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“What does a kakapo tracker do when there aren’t any kakapos that need tracking?”

“Kills cats.”

“Out of frustration?”

“No. Codfish Island was infested with feral cats. In other words cats that have returned to the wild.”

“I always think that’s an artificial distinction. I think all cats are wild cats. They just act tame if they think they’ll get a saucer of milk out of it.”

He nodded curtly to us and squatted down to fuss with his dog for a moment. Then he seemed to think that perhaps he had been a little over curt with us and leant across Boss to shake our hands. Thinking that he had perhaps overdone this in turn, he then looked up and made a very disgruntled face at the weather. With this brief display of complete social confusion, he revealed himself to be an utterly charming and likeable man.

The gorillas were not the animals we had come to Zaïre to look for. It is very hard, however, to come all the way to Zaïre and not go and see them. I was going to say that this is because they are our closest living relatives, but I’m not sure that that’s an appropriate reason. Generally, in my experience, when you visit a country in which you have any relatives living there’s a tendency to want to lie low and hope they don’t find out you’re in town. At least with the gorillas, you know that there’s no danger of having to go out to dinner with them and catch up on several million years of family history, so you can visit them with impunity.

[On how human activity on the Yangtze river affects the Baiji:] “I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be a blind man trying to live in a discotheque. Or several competing discotheques.”

“Well, it’s worse than that, isn’t it?” Mark said. “Dolphins rely on sound to see with.”

“All right, so it would be like a deaf man living in a discotheque.”

“Why?”

“All the stroboscopic lights and flares and mirrors and lasers and things. Constantly confusing information. After a day or two you’d be completely bewildered and disoriented and start to fall over the furniture.”

“Well, that’s exactly what’s happening, in fact. The dolphins are continually being hit by boats or mangled in their propellers or tangled in fishermen’s nets. A dolphin’s echolocation is usually good enough for it to find a small ring on the sea bed, so things must be pretty serious if it can’t tell that it’s about to be brained by a boat. Then, of course, there’s all the sewage, the chemical and industrial waste and artificial fertiliser that’s being washed into the Yangtze, poisoning the water and poisoning the fish.”

“So,” I said, “what do you do if you are either half-blind, or half-deaf, living in a discotheque with a stroboscopic light show, where the sewers are overflowing, the ceiling and the fans keep crashing on your head and the food is bad?”

“I think I’d complain to the management.”

“They can’t.”

“No. They have to wait for the management to notice.”

I began to feel how patronising it was of us to presume to judge their intelligence, as if ours was any kind of standard by which to measure. I tried to imagine instead how he saw us, but of course that’s almost impossible to do, because the assumption you end up making as you try to bridge the imaginative gap are, of course, your own, and the most misleading assumptions are the ones you don’t even know you’re making.

That evening I fell to wondering why it was that I was so intensely keen to find and see a kakapo and so little bothered by all the other birds.

I think it’s its flightlessness.

There is something gripping about the idea that this creature has actually given up doing something that virtually every human being has yearned to do since the very first of us looked upward. I think I find other birds rather irritating for the cocky ease with which they flit through the air as if it was nothing.

It was hard to avoid the feeling that somebody, somewhere, was missing the point. I couldn’t even be sure it wasn’t me.

The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realised that it was a system at all and that it wasn’t something that was just there.

I had no idea what I expected a freelance kakapo tracker to look like, but once we saw him, it was clear that if he was hidden in a crowd of a thousand random people, you would still know instantly that he was the freelance kakapo tracker. He was tall, rangy, immensely weather-beaten, and he had a grizzled beard that reached all the way down to his dog, who was called Boss.

The kakapo, though, is not an angry or violent bird. It pursues its own eccentricities rather industriously and modestly. If you ask anybody who has worked with kakapos to describe them, they tend to use words like innocent and solemn, even when it’s leaping helplessly out of a tree. This I find immensely appealing.

I mean, animals may not be intelligent, but they’re not as stupid as a lot of human beings.

So the question really is this: How do you persuade a young Yemeni that a rhino horn dagger is not a symbol of your manhood but a signal of the fact that you need such a symbol?