At a quarter past twelve, Wahab began to get restive. At twelve-thirty, he started pacing up and down outside the tent. When he organised something, he liked it to run smoothly. At half past one, we made some tea and congratulated ourselves on not having used up all the water. At half past two, Wahab took Zozo outside. They went up on to the blistering helipad and stood there, gazing hopefully at the dim, heat-haze-blurred mountains of Mauritius.
Wahab’s very annoyed,’ said John. ‘He likes things to be done properly.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘but what can we do? We could radio, I suppose.’
When Wahab came back, I suggested it. He thought for a bit, and then we took the tiny radio transmitter up on to the helipad and stood in a perspiring circle, trying to make it work.
‘It’s no good,’ said John, at last, ‘it’s as dead as the Dodo.’
Wahab gave him a reproachful look. We trooped back to the tent, leaving the defunct radio on the helipad.
‘Zozo looks really worried,’ said John, in a whisper.
‘Well, he has only recently been married,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s a bit early to find himself turned into a Robinson Zozo.’
‘I think he really imagines we’ve had it,’ said John.
Zozo was sitting, moodily, under a palm tree nearby. I decided to lighten his gloom.
‘Zozo,’ I called.
^Yes, Mr Gerry?’ he said, peering at me from under the brim of his solar topee, which made him look ridiculously like a green mushroom.
‘It seems as if the helicopter is not coming to rescue us.’
‘Yes, Mr Gerry,’ he agreed, soulfully.
‘Well,’ I said, kindly, ‘I wanted you to know that, by an overwhelming vote, we have decided to eat you first when the food runs out.’
For a moment, he stared at me, wide-eyed; then he realised it was a joke and grinned. Even so, it did little to relieve his gloom. Wahab prepared to go up on to the helipad for the twentieth time.
‘I can’t understand where they are,’ said Wahab, irritably.
‘Look,’ I said, soothingly, ‘why don’t we have a cup of tea? Zozo, put the kettle on.’
Zozo, glad to have something to do, filled the kettle.
‘You’ll see,’ I said to Wahab, ‘the moment that kettle starts to boil, the helicopter will arrive.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Wahab.
White man’s magic,’ I said solemnly, and he grinned at me.
Strangely enough, just as the kettle started to boil, we heard the drone of the approaching helicopter. Within half an hour, we had packed everything in and, in an indignant snowstorm of tropic birds, took off with our precious cargo of snakes and lizards lying in their cloth bags on our laps.
At my request, the pilot circled the island at low level. We saw its great humpback, bare and desiccated, and the edge of its crater, as if some giant sea monster had taken a bite out of its side, and the pathetic, thin belt of palms and Latanias running like a pale green half-moon round one side, and over it looming the great sheets of eroded tuff. It seemed incredible that even now, when the island was practically dead, it should provide a home for such a variety of creatures and plants, and even more incredible that six of them should be found nowhere else in the world.
As we rose higher and higher, and the island dwindled against the turquoise sea, I became determined that we must do everything we could to save it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PINK PIGEON POSTSCRIPT
By 1975 the Black River project had a pair of Pink pigeons, the female of which David McKelvey reckoned was too old to breed, and two odd male birds. As there had been no breeding success by 1976, it was thought imperative that some more birds be caught to increase the captive breeding stock. The problem was that the entire flock of pigeons appeared to have vanished from the cryptomeria grove. Looking for thirty-five birds in that vast area of forest was a Herculean task. John and Dave spent many hours soaked to the skin, hopefully surveying various areas; but all searches were in vain. When they should have been in the cryptomerias, building their ridiculous nests, they were nowhere to be seen. This was extremely worrying. With the benefit of hindsight we now think that the two cyclones, which had forced us to abandon Round Island and had bogged us down for so many days, were responsible for retarding the breeding season. However, at the tail end of our final trip, the Pink pigeons suddenly returned to the cryptomeria grove and started to nest.
Since nothing had been done between 1975 and 1976 and it seemed most urgent that a reasonable breeding group should be established, both in Mauritius and in Jersey, I decided that, after we had returned to Jersey, John should return to try to capture more Pink pigeons for the captive breeding project at Black River and to procure a breeding nucleus for us here. So after we had returned to Jersey with our precious cargo of Round Island geckos and snakes, John had to prepare to go back to Mauritius once again.
When he got back, he went straight to the cryptomeria grove and found himself a suitable tree. From this vantage point he could survey most of the valley. He settled down to await the Pink pigeons. After three hours, he began to wonder whether the pigeons had once more moved out of the cryptomerias to some other area. Then, glancing about, he suddenly saw, in the tree next door to him, a Pink pigeon sitting on a nest. As he said, ‘Once I’d seen the damn thing, it was obvious that I had been staring at it for three hours and it had been invisible.’ Greatly excited, he climbed down, made his way to the base of the tree with the nest in it, and sat there until dark to make sure that no monkeys found it, for he could hear troops of them all around in the forest.
When it was dark, he hurried back and alerted Wahab, Tony Gardner and Dave. The four of them planned to return to the nest at dawn. If there was a baby in the nest, they proposed to take it and replace it with a young rammier pigeon of the same size. Then they planned to put mist nets round the tree to catch the parent birds. All worked very well. They found to their delight that the nest contained an almost fully-fledged baby and this was duly replaced with the baby rammier pigeon. Then, with great difficulty, they rigged up the mist nets.
However, when the mother bird returned, either by cunning or stupidity — one suspects the latter — she evaded the nets but happily continued to feed a baby which in no way resembled her own. They waited all day but without success and so, leaving the nets in position, they went home to return the following morning at dawn. By the time they got back, monkeys had found the nest. It had been destroyed and the rammier chick devoured. So, although they could not catch the parent birds, at least they had the satisfaction of knowing that they had saved the Pink pigeon baby from being killed. It was kept in the aviaries at Black River and within three days was flying and feeding itself.
Meanwhile, John continued to search for nests, and soon discovered another one containing an egg. He and Dave had discussed at length what they should do in a case like this and had decided on a course of action. From Dave’s observations they knew that both the sexes incubated the eggs and that the change-over between the parents occurred at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. approximately. So the plan was to take the egg, to be placed eventually in the incubators at Black River, and to substitute for it a domestic pigeon’s egg. Then the nest was to be covered with a specially adapted bal-chatri in the hopes of catching the parents. By this means we would know that we had secured a true pair, for since the sexes were alike, if you caught an odd bird it was difficult to know what sex it was. The bal-chatri is a very ancient device used by falconers for capturing hawks. It consists of a rounded cage, like an old-fashioned meat or cheese safe, into which is put one’s bait — in the case of hawks, a bird and in the case of the nest, an egg. The whole of the top of the contrivance is covered with fine nylon nooses. The idea is that, once the bird lands on the bal-chatri, it will get its feet entangled in one or other of the hundreds of little nooses that cover it.