My head ringing with their exuberant cries, I gave my mind to the problem now on hand. Owing to the fact that we had to match our pigeon-catching exploits to the availability of our gargantuan Task Force, we had been forced to choose this evening, when the moon was half full, rather than an evening when there was no moon at all. This meant that now it was dark, we would have to move very fast and try to catch our birds before the moonlight became too strong and thus gave them sufficient light to escape by.
Presently, we were all congregated at the foot of my pigeon tree to discuss strategy. We decided that, as all the birds we had pinpointed — five in all — were widely scattered throughout the cryptomeria forest, we would start with the one in the smallest and most easily climbed tree nearest to the path and gradually work outwards to the others. Having decided this, we converged on the first tree and surrounded it with our torch beams and the blinding light of the portable searchlight, directed up into the branches where a fat, sleepy, bewildered pigeon sat some thirty-five feet above us.
At first sight, it looked extremely simple to shin up and grab or net the bird, but closer inspection revealed that the tree was so constructed that in order to climb it one would have to cause the maximum amount of noise and commotion. This could well startle the bird into launching itself into the frightening, black night. We had a rapid council ofwar in whispers, while the pigeon, now fully awake, watched us with benign interest. It was decided that the Sergeant, possibly the most gigantic of our force but the best tree climber, would scale one of the adjacent trees while John Hartley, who had long arms, would scale another. They would then endeavour to manoeuvre themselves into a position from which the capture of the pigeon would be possible. We decided not to plan any further at this stage since things tend to look different when you are dangling thirty-five feet up in the air.
The Sergeant started up his tree, massive but extraordinarily agile, and John Hartley, long-legged as a crane fly, started up his. The pigeon watched them coming aloft with deep interest untinged by alarm, its head slightly on one side. When the Sergeant and John had simultaneously reached a height equal to that of the pigeon’s roost, they paused for breath, then in hoarse whispers confided to us that the Sergeant could edge along the branch to within netting distance of the bird. We eagerly told him to go ahead. We watched as he edged his twenty-odd stone of bone and muscle out along a branch that seemed too fragile to support a squirrel, let alone our ebony Goliath, but to our amazement he reached the end without it snapping.
Here, he manoeuvred the net into position. This net, as I have explained, was like a pair of sugar tongs with a net on each end. Clapped together, they caught the bird in the middle. At the sight of the net, the pigeon showed its first signs of wariness; that is to say, it put its head on one side and gave a slight flirt of its wings. The Sergeant now found that he needed to get another three feet closer to his prey and that this meant climbing to a higher branch. As the pigeon was now showing definite signs of unease, we decided to turn off our battery of lights and let the Sergeant get to his new vantage point in the dark as best he could. Some time, and a considerable amount of blasphemy later, he called down to us that he had successfully reached his new position.
We switched on our lights and discovered to our astonishment that the pigeon had seized this opportunity to tuck its head under its wing and snatch forty winks. When the lights came on again it pulled its head out from under its wing, with a gesture of irritability, and looked distinctly put out. The Sergeant, with an air of desperation, was now clinging to yet another fragile branch and working the net into position. Breathlessly, we watched him as he swept the net towards the pigeon; then we saw the bird, with surprising agility, hop farther down the branch but not fly away into the night. The Sergeant, clinging desperately to his bending, creaking branch, edged closer and took another swipe. This time, the two halves of the net snapped together and engulfed the bird, but the effort had been too much; Sergeant and branch bent downwards and in an effort not to let go and fall, he relinquished his hold on the handle of the net.
In silent horror, we watched it fall. The two sides of the ‘sugar tongs’ fell open so that our precious Pink pigeon was now only contained in one half of the net and could easily escape. Then
the falling net hit a tree limb and hung there. The pigeon gave a couple of half-hearted flaps and we waited to see if it would extricate itself from the net and fly away into the impenetrable gloom of the cryptomerias. However, after a token effort to escape, it lay stoically still, which was just as well as the net was only just hanging on to the branch.
Now we noticed something else. The branch in which the net was caught grew out at an angle and came quite close to the tree in which John Hartley was ensconced. Seeing this, John made his way rapidly down his tree and then out along the branches until he was separated from the net by a mere four- foot gap. With great care, since the branch he was on was both fragile and elastic, he reached across the gap. For a moment, I thought his arms were not long enough but then, to my relief, his hands closed round the mouth of the net. The Pink pigeon was ours.
Carefully, John eased his way back into the green depths of the cryptomeria where he transferred our capture from the net into one of the soft cloth bags with which he and the Sergeant had been provided. This safely done, he lowered the booty slowly down to the ground on a string. As the bag swung down out of the dark cryptomeria leaves, I received it reverently into my cupped hands. With great care, I opened it and extracted the pigeon for Dave to look at it. It lay quietly in my hands, without struggling, merely blinking its eyes in what appeared to be mild curiosity at this new experience. The colours seen so closely, even in an artificial light, were vivid and beautifuclass="underline" the pale chocolates of the wings and the back, the rusty, almost fox-red of the tail and rump, and then the broad breast, neck and head, pale grey flushed with cyclamen-pink overtones. It was a remarkably handsome bird.
Gazing at it, feeling its silken feathering against my fingers and sensing the steady tremor of its heart-beat and its breathing, I was filled with a great sadness. This was one of the 33 individuals that survived; the shipwrecked remnants of their species, eking out a precarious existence on their cryptomeria raft. So, at one time, must a tiny group of Dodos, the last of their harmless, waddling kind, have faced the final onslaught of pigs, dogs, cats, monkeys and man, and disappeared for ever since there was no one to care and no one to offer them a breeding sanctuary, safe from their enemies. At least with our help, the Pink pigeons stood a better chance of survival, even though their numbers were down to such a dangerously low level.
We had taken so long over the capture of this pigeon that the moon had come out in strength and, to our annoyance, there was not a cloud in the sky. Any operation to capture more pigeons was doomed to failure, since there was more than enough light for them to see to fly by. Our first attempt to climb up to their roosts sent them flapping out of the cryptomeria branches and off down the valley. To try to track them down would have been a hopeless waste of time. As we tumbled and slipped and sweated our way out of the valley into a landscape brilliantly frosted by moonlight, we carried our precious burden, the Pink pigeon. We felt we could not complain. To have caught one bird out of the 33 in that sort of terrain and at the first attempt, struck me, in fact, as being little short of a miracle.