A New World
My ramblings about science….

Zoology isn’t my thing but…

I’ve recently been reading “Last chance to see” which is a supurb book writen by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. It’s an account of their trips visiting endangered animals around the world for a BBC radio series.

Now one of the animals in this book that interests me the most is the Kakapo, a weird bird from New Zealand. There are around 80 of these birds alive at the moment on two islands. Which is a signficant increase on the around 40 when the book was writen in the 80’s.

Now why this bird interests me well firstly it’s odd. Very odd. And secondly it’s story is similar to that of the Dodo, which I’m sure we’re all familiar with. A flightless bird with no preditors evolves on an island, along come explorers and bring rats (and later cats), who naturally kill the birds. In the sad case of the Dodo this resulted in the fast extinction of the species, but the Kakapo was lucky, humans realised what was happening and are trying to save it.

To save this amazing bird, which makes an enormous array of different noises including a booming mating call, two islands where picked and every predator, cat, rat, possum etc. was hunted and killed. These same hunters trained dogs to hunt out the last of the Kakapo and set about finding them where they where known to be. The dogs are interestingly trained because of the lack of Kakapo it is obviousely hard to train the dogs what to hunt, so instead they train the dogs to not hunt anything else.

So I’ve called these parrots weird a few times now, and I suspect people will want justification on this point, well they’re flightless, which is not amazingly unusual even with birds, but they’re not used to being scared and one of their attempts at dealing with it is running away, climbing the nearest tree and then jumping out of it. They have no hope of flight they’re fat birds with small wings, they just drop…

It should also be said that whilst the book is mainly about these animals and their attempts at saving them Douglas Adams also spends some time considering how humans think about animals and anthropomorphis them. This leads to a discussion of the assumptions that humans make about animals, but also the assumptions we make about other humans. He uses their travels in China as an example of how the assumptions of two cultures are so very different.

I end on the note that you should read the book it’s funny and interesting.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Books, Zoology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.