.
‘I walked in those goddarned woods looking for the roosting sites until I sure as hell felt like a water-shed, the way I was rained on. I thought maybe I would get to growing mushrooms between my toes as a sideline. I felt about as hopeful as if I was looking for Dodos. I used to stay up there until way after dark, and let me tell you, it’s blacker than the inside of a dead musk ox’s stomach on those hills after dark. Then one day, wham, there they all were, flying in to Cryptomeria Valley, their wings going “whoof, whoof, whoof” and then, when they settled, they kind of bowed to each other and then went “caroo, coo, coo, caroo, coo, coo”. ’
Dave burbled on in this vein as he led us from his house to the walled garden nearby, where an enthusiastic local aviculturalist had donated the aviary space for the project.
‘Now,’ said Dave, as he led us up to the first aviary, ‘now you are going to see one of the rarest birds in the world and one of the most goddarned beautiful too, and tame as a newly-born guinea pig. They were from the start. There!’
In the aviary sat three undeniably handsome pigeons. They were much larger than I had imagined and more streamlined, but this was due to their extraordinary long tails and necks. With their reddish-brown plumage and the delicate cyclamen- pink blush on their necks and breasts, they were large and very elegant members of the family. They had small heads perched on long, soigne necks, which gave them a look rather like a feathered antelope. As we approached the wire, they peered at us in the mildly interested, oafish way that pigeons have and then, dismissing us from what passed for their minds, they fell into a doze. I felt that even though their rarity made them of great biological and avicultural importance, one could hardly say that they had personalities that inspired one.
‘They look rather like a wood pigeon that has been dyed,’ I said, unthinkingly, and Dave gave me a wounded look.
‘There’s only thirty-three of them left,’ he said, as though this made them much more desirable and beautiful than if there had been 25 million.
We moved on to the aviary that contained a pair of Mauritian kestrels. They were small, compact birds with wild, fierce- looking eyes, but here again, they bore such a close resemblance to the European and North American kestrels that only an expert could tell them apart, and the uninitiated could well be pardoned for wondering what all the fuss was about. Was I, I wondered, being unfair to the Mauritian kestrel just because it closely resembled a bird that I had been familiar with from childhood, had kept and flown at sparrows? Did this make me less anxious to enthuse over it than if it had been something as bizarre as a Dodo? After mature reflection for at least thirty seconds, I decided that this was not the case. Nothing could be more boringly like a guinea pig than a West Indian hutia, a rodent to which I was passionately attached and whose future was as black as the kestrels’. No, it was simply that I was more mammal than bird-orientated, and so a small, dull mammal appealed to me more than a small, dull hawk. I decided that this was remiss of me and made a vow to make amends in the future. Dave, meanwhile, was regaling me with the fate of a pair of kestrels that had been foolish enough to nest on a cliff face that was not totally inaccessible.
‘Monkeys,’ said Dave, dramatically, ‘the forest’s full of the damn things. Big as a six-year-old child, some of the males. Travel in huge troops. You can hear them, “aaagh, aaagh, aaagh, eeek, eeek, eeek, yaah, yaah” (that’s the old male), and then there are the babies, “week, week, week, eeek, eeek, eeek, yaah, yaah, yaah”.’
A whole troop of malevolent monkeys, from grandfathers to newly born, were conjured up as a torrent of sound poured from Dave’s vocal chords. These unnecessary, ingenious, and omnivorous pests had overrun the island and attacked not only the kestrels’ nests but the Pink pigeons’ as well.
After we had finished admiring the pigeons and the kestrels, we drove up to Curepipe, where the Forestry headquarters were situated. Here we met Wahab Owadally, the Conservator of Forests. He was a boyishly good-looking young Asian with an infectious grin and an even more infectious enthusiasm. After we had made polite noises at each other in his office, he and his European second-in-command, Tony Gardner, took us out to show us the handsome botanical garden that adjoined the office building. It was here that Wahab’s enthusiasm completely changed my attitude towards palm trees. They had never seemed to me a very inspiring dendrological growth when seen, dusty and moulting, lining tropical streets or standing shivering in what passes for an English summer in places like Bournemouth or Torquay, but here in the spacious and beautifully laid-out grounds of the botanical gardens of Curepipe they had come into their own. There were the tall, elegant Hurricane palms, the Royal ones, with trunks like a piece of the Acropolis, the famous Coco de Mer from the Seychelles and, above all, the palms that went straight to my heart, the Bottle palms. Wahab introduced us (and I use the term advisedly) to a small plantation of these enchanting trees. The trunk of each baby palm was shaped just like a Chianti bottle and from the top, exuberant and uncombed, the fronds sprang out like a green fountain. They looked like strange pot-bellied people and when their fronds moved in the breeze, it seemed as if they were waving at you.
Back in Wahab’s office, we discussed the things we ought to see and do in Mauritius. First of all, I was anxious to visit the Cryptomeria Grove in which the Pink pigeons nested, and then the Macabee Forest and the Black River Gorge Nature Reserves, which were the last haunt of the kestrel and the Mauritian parakeet. Wahab was also very insistent that we visit Round Island, a small island in a group lying north of Mauritius.
‘It is Mauritius’s answer to the Galapagos,’ he said, grinning, ‘an island of only three hundred and seventy- five acres, yet you have three species of tree, three species of lizard and two species of snake that are found nowhere else in the world. At the moment, the island is in great danger from introduced rabbits and goats, eating up all the vegetation. It’s a desperate situation which I’ll tell you more about when we are there. Until we solve this problem, the island is getting steadily more eroded so the reptile fauna is in great danger.’