It is obvious that Rodrigues cannot support them. The colony from which John and I collected the breeding groups has now risen, thankfully, to about 800 animals, as there have been no major hurricanes recently and human disturbance in Cascade des Pigeons has been minimized. But 800 bats are thought to be about as many as the remains of Rodrigues’ natural forests can cope with. Even if the current reafforestation programme is a success, it will be many years before the new forests could support bats, and even if it were possible to set up another colony in Cascade des Pigeons the problem of hurricanes remains. It is only a matter of time before an enormous one hits this tiny island and removes the trees of Cascade des Pigeons as the wind whips a scarf from one’s throat.
We had thought of the Chagos Archipelago lying just over a thousand miles north of Rodrigues. These islands are uninhabited and outside the cyclone belt and the trade winds. It is presumably because of this that no bats flew or were blown there to colonize them. There are three atolls in the group which could conceivably support a fruit bat colony: Diego Garcia, Peros Banhos and Salomon. At one time the islands were planted with copra but the plantations were abandoned in 1972. Some of the fruit trees and vegetable gardens established by the copra growers are going wild, and these might provide a food source for any introduced bat.
Needless to say, like so many pleasant islands Diego Garcia is a military base now, and access is strictly controlled. The other two islands, however, may possibly be able to sustain a bat colony, although it is always unwise to introduce alien creatures into in ecosystem. One has seen what havoc they produce – be it deer in New Zealand, rabbits in Australia or donkeys on the Galapagos. However, in the case of these islands, all the natural vegetation was removed to make way for copra. In addition, rats, cats, pigs and goats were introduced and have become feral, with all the concomitant effects that such creatures have on any ecosystem. Therefore, the introduction of the Rodrigues fruit bat could not worsen the situation, but could help save the species from extinction and possibly be beneficial to the regeneration of the vegetation as well.
It has been proved that fruit bats play a very important ‘gardening’ role in forests as flower pollinators. Moreover, they eat the fruit, the seeds pass through their bodies as they fly from place to place, drop to the forest floor and take root, spreading that particular species of fruit tree across a wide area. It is never wise to say – as so many people do in scornful tones – what use is it? of any creature or plant, for it assuredly has a use, though it may not be immediately apparent. The horticultural activities of bats aid a host of other life forms, including man himself.
We asked permission to visit Diego Garcia and permission was refused, the authorities telling us to focus our attention on the other two islands. This we are doing in the hopes of finding a safe haven for our little flying golden teddy bears, for that is what they look like. We hope that by the time we find this haven it will not have been turned into an atomic bomb range. Anything is possible in a world where killing seems to be more important than preserving.
While the Rodrigues fruit bat is suffering from the ‘There Syndrome’, some other animals from the Indian Ocean are being cured of it. This is the story of Round Island, which I think is our most impressive achievement to date: we have rescued an island and its unique inhabitants from oblivion.
* * *
When John Hartley and I were in Mauritius setting up the breeding project for the Pink pigeon, my attention was drawn to the problems facing Round Island, a volcanic cone some 350 acres in extent, lying thirteen miles north-east of Mauritius. The extraordinary thing about it is that on this small scrap of earth live no less than two lizards and two snake species and several plant species found nowhere else in the world. Furthermore, it is one of the very few elevated tropical islands in the world free of rats and mice, and it is an important breeding station for various seabirds. Many years ago Round Island resembled Mauritius in miniature: that is to say the high parts of the island were thickly forested with hardwood trees including ebony, while on the lower slopes lay an apron of palm savannah. Then sometime in the 1800s some fool released some goats and rabbits on the island, of all animals the most destructive. The result was like shutting a Sabre-toothed tiger in a sheepfold. What the goats did not eat the rabbits did, and soon the hardwood forest had disappeared altogether, the palm savannah was fighting a rearguard action and the rapidly eroding island was slowly but surely starting to slip into the sea. On my first visit it was looking like the raddled, seamed death mask of a centenarian Red Indian, with only a scattering of palms, a few pandanus and some scant low growth left. It was obvious that something had to be done very quickly about the reptiles, for their habitat was being munched away as it grew. John and I paid two visits to the island, for the Mauritius government was in complete agreement that a nucleus of the reptiles should be captured for a captive-breeding initiative first in Jersey and later, perhaps, in Mauritius. A method for dealing with the rabbit and goat situation was, we were informed, in hand.
I have collected animals in a great many parts of the world and none of the captures has been easy. However, on Round Island the reptiles went out of their way to be cooperative to an extraordinary degree. Of the lizards, the Telfair’s skinks were so tame that when we squatted down to have a picnic in what little shade was provided by a pandanus’ green hand-like leaves, they joined us with whole-hearted enthusiasm. Large smooth-scaled reptiles, a sort of greyish caramel colour which was iridescent as a rainbow when the sun caught them, they had pointed, intelligent faces and thick black tongues. They clustered around us, climbing into our laps and partaking of hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes and passion fruit in the most genteel way and sipping beer and Coca-Cola out of our glasses with all the decorum of a group of village ladies at a vicarage tea party. We felt like cads and bounders when, at the end of the repast, we simply picked up our well-behaved guests and bundled them head first into soft cloth bags, rather as the Mad Hatter and the March Hare bundled the Dormouse into the teapot in Alice.
Our next objective was the capture of the Gunther’s gecko, an eight-inch plump lizard with huge golden eyes, fan-shaped suckers on its toes and a mottled black and ash-grey skin as soft as velvet. They were not as convivial as the skinks and preferred to live in the remaining palm savannah, clinging to the trunks of the trees about halfway up. We had to use a more complex method of capture; we had to fish for them. We had brought bamboo poles with us and we attached slipknots of fine nylon to these. The geckos were most cooperative, staying quite still until we had the noose over their heads and round their fat necks. Then it was merely a question of chivvying them down the trunk and into a bag. This had to be done very gently and with great care, for should the lizard suddenly panic and pull against the noose there was a danger of the nylon cutting into the tissue-paper-soft skin of the neck. We were successful, however, and we now had twenty skinks and sixteen geckos in the bag – quite literally.
Next came the snakes. The two species found on Round Island are non-poisonous and distantly related to the family of snakes, which includes the boa constrictors of tropical America, but are now considered to comprise a family on their own. One of them is an olive-coloured snake with lighter markings, about three and a half feet long. During the day it rests in the skirt of dead fronds which hang down bases of the Latania palms, of which there are quite a few left in the savannah area. These snakes were easy enough to catch since they just lay there and let you pluck them out of the fronds, but the difficulty was that they lay so still they were difficult to spot. With the other species of snake, we had no success at all. It is subterranean and so much more difficult to locate. The last one had been seen in 1975; since then there had been no reports of it, and it was feared extinct. Though we hunted high and low, we could find no trace of it and regretfully decided that it must be so.
When we returned to Mauritius, we found that all hell had broken loose over the rabb
it and goat extermination plans for Round Island. The authorities had been advised that poisoning was the only solution since the terrain was too difficult to employ any other method, and so strychnine had been chosen. This is an unpleasant poison but, unfortunately, the only one apparently available at the time which could be left out in the blistering sun for days on end without losing its potency. In hindsight, of course, the choice of strychnine was even more unfortunate, for it was discovered later that it could have poisoned some of the reptiles, as well as the target goats and rabbits. However, strychnine was thought the best choice at the time, and it was imperative that Round Island be cleared of the offensive herbivores as soon as possible. Then someone connected with the project gave a press interview in which he blandly outlined the plan and pandemonium erupted.
Various animal protection societies in the UK took up the cause, baying like hysterical hounds, one of their representatives even going so far as to say to Sir Peter Scott (who was attempting to mediate) that he would rather see all the species on Round Island become extinct than one rabbit killed. The local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Mauritius who up till then had been most helpful and had agreed to the poisoning campaign now got cold feet, back-pedalled madly, and said it would be rank cruelty to poison the rabbits and goats and they would certainly do everything to stop it. In vain did we plead that at this rate the rabbits and goats would eradicate their food supply and thus die a slow death by starvation, surely worse than a quick one by poisoning. One English society for the welfare of animals did send out a marksman who spent some time on the island trying to eliminate the goats with the aid of a rifle and, to our considerable surprise, succeeded. I say to our surprise, for the animals were extremely wary and had made their headquarters at the lip of the volcano crater, the most difficult and dangerous terrain on the whole island. But this still left the insidious munching rabbits, and so matters rested.
It was during this extremely worrying time that an amusing incident occurred which lightened our load a little. The man in England who was causing the most trouble over the whole business of rabbit eradication was a certain Dr Glenfiddis Balmoral. This is obviously not his real name, but his name was sufficiently unusual to make it memorable. John Hartley and I, together with my friend Wahab Owadally, Chief Conservator of Forests for Mauritius, were attending a conference at London Zoo and, glancing casually through the list of participants, I saw the dreaded doctor was going to take part. I felt sure that if the three of us could get him somewhere privately we stood a chance of talking some sense into him. We planned our kidnap with great care. Firstly, I asked Michael Brambell, then Curator of Mammals at London Zoo, if we could borrow his house, which stood on the banks of the Regent’s Park Canal, not far from the conference hall. Then I got an exalted personage to introduce me to the doctor. He seemed a nice, sensible man and I was amazed that he was taking such an extreme view over the so-called Bunny Blood Bath. I said there was something I and my colleagues would like to discuss with him and would he join us during a break in the conference to have a drink at Michael’s house; he agreed with alacrity. Unfortunately he chose the moment when someone was giving a paper on breeding manatees, animals for which I have a passion, but I felt I would have to forgo it as Round Island was so important. It is one of the many sacrifices I have made in the name of conservation.
Anyway, we dragged the good doctor off to Michael’s house, raided the drinks cabinet and soon had our victim mellowing under the influence of a huge gin and tonic. I started in on the Round Island problem and its global importance. The good doctor listened, nodding wisely. When I flagged, Wahab took up the reins and explained how the rabbits were doomed to slow death by starvation. He painted such a horrific picture that there were tears in all our eyes. Then John leapt into the fray and explained eruditely why Round Island was of such biological significance that to let it be destroyed by rabbits would be criminal. Throughout this, the good doctor had nodded agreement, and said encouraging things like ‘Quite right – I agree – yes, very true,’ so it came as something of a shock finally, when we had run out of steam, to hear him say, ‘But I don’t really see how I can help you.’
I looked at him blankly.
‘But you’re Dr Glenfiddis Balmoral, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said, puzzled.
‘Of the Society for the Greater Protection of Fur and Feather?’
‘No, no,’ he corrected, ‘of the Society for the Preservation and Better Understanding of the Coleoptera.’
It was the wrong doctor. But who would have thought there could be two doctors with the same unusual name? The really bitter part of it was that I had missed my manatee paper.
In the meantime, seeds from the rare Round Island palms had been collected and successfully reared at the Botanical Gardens in Mauritius and we were having spectacular success in breeding all the reptile species we had brought back to Jersey. Of the Gunther’s gecko we have bred 235, of the friendly Telfair’s skink 327 and – probably our greatest achievement – 31 Round Island boas. We have sent specimens of the skinks and geckos on breeding loan to the USA, Germany, France, the UK, Holland and Canada, thus making sure that they were well established in captivity. Some of the boas we sent, appropriately enough, to Canada, to The Reptile Breeding Foundation belonging to Geoff Gaherty, whose enormous gift enabled us to build our own Reptile House.
We now had both palms and reptiles that could be returned to Round Island and all that stood in the way was this bunch of unattractive invaders. We had the ‘there’ to put native plants and animals back into, but the ‘there’ was not as yet suitable.
Ever since I visited New Zealand many years ago, I have kept in touch with the New Zealand Wildlife Service, probably the best in the world. In one of my letters, I mentioned the problems we were having with Round Island and asked if they had any suggestions, for I knew they had had terrible problems with rats and feral cats on their offshore islands. Back came the answer from Don Merton who said he thought could solve our problem for us. They had evolved a new form of poison which was specific to mammals and painless, unlike strychnine, and which moreover remained stable in extremes of temperature. In addition, said Don, he felt sure that if we approached the Wildlife Service he and some colleagues would be given leave of absence and would be delighted to place their expertise at our disposal and do the job for us. This seemed almost too good to be true, but in due course Don and his friends arrived in Mauritius carrying goodness knows how many hundredweight of deadly poison in their luggage, as well as tents, tarpaulins and other vital equipment. It was going to be a long job, we knew, for the task of poisoning all the rabbits in 350 acres of terrain which resembled the surface of the moon was not going to be easy. All this heavy equipment would have to be carried to Round Island by helicopter, since it would be impossible to land it all from boats and then carry it up almost perpendicular cliffs. Just as they were all packed up and ready to go on their vital mission, the government helicopter we were relying on broke down. We were in despair at the thought that we might have to put it off for yet another time, but a kindly Fate stepped in to our rescue. A destroyer of the Australian Navy was paying a courtesy call to Mauritius and had on board a spanking new helicopter. Frantic phone calls to the Australian Ambassador met with a kindly response and the Australian Navy was pressed into service to help us. Don and his team, plus their gear and poison, plus a six weeks’ water supply (for there was none on the island), were taken by HMAS Canberra to Round Island and there the helicopter lifted the whole cargo, both human and inanimate, on to the only bit of Round Island that could be called flat. Here Don and his team made camp and started work.
They did the most wonderful job under the most trying conditions and within six weeks Don reckoned that they had eliminated all the rabbits. However, to make absolutely sure, he and his team paid a return visit a year later. The reason we had to make sure of course was that if
there were half a dozen rabbits of both sexes left, the poisoning would have merely acted like a cull, the surviving rabbits would have undergone a population explosion and we would be back to square one. However, there was not a trace of a rabbit and Don sent me some exciting photographs that showed the carunculated, desiccated, eroded surface of Round Island already wearing a green haze of new growth. The island was having its second chance to survive. The work does not stop there, of course, for palms and, we hope, hardwoods will be planted. But we also hope that in fifty years’ time the island will closely resemble what it was some two hundred years ago, and offer a safe habitat for its strange and unique denizens.
Just recently, we had a visit from the distinguished author, Richard Adams, who wrote that extraordinary best-selling book about rabbits called Watership Down. Jeremy was showing him around the collection and, as Jeremy always does, was getting more and more enthusiastic about our work and particularly about the far-reaching ramifications of it. He was busily telling Mr. Adams probably more than he wanted to know about our work on Round Island when he made a mistake.