Last Chance To See

Have you seen the aye-aye? the komodo dragon? The mountain gorilla? the kakapo? the baiji dolphin?the rodrigues fruitbat? If you have, then you are one of the lucky ones. These are on the endangered species list, scheduled to disappear into the night sometime in the near future if we dont get our act together and make the right moves to help conserve and further their tribe.

I havent seen any of them. But after reading Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine, I have. The book is a fascinating account of these animals and birds told in the inimitable style of Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ). In a departure from writing humorous science-fiction (if I can call it that - it bugs me when I can never find Douglas Adams listed under Humor but under Science-Fiction), here is a book written after he took an expedition around the world with Mark Carwardine, a zoologist, writer and photographer.

To quote from the opening page of the book:

"This isn't at all what I expected. In 1985, by some sort of journalistic accident I was sent to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine to look for an almost extinct form of lemur called the aye-aye. None of the three of us had met before. I had never met Mark, Mark had never met me, and no one, apparently, had seen an aye-aye in years.

This was the idea of the Observer Colour Magazine, to throw us all in at the deep end. Mark is an extremely experienced and knowledgeable zoologist, working at that time for the World Wildlife Fund, and his role, essentially, was to be the one who knew what he was talking about. My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise. All the aye-aye had to do was do what aye-ayes have been doing for millions of years - sit in a tree and hide."

Believe me, after that the book is un-putdownable! I have always enjoyed his work, and this book is an excellent read - for the wonderfully humorous detailing of all these endangered animals and birds. Get hold of a copy and read it.