We left the electrician and his fiendish contraption in the village and drove back to Dungun for dinner, then, at half past six, we piled ourselves and our equipment into the Land-Rover and drove down to the turtle beach. It was a beautifully warm, moonless night, the ideal sort of night for the turtles to come ashore. When we arrived at the village, we found the headman, several egg collectors and our circular electrician all jumping up and down excitedly at the edge of the road and waving their arms about. Apparently a large female turtle had just made her appearance and was even now hauling herself up the beach some three hundred yards away. This was an unprecedented stroke of luck and so, groaning under the weight of the portable generator and the cameras, we hurried after the egg collector who had spotted the female. Presently, panting and sweating and covered with sand (for we had an fallen down at least once before we reached the spot), we arrived at where the turtle lay.
I knew they were big, but I had not been prepared for anything quite so massive. She lay on the sand like the hull of an overturned dinghy; her head was the size of a large dog’s, with enormous, heavy lidded, filmstar eyes that gazed mournfully into space. With her hind flippers, that were curiously mobile and hand-like, she had scooped out a crater in the sand some four feet across and two feet deep. Very carefully cupping her flippers, she was scooping out the damp sand to make a nice, cup-shaped hollow for the reception of her eggs. The exertion of having hauled herself up the beach and of digging this hole, caused her to pant and wheeze distressingly, and periodically she would stop digging and have a rest, uttering, at the same time, a prolonged, shuddering sigh that was quite heartrending. The mucus that normally lubricated her eyes and protected them against the sea water, now flowed copiously from them. It trickled down her cheeks and hung there in long, shining, glutinous strands and this, combined with her heartrending sighs, gave the impression that she was suffering from a melancholy so deep and so anguished that nothing could possibly alleviate it. Her shell was very curious, for it had the colouring and texture of a well-dubbined saddle with just the curious line of little pyramid shaped nodules of bone running down the middle.
She dug on solidly for about half an hour and then, apparently satisfied, she shifted her position slightly so that her tail and rear end were directly over the hole. Then, without any apparent effort, she started to lay. The first egg dropped into the nest, gleaming white and sticky in the lamplight like a huge pearl. There was a slight pause and then there was a positive fusillade of eggs, dropping as rapidly as gigantic hailstones into the nest. Most of the eggs were about the size of a billiard ball but here and there were some which were only the size of a ping-pong ball and others the size of a large marble. Whether these stunted eggs would ever have hatched is, I think, a moot point, but of the ninety-odd eggs she laid, there were at least ten or fifteen of these deformities. When she had finished laying, she started to shovel the sand back into the hole, using principally her hind flippers, and stopping every now and then to pat the sand down tight. When the eggs were well covered, her front flippers came into play, and she used these with a scything movement to scoop up the sand on her broad-bladed paddles and throw it behind her, so that her hind flippers could stamp it into position. When the hole was completely filled in, she shuffled her great body over it, allowing her weight to do the final pile-driving of packing the sand into position; then she hauled herself forward a few feet and started hurling sand backwards with her front flippers with complete abandon. At first I could not quite see the point of this manoeuvre, until I realised that what she was doing was camouflaging the nest, for a smooth, flattened area on the beach would have been instantly noticeable, whereas now, under this hail of loose sand, it very soon became indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain. When she was satisfied that she had obliterated all traces of her presence, she started to haul her great nine foot bulk down the beach, a slow and laborious process which took her about half an hour, interrupted by long rests during which she sighed and gasped and blew bubbles, and the long chains of mucus hanging from her eyes became more and more encrusted with sand. Then she reached the very edge of the sea and a wave broke and washed her face clean. She lay for a few minutes, luxuriating in the feel of the water, and then slid forward across the wet sand. The waves broke over her and then suddenly lifted her, arid from being a gigantic, ungainly creature, she became swift and agile. She turned on her side, waved one flipper at us in a rather saucy gesture of farewell and, with speed and grace, shot out to sea.
Several more turtles came out that night and so by about midnight we had obtained all the shots we wanted and, tired but happy, made our way back to Dungun.
The following morning we returned to the beach to see and film the conservation measures that were being taken to preserve the turtle. This scheme was quite a recent innovation and had only been in operation for one season prior to our arrival. The man in charge of the operation, from the Fisheries Department, explained the system to me. The nests, as I said before, were purchased at the current market price from the concessionaire; these nests were then carefully dug up and the eggs transported to a special fenced off area of the beach. Here a new nest hole was dug at just the right depth, the eggs placed in it and then the sand carefully packed down on top of them: it was very important to try to simulate exactly the conditions of the real nest. Then each nest was marked with a little wooden cross on which was written the date on which the eggs were laid, the number of eggs, and later, the number that hatched. The result of this was that the fenced off area of the beach looked rather like a lilliputian war cemetery with its rows and rows of little wooden crosses solemnly stuck in the sand. They had buried, the previous year, ninety-five nests, which amounted to some eight thousand eggs, out of which more than three thousand had hatched successfully. In the normal course of events, when the baby turtles hatch, they dig their way to the surface and then rush down the beach as fast as they can and into the sea. By some curious, telepathic means, most of the ocean’s predators such as sharks and barracudas, seem to know when the succulent babies are about to hatch, and so they line the shallow water in a hungry barrier and the babies have to run the gauntlet through this barrier to survive. What with the large proportion of babies lost in this way, plus the fact that the eggs were being harvested in such quantity, the outlook for the leathery turtles was pretty grim. In order to circumnavigate the line of hungry sharks and barracudas, each of the little war graves was surrounded, when it neared the time of hatching, with a circle of chicken wire so that when the babies hatched, they could not make their way down the beach. They were then collected in buckets and tubs and taken on the Fisheries launch some two or three miles out to sea, where they were scattered over a wide area. In this way they stood a much greater chance of survival.
When they first hatch, the babies bear very little resemblance to their ponderous parents – some four inches long, they wear gay, pinstriped suits of bright green and yellow and are rather enchanting-looking little creatures. Nobody knows how long it takes one of these little pinstriped babies to grow to maturity, but one imagines that it must be in the neighbourhood of twenty to thirty years before they are old enough to come back to the beach of their birth and dig their own nests.
So far, this scheme has been a great success and I hope that it will continue to be so. The great, white beach at Rantau should always be a safe nursery for these giants of the sea.
Summing up
He had softly and suddenly vanished away –
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
Hunting of the Snark
So we came to the end of our journey, which had taken us some 45,000 miles through three countries, and during which we had met dozens of fascinating animals. I feel that – as I have rather tended to concentrate on these animals to the exclusion of everything else – I may have given a rather lopsided and too glowing a picture of conservation. I would like to try to remedy that now.
Firstly, what does conservation mea
n? It is not merely the saving from extinction of such species as the notornis, the leadbeater’s possum or the leathery turtle; this is important work but it is only part of the problem. You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that you have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is not only vital for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself – a point that seems to escape many people.
We have inherited an incredibly beautiful and complex garden, but the trouble is that we have been appallingly bad gardeners. We have not bothered to acquaint ourselves with the simplest principles of gardening. By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves, in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic war, and we are doing it with all the bland complacency of an idiot child chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors. We go on, year after year, all over the world, creating dust bowls and erosion by cutting down forests and overgrazing our grasslands, polluting one of our most vital commodities – water – with industrial filth, and all the time we are breeding with the ferocity of the brown rat, and wondering why there is not enough food to go round. We now stand so aloof from nature that we think we are God. This has always been a dangerous supposition.
The attitude of the average person to the world they live in is completely selfish. When I take people round to see my animals, one of the first questions they ask (unless the animal is cuddly and appealing) is, ‘what use is it?’ by which they mean, what use is it to them? To this one can only reply, ‘what use is the Acropolis?’ Does a creature have to be of direct material use to mankind in order to exist? By and large, by asking the question ‘what use is it?’ you are asking the animal to justify its existence without having justified your own.
The picture of conservation that I found in New Zealand, Australia and Malaya was distressingly familiar. Small bands of dedicated, underpaid and overworked individuals are fighting a battle against public apathy and political and big business chicanery. By and large people are only apathetic because they do not realise what is going on, but the most dangerous part of the problem is political apathy because it is only at top level that you can get things done. Most politicians would not risk their careers for the sake of conservation, because firstly they do not think it is important, and secondly they treat all conservationists with the disregard that they would display to an elderly spinster’s ravings over her pet peke. A Cabinet Minister, no less, in New Zealand said to me that it did not matter if some albatrosses which nested on an island in the south deserted their colony. The reason he gave for this was that the island was so far south that no one interested in albatrosses could get down there anyway, so why worry? My reply was that there were a number of paintings and sculptures in Europe which I should probably never see, but I would not suggest destroying them on that score. But if you get this sort of attitude at government level, what chance does the conservationist stand? People very complacently say, ‘Oh, there are large national parks and the wildlife will be quite safe in those.’ What very few people realise is that the greater majority of these national parks are not inviolate. Should, for example, gold or tin or diamonds be found in them, the government could immediately allow mining in the area, thus destroying the whole point of the park. This is not just an alarmist attitude, because it has been done in the past. In fact, while I am writing this, there is a suggestion in New Zealand that mining activities take place on an island which is supposed to be one of their major sanctuaries and which is the last outpost for several unique species of bird. Again, in many areas animals have full protection on paper: you are not allowed to hunt or capture them. But this is purely paper protection and does not apply in fact for the simple reason that no machinery has been set up, either through apathy or through lack of funds, to implement the law. It is rather like saying you must not kill your neighbour but if you do we cannot stop you because we have no police force.
During the last few years there has been a growing awareness among people of the importance of preserving wildlife and its habitat. For a lot of species – the number, in fact, fills two fat volumes – this concern has come too late. In a great number of other cases there are species whose population has been cut down to such an extent that only a herculean effort can possibly save them.
All my life I have been extremely concerned about this problem. It seems to me that in many cases one could, by taking appropriate action, safeguard the creature in its natural habitat, but in many other cases this is an impossibility – or at least an impossibility at this moment. A good example of what I mean is the case of the flightless rail, of Inaccessible Island, one of the Tristan da Cunha group. This tiny little bird exists only on this island, which is about four square miles in area. It is found nowhere else in the world. On paper it is strictly protected, which is fine, but a friend of mine, a keen ornithologist who is in the navy, called in at Tristan da Cunha on his destroyer, and among the many souvenirs that the local people brought on board to sell to the sailors were rather badly stuffed flightless rails. Now the total world population of this bird cannot be more than a few hundred, since the size of their habitat would not support more, so what sort of damage is this depredation doing? There is no game warden in Tristan da Cunha to watch over the flightless rail; it would be completely impractical to have one. Yet, on that minute speck of land, the accidental introduction of rats or pigs or cats or any one of the human beings’ henchmen, could destroy the flightless rail as completely as the dodo in a matter of weeks or months. So there is your problem. In a case like this, how does one go about saving the rail? You can designate the island a sanctuary, but rats, pigs and cats unfortunately would be the last to hear of it, and unless there was somebody on the spot (which would cost money) you could not be certain that the sanctuary would be anything other than another airy paper promise. If, therefore, the rail is to be saved, it must be taken into safe custody in a place where it can live and breed without fear of human or animal predators.
The case of the flightless rail is not an isolated one; there are dozens of hundreds of species all over the world which are in a similar predicament. Sometimes they are threatened by the fact that their habitat is being destroyed or they are being preyed upon by human beings to such an extent that they can no longer hold their own, or else they are threatened by the fact that in the country in which they live there is such a total ignorance of conservation that people just simply do not worry.
At one time, if you had suggested that these creatures should be rescued and kept and bred in captivity, you would have been shouted down by all the well-meaning but woolly minded animal lovers who are fondly under the impression that an animal in the wild state leads an idyllic existence. But slowly even these people have come to realise that in certain cases this is the only way of saving a species. In the last hundred years there have been several spectacular examples of this. The Pére David deer, for instance, which was only known from the gardens of the Imperial Palace in Peking. After considerable difficulty (because the bamboo curtains in those days was even thicker than it is today) a few specimens of this remarkable deer were brought to Europe. It is just as well, because during the Boxer rebellion the herd in the Imperial Palace gardens was slaughtered and eaten. With much care and trouble, the late Duke of Bedford gathered together a few specimens dotted about in zoos in Europe and formed a small herd at Woburn Abbey. Over the years these have increased and now number some four hundred. Breeding pairs have been sent to most of the major zoos in the world and just recently a pair was actually sent back to China.
The same success story can be told of the European bison, the Hawaiian goose, the North American bison and a great many others. The most recent and spectacular example was the case of the Arabian oryx. Hunted and harried by Arabs in fast cars with ma
chine-guns and even, very sportingly, hunted by plane, this beautiful creature was reduced in numbers to such an extent that it was quite obvious that it could not hold its own. There were no conservation laws to protect it and the Arabs were completely uninterested in the fact that it might become extinct. A few of the remnants of this species were caught and shipped to America, where they are successfully breeding. At some future date, should the attitude towards conservation in their native home change, breeding pairs can be sent back to re-populate the areas from which they have been exterminated.
When dealing with a species, people always delude themselves as to numbers. ‘Oh, there are plenty of those,’ is the usual phrase, simply because they happen to have seen a hundred and fifty specimens at a given moment; it never seems to occur to them that those might be the only hundred and fifty specimens in existence. That you can eliminate even the most prolific species in a very short space of time, is exemplified by the passenger pigeon. This was found in North America in such numbers that it was probably the biggest concentration of birds known on earth. Some flocks were, at a conservative estimate, 2,230,272,000 birds strong. When they roosted, the weight of their numbers broke large branches off trees. There was some small justification for saying that there were plenty of those! So they were shot unmercifully, because there were plenty of them, and their eggs and young were taken in vast quantities, because there were plenty of them. The last passenger pigeon died, celibate, in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. If somebody had had the interest to take four or five specimens of this prolific species and breed them in captivity, the passenger pigeon would not be extinct. Then, as the attitude towards conservation changed in North America, it could have been re-introduced to its former range.