It's been a strange week, to say the least.
Sirocco, the
kakapo, has been taking the world by storm and made this endangered flightless
parrot from New Zealand
a household name. In case you missed the fifth programme, we had what can only
be described as an intimate encounter (Sirocco tried to mate with my head) and
the resulting two-minute clip somehow appeared on news programmes from America to Australia. Now, it has become an
internet sensation - apparently, it is the most-viewed video on the BBC website
and, at the last count, has been seen by more than a million people on YouTube.
We knew at
the time that Sirocco's little outburst would make good television, but had
absolutely no idea that it would attract quite so much attention. Meanwhile,
Stephen has taken to calling me the Kakapo Porn King and I am slowly getting
used to people coming up to me in the street and asking if the scars have
healed.
The good
news is that, as a result, the kakapo project in New Zealand has been swamped with
donations and offers of help. That makes it all worthwhile.
This week
also marks the end of the series - with our search for the blue whale in Baja California,
Mexico. I'd
been looking forward to introducing Stephen to the largest animal on the planet
and it more than lived up to expectations. Stephen was so taken by the
experience that he said it was one of the best days of his life. It's hard to
describe what it's like being next to an animal almost as long as a Boeing 737,
but suffice to say it is one of the greatest wildlife experiences anyone could
ever hope to have.
The whole
point of the series, of course, was to retrace the steps I'd taken with Douglas
Adams twenty years earlier - and the final programme was the only time we
didn't actually do that. We should have gone to China
to look for the Yangtze river dolphin, but we
had to cancel our plans when this troubled freshwater dolphin was officially
declared extinct before we could get there. It was this, more than anything
else, that brought home to me what had been happening in the twenty-year gap.
Last
Chance to See was a series about endangered species and conservation, of
course, but six hours of doom and gloom television ranting about all the
terrible things we are doing to the planet, just wouldn't have worked. Few
people would have watched and many of those would have switched off halfway
through. But our hope was that, by mixing extremes such as these - the
silliness of Sirocco mating with my head, the sheer joy of encountering a blue
whale and the shock and sadness of the Yangtze river dolphin disappearing
before our very eyes - we could make a series about conservation without anyone
really noticing that it was a series about conservation.
I hope I haven't been sounding too negative in these blogs, because it's certainly not all bad news in the world of conservation. And thank goodness - we need success stories, proving that we really can make a difference, to keep us all going.
Here in Britain, one high profile conservation achievement is the return of the
beautiful red kite. Almost wiped out by widespread killing in Victorian times, its population had plummeted to just ten pairs by the beginning of the Second World War. Hiding in a remote corner of Wales, they survived against all the odds - with a little help from their human friends.
Thanks to ongoing reintroductions, and the dedication of so many conservationists, farmers, landowners and committed individuals, now there are more than 1,200 pairs right across Britain.
It just shows that a species on the brink can recover.
Now the kakapo population stands at 124. It's still teetering on the brink but, thanks to
New Zealand's Department of Conservation and literally hundreds of volunteers, it has more than trebled in 20 years.
Do you notice the common factor? Dedicated people. One thing that struck me more than anything else while filming Last Chance to See was that Stephen and I were able to meet up with the very same people Douglas Adams and I had met 20 years earlier. They are still out there in the field devoting their lives (and, in many cases, risking their lives) in their sheer and utter determination to protect the animals they care about so much. They are the ones who are standing between endangered species and extinction.
When the going gets tough, it's these people, who have dedicated their lives - to the red kite, the kakapo and the likes of gorillas, robins, rhinos, turtles and lemurs - that give me so much cause for optimism.
| 11:16 UK time, Monday, 26 October 2009
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