FROM HER TREE PERCH, a female Mauritius kestrel eyes Carl Jones as if she has spotted a crazy man, and perhaps she has. Yesterday Jones placed plastic eggs in her cliff-hole nest, expecting her to incubate them. Now he wants her to believe that one of those dummy eggs has just hatched into her very own 21-day-old kestrel chick.
Instead, the baby falcon--rescued from malnourishment a few days ago-- arrived here with Jones in a plastic bucket, and the intended foster mother seems to know it. For two hours, as the Welshman's nose reddens in the tropical sun, she ignores the chick wherever he puts it. Finally, when she enters her nest, he scales the basalt cliff again and, sweet-talking the whole while, gingerly hands his fluffy ward to the wary female. She looks the other way.
If his kestrel matchmaking efforts seem futile, Jones is used to it. In the 21 years this ornithological St. Jude has been rescuing birds on the remote Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, his cases all have looked hopeless at first. Yet Jones, founder and scientific director of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation (MWF), has managed to defy extinction repeatedly. He and his MWF colleagues have brought back three bird species--the echo parakeet, the pink pigeon and the kestrel--whose numbers each had plummeted to around a dozen individuals.
Conservationists had written off these apparently lost causes, but Jones refused: "If you allow yourself to think like that, you end up achieving nothing." Now he says that "there is no species within the Mauritian ecosystem beyond our grasp," a daring boast considering the island's sad history: When the last dodo died here in the seventeenth century, Mauritius taught the world how quickly humans can drive an animal to extinction. Today Jones believes the island can teach the world how to turn back the clock--if only the world would listen.
When the first humans arrived on this 720-square-mile tropical island five centuries ago, none of its native species had ever seen a mammal other than a bat. Here the King of the Jungle was a giant vegetarian tortoise, and there were no large predators of any kind. Evolving over millennia in this safe environment, the island's birds gradually lost their wariness, and several species, including the dodo, also lost the ability to fly.
Such naiveté proved to be a boon for hungry humans who began arriving on ships in the sixteenth century, as well as for the monkeys, pigs, cats and rats they brought with them. First described by explorers around 1600, the dodo was extinct fewer than 80 years later.
Soon people and foreign creatures began to eat their way through one native species after another. Meanwhile, imported plants were overrunning the island, choking the few forests that had not been cleared for sugarcane. Birds such as kestrels, which once wove around ancient trunks on their short, rounded wings, suddenly found their paths blocked and their prey scarce. When weedy species finally began to bother people, the settlers adopted the wisdom of the old lady who swallowed a fly, and chased bad with worse. They introduced mynah birds to catch locusts, mongooses to kill rats, and snails to control other snails. Before long, each of these nonnatives had became a pest as well.
And so the dodo was followed into history by the domed Mauritian giant tortoise, 39 snail species, the blue pigeon, two owls and nearly a dozen other birds. Today the tally of bird extinctions on the island exceeds that of continental North America and Africa combined; only Hawaii has fared worse.
The kestrel also was on its way to extinction when Jones came to Mauritius in 1979, sent by the International Council for Bird Preservation (ICBP), which had long sponsored a project to bring back the bird. The raptor's population had been decimated by centuries of habitat loss and predation on eggs and chicks by monkeys, cats, rats and mongooses. More recently, widespread use of the pesticide DDT had further knocked down kestrel numbers. While DDT had been banned by the time Jones arrived--and despite nearly a decade of effort by ICBP--the bird had not recovered, and fewer than ten individuals survived. To stop what his employer viewed as a waste of scarce conservation funds, Jones's mandate was to shut the project down.
But in an act of heroic insubordination, the lanky, rough-hewn falconer disobeyed his orders and instead threw himself into saving the kestrel. To protect eggs and young from carnivores, he set up and encouraged the birds to use predator-proof nest boxes. He trained prey-starved kes- trels to take food from his hand. He even tricked females into laying extra eggs by removing new ones from nests, then bolstered the bird's numbers by incubating these eggs in captivity and releasing mature offspring. To Jones, the extinction of this bird was simply not an option.
Today about 800 of these tawny falcons swoop through the island's forests, a testament to Jones's gritty optimism. Once considered the world's most endangered bird, the Mauritius kestrel was taken off the IUCN--The World Conservation Union endangered list last year. And beyond rare situations such as disease or malnutrition, biologists no longer need to feed or breed the species in captivity. In the words of the late conservationist and author Gerald Durrell: "If ever anyone can be said to have snatched a species back from the brink of oblivion, then it can be said of Carl and this diminutive hawk."
Buoyed by the kestrel's resurrection, Jones and his MWF colleagues moved on to other apparently hopeless causes. Most desperate was the pink pigeon. This close relative of the dodo seemed destined to follow its cousin on the path to oblivion. Like the dodo, it had evolved to be defenseless and trusting--so much so that early witnesses believed the birds were drunk on fermented berries.
One sweltering day on the tiny islet of ele aux Aigrettes, MWF's Sarah Egglington inadvertently demonstrates what easy prey the birds make. As she hoists herself into a quivering tree in search of chicks, a fat mother pigeon sits tight on her eggs until Egglington practically pushes her off the nest, and the bird clumsily crashes her way to a nearby branch. "They're endangered for a reason," Egglington quips.
By 1990, predation by alien carnivores, habitat destruction and an introduced disease, trichomoniasis, had slashed the pigeon's population to just nine individuals. But MWF workers have been fighting back. The organization eliminated all cats and rats on ele aux Aigrettes. And Egglington spends her days doting on the birds with a dedication even mother pigeons cannot match. She knows each bird by name ("That one is Hutch. Starsky is dead.") and feeds the adults, measures their eggs and weighs the chicks. If she finds a chick showing symptoms of the dreaded trichomoniasis, Egglington stuffs a pill down its throat. The group's efforts seem to be working: Nationwide, the pink pigeon's numbers have swelled to more than 400, and like the kestrel, the species no longer requires captive breeding to keep its population growing.
Other Mauritian birds still need all the help they can get. An hour away from the parching heat of ele aux Aigrettes, in the rain-sodden forests of Black River Gorges National Park, MWF fauna manager Lance Woolaver faces a crisis. A poor growing season has left native trees barren of fruit in the last patch of forest where the echo parakeet clings to existence. Like so many chicks this season, the 20-day-old offspring of Toy Doll and Sib has virtually stopped growing. If the chick misses the 94 gram cut-off weight today, Woolaver will have to remove it to be hand reared at MWF's aviaries.
Hanging by a rope from a bois de natte tree, Woolaver examines the nearly naked chick. Its crop is empty, its eyes have gone dull and it weighs less than half what it should at this age. The inevitable decision pains Woolaver. "You've been watching mum sitting there for three weeks, and you realize she's going to go back and her chick's gone," sighs the soft-spoken Canadian. But with only 100 echo parakeets left on Earth--and only 26 of them female--he cannot afford to lose even a single chick.
So the rescue mission springs into action. Woolaver descends to the ground cradling the chick. He dribbles a rehydrating solution into its pink beak, then nestles the delicate bird into a foam-lined Thermos bottle. Back at his pickup, he transfers his charge to a portable incubator and makes a cell-phone call to the aviary staff. "We're bringing you one more chick," he warns them. "It's going to be very hungry and thirsty."
After a 45-minute, winding drive to the coastal town of Black River, parrot rearer Anne Morris takes over. To rehydrate the bird, she injects ringer's solution into each leg and begins spoon-feeding the famished young-ster. In three months, Woolaver will take over again, reacclimating the fully grown parakeet to the wild.
