It seemed to Arab that most of his recent life had been spent on islands, which was not just a coincidence: island ecologies are so fragile that many island species are endangered, and islands are often used as last places of refuge for mainland animals. Arab had himself tracked many of the twenty-five kakapos that had been found on Stewart Island and airlifted by helicopter in soundproof boxes to Codfish. They always tried to release them in terrain that corresponded as closely as possible to that in which they had been found, in the hope that they would re-establish themselves more easily. But it was very hard to tell how many of the birds were establishing themselves, or even how many had survived here.
The day was wearing on and the light was lengthening. Excitingly, we found some kakapo droppings, which we picked up and crumbled in our fingers and sniffed at in much the same way that a wine connoisseur will savour the bouquet of a fine New Zealand North Island Chardonnay. They have a fine, clean, herbal scent. Almost as excitingly we found some ferns which a kakapo had chewed at. They clip it and then pull it through their powerful bill so that it leaves a neat ball of curled up fibre at the end.
A lot less excitingly it was becoming very clear that the day was going to be completely free of any actual kakapos. As the evening gathered in and a light rain began to fall, we turned and trudged the miles we had come back through the forest. We passed the evening in the but making friends with the whisky bottle and showing off our Nikons.
Towards the end of the evening, Arab mentioned that he hadn’t really expected to find a kakapo today at all. They’re nocturnal birds and therefore very hard to find during the day. To stand any chance of seeing one at all you have to go and search when there is just enough light in the sky to let you actually see the thing, but when its scent is still fresh on the ground. About five or six in the morning was the time you wanted to go and look for them. Was that OK with us? He stood up and dragged _ his beard to bed.
Five in the morning is the most horrible time, particularly when your body is still desperately trying to disentangle itself from half a bottle of whisky. We dragged ourselves, cold, crabby and aching, from our bunks. The noise of sub-machine-gun fire from the main room turned out to be frying bacon, and we tried to revive ourselves with this while the grey morning light began to seep hideously up into the sky outside. I’ve never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I’ve seen a few and they’re never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you’re in the right frame of mind, which is usually about lunchtime.
After a lot of sullen fumbling with boots and cameras we eventually struggled out of the door at about six-thirty and trudged our way back out into the forest. Mark started to point out exciting rare birds to me almost immediately and I told him to take a running jump. A great start to a day of virtually unremitting ornithology. Gaynor asked me to describe the scene as we walked into the forest and I said that if she poked that microphone in front of me once more I’d probably be sick over it. I quickly found that I was walking by myself.
After a while I had to admit that the forest wasn’t that bad. Cold, wet and slippery, and continually trying to wrench my legs off at the knees with some bloody tangled root or other, but it also had a kind of fresh glistening quality that wouldn’t go away however much I glowered at it. Ron Tindal had joined us this time, and was busy striding his way through the undergrowth in an appallingly robust and Scottish manner, but even this ceased to make my head ache after a while as all the glistening began slowly to work a kind of soothing magic on me. Way ahead of us, half-glimpsed through the misty trees, the blue plaid windcheater moved silently like a wraith, following the busy clinking of Boss’s bell.