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The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.

It’s easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo, we are now sadder and wiser, but there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.

Some fish were jumping up the beach and into the tree, which struck me as an odd thing for a fish to do, but I tried not to be judgmental about it. I was feeling pretty raw about my own species, and not much inclined to raise a quizzical eyebrow at others. The fish could play about in trees as much as they liked if it gave them pleasure, so long as they didn’t try to justify themselves or tell one another it was a malign god who made them want to play in trees.

One of the characteristics that laymen find most odd about zoologists is their insatiable enthusiasm for animal droppings. I can understand, of course, that the droppings yield a great deal of information about the habits and diets of the animals concerned, but nothing quite explains the sheer glee that the actual objects seem to inspire.

“You’d think that everyone involved in conservation work would be on the same side,” said Mark after he’d gone, “but there’s just as much squabbling and bureaucracy as there is in anything else.”

It would help if there were plenty of them being born, but this brings us on to more problems. The kakapo is a solitary creature: it doesn’t like other animals. It doesn’t even like the company of other kakapos. One conservation worker we met said he sometimes wondered if the mating call of the male didn’t actively repel the female, which is the sort of biological absurdity you otherwise find only in discotheques.

I certainly don’t like the idea of missionaries. In fact, the whole business fills me with fear and alarm. I don’t believe in God, or at least not in the one we’ve invented for ourselves in England to fulfill our peculiarly English needs, and certainly not in the ones they’ve invented in America, who supply their servants with toupees, television stations, and, most important, toll-free telephone numbers. I wish that people who did believe in such things would keep them to themselves and not export them to the developing world.

[On the Rodrigues fruitbat:] “Yeah, but there are hundreds of them,” insisted Richard.

“Hundreds means they’re severely endangered!” said Mark.

“Do you know how many echo parakeets there are in the wild?” exclaimed Richard, “Fifteen! That’s rare. Hundreds is common. When you come to Mauritius and you see things in such a last-ditch state, everything else becomes unimportant.”

Wildlife conservation is always a race against time. As zoologists and botanists explore new areas, scrabbling to record the mere existence of species before they become extinct, it is like someone hurrying through a burning library desperately trying to jot down some of the titles of books that will now never be read.

The only people who do believe it are people who’ve read somewhere that other people believe it, and are ready and willing to believe anything they hear that they like the sound of.

The first people to pour in were the missionaries: Catholics who arrived to teach the native populace that the Protestants were wrong and Protestants who came to teach that the Catholics were wrong. The only thing the Protestants and Catholics agreed on was that the natives had been wrong for two thousand years.

The system by which Zaïre works, and which this card [a card urging Zaireans to be helpful to foreigners] was a wonderfully hopeless attempt to correct, is very simple. Every official you encounter will make life as unpleasant as he possibly can until you pay him to stop it. In U.S. dollars. He then passes you on to the next official, who will be unpleasant to you all over again.