Last Chance to See

Adams, Douglas and Carwardine, Mark. Last Chance to See. New York: Harmony. 1990. Print

First Sentences:

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.

Description:

We all know or have heard of Douglas Adams for his humorous sci-fi novels (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Restaurant at the End of the Universe, etc.). But did you know of his travel and zoological experiences looking for the rarest of animals described in Last Chance to See? No? Well, grab it right now, sit back, and prepare to be delightfully amused and informed.

Last Chance to See compiles Adams' notes written in the late 1980s with zoologist Mark Carwardine describing their travels and adventures in obscure parts of the world. Their goal is to observe a number of very rare animals before they (the animals, not Adams and Carwardine) become extinct. 

The book is filled with Adams' usual humor, mainly at his own expense due to inexperience with the world of wildlife as well travel to primitive lands. He notes that the roles of the two explorers are clear: Cardardine is "the one who knew what he was talking about" while Adams is "to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to who everything that happened would come as a complete surprise."

The animals they seek and eventually find include, as described in Adams' non-scientific words:

• Aye-aye - a nocturnal lemur that "looks a little like a large cat with a bat's ears, a beaver's teeth, a tail like a large ostrich feather, a middle finger like a long dead twig, and enormous eyes that seem to peer past you into a totally different world which exists just over your left shoulder";

• Komodo dragon lizard - "over twelve feet long and stands about a yard high, which you can't help but feel is entirely the wrong size for a lizard to be, particularly if it's a man-eater and you're about to go and share an island with it";

• Northern White Rhinoceros - only 22 are left in the wild in Zaire, each weighs three tons "with nasal passages bigger than its brain.... The sheer immensity of every part of it exercises a fearful magnetism on the mind. When the rhino moved a leg, just slightly, huge muscles moved easily under its heave skin like Volkswagens parking";

• Kakapo - just 40 left in New Zealand, these flightless birds, living for centuries on an isolated island, "are generally unused to defending themselves....If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, though you know that it probably will not be";

• Baiji river dolphins - "half-blind for the reason that there is nothing to see in the Yangtze. The water is so muddy now that visibility is not much more than a few centimetres.....[They are] intelligent animals whose perceptive universe we could scarcely being to imagine, living in a seething, poisoned, deafening world, and that their lives were probably passed in continual bewilderment, hunger, pain, and fear."

Along the way he and Carwardine have to deal with:  

• Mosquito nets - that trap mosquitoes inside the bed area rather than outside the net; 

• Singing hippos - which use natural river banks to echo their voices; 

• Bizharzia - the second most common disease in world (after tooth decay) where tiny worms enter your body if you walk through infected water. (These facts are mentioned by Carwardian to pass the time as they slogged through yet another marshy bog), 

• Tiananmen Square - when it was still an easy, relaxed place of great beauty, speakers, music, history, and parents wandering around with children (just a few months before it became world famous for more violent reasons); 

• Rubberovers - the Chinese term for condoms which the explorers must purchase to cover a microphone for underwater recording, having to pantomime what they want to the astonishment of merchants and onlookers who offer advice and interesting solutions; 

• After shave - Adams purchases multiple bottles out of nervousness on his flight to China, then tries to get rid of them by hiding them in obscure spots, much like an animal marking his territory;

• One wild automobile driver - who continuously turns around to look at them in the back seat when asking questions, refusing to look forward towards the road until they give an answer to his satisfaction.

Their journeys can be summed up with the prophetic words Carwardine says to Adams when they meet for the first time in Madagascar: "Everything's gone wrong." Their adventures start off bad, and end even worse. But along the way they do see rare animals, meet odd and also professional people (sometimes the same person), and wonder about the future of these species ... and of our own.

Very highly recommended for anyone curious about our world, its inhabitants (human and animal), and a Mark Twain-like narrator who can describe these experiences with dry humor and piercing insight.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Quammen, David. The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

A naturalist and gifted writer, Quammen travels the world to islands to observe and record evolution and extinction. He is one of my favorite writers of the animal world.

Quammen, David Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature 

More from my favorite naturist, with short essays on a wide variety of quirky topics from mosquitoes, dinosaurs, cloning, population dynamics, mating of snakes, and much, much more. Wonderful!

Thomas, Lewis. Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher 

Short essays delightfully written about the inter-relationships of everything in the world, the beauty of each organism, music, germs, death, and poetry. Highly recommended classic in the field of biology for the non-scientist.