He shook his head, and then calmed down.
`Listen,’ he said to Mark. `You’re right. The Rodrigues fruitbat is a very important animal, and we are working to protect it. It’s lost a lot of its habitat because the people of Rodrigues live by subsistence farming which means that they’ve done a lot of forest clearance. The bat population is so reduced that one big cyclone – and we get them here – could wipe them out. But the Rodriguans have suddenly realised that it’s actually damaging their own interests to cut down the forest, because it’s reducing their water supply. If they want to preserve their watersheds they have to preserve the forests, which means the bats get somewhere to live. So they’re in with a chance. By the world’s standards they’re severely endangered, but by the standards of these islands where every indigenous species is endangered, they’re doing fine.’
He grinned.
`Want to see some endangered mice? he said.
‘I didn’t think mice were an endangered species yet,’ I said.
‘I didn’t say anything about the species,’ said Richard. ‘I just meant the particular mice. Conservation is not for the squeamish. We have to kill a lot of animals, partly to protect the species that are endangered, and partly to feed them. A lot of the birds are fed on mice, so we have to breed them here.’
He disappeared ‘into a small, warm, squeaking room and re-emerged a few seconds later with a handful of freshly killed mice.
`Time to feed the birds,’ he said, heading back towards the Landrover from hell.
The best and quickest road to the Black River gorges where the kestrels live is a private one through the Medine sugar estate.
Sugar, from the point of view of the ecology of Mauritius, is a major problem. Vast swathes of the Mauritius forest have been destroyed to provide space to grow a cash crop which in turn destroys our teeth. This is serious anywhere, but on an island it is a very special problem, because island ecologies are fundamentally different to mainland ones. They even have a different vocabulary. When you spend much time on islands with naturalists you will tend to hear two words in particular an awful lot: `endemic’ and ‘exotic’. Three if you count ‘disaster’.
An ‘endemic’ species of plant or animal is one that is native to an island or region and is found nowhere else at all. An ‘exotic’ species is one that has been introduced from abroad, and a disaster is usually what results when this occurs.
The reason is this: continental land masses are big. They support hundreds of thousands, even millions, of different species, each of which is competing with another for survival. The sheer ferocity of the competition for survival is immense, and it means that the species that do survive and flourish are mean little fighters. They grow faster and throw out a lot more seeds.
An island, on the other hand, is small. There are far fewer species, and the competition for survival has never reached anything like the pitch that it does on the mainland. Species are only as tough as they need to be, life is much quieter and more settled, and evolution proceeds at a much slower rate. This is why you find on, for instance, Madagascar, species like the lemurs that were overwhelmed aeons ago on the mainland. Island ecologies are fragile time capsules.
So you can imagine what happens when a mainland species gets introduced to an island. It would be like introducing AI Capone, Genghis Khan and Rupert Murdoch into the Isle of Wight – the locals wouldn’t stand a chance.
So what happens on Mauritius, or indeed any island, is that when endemic vegetation or animals are destroyed for any reason, the exotic forms leap into the breach and take over. It’s hard for an Englishman to think of something like privet as being an exotic and ferocious life form – my grandmother has neatly trimmed privet bushes lining her front garden – but in Mauritius it behaves like a bunch of marauding triffids. So does the introduced guava and numerous other foreign invaders, which grow much more quickly and produce many more seeds.