The female kakapo can't tell where the booming is coming from either, which is something of a shortcoming in a mating call. `Come and get me!' `Where are you?? 'Come and get me!' 'Where the hell are you?' `Come and get me!' `Look, do you want me to come or not?' `Come and get me!' 'Oh, for heaven's sake.' `Come and get me!' 'Go and stuff yourself,' is roughly how it would go in human terms.

As it happens the male has a wide variety of other noises it can make as well, but we don't know what they're all for. Well, I only know what I'm told, of course, but zoologists who've studied the bird for years say they don't know what it's all in aid of. The noises include a high frequency, metallic, nasal 'ching' noise, humming, bill-clicking, 'scrarking' (scrarking is simply what it sounds like - the bird goes 'scrark' a lot), `screech-crowing', pig-like grunts and squeals, duck-like `warks' and donkey-like braying. There are also the distress calls that the young make when they trip over something or fall out of trees, and these make up yet another wide range of long-drawn-out, vibrant, complaining croaks.

I've heard a tape of collected kakapo noises, and it's almost impossible to believe that it all just comes from a bird, or indeed any kind of animal. Pink Floyd studio out-takes perhaps, but not a parrot.

Some of these other noises get heard in the later stages of courtship. The chinging for instance, which doesn't carry so well, is very directional and can help any females that have been aroused by night after night of booming (it sometimes goes on for seven hours a night for up to three months) to find a mate. This doesn't always work, though. Females in breeding condition have been known to turn up at completely unoccupied bowls, wait around for a while, and then go away again.

It's not that they're not willing. When they are in breeding condition, their sex drive is extremely strong. One female kakapo is known to have walked twenty miles in one night to visit a mate, and then walked back again in the morning. Unfortunately, however, the period during which the female is prepared to behave like this is rather short. As if things aren't difficult enough already, the female can only come into breeding condition when a particular plant, the podocarp for instance, is bearing fruit. This only happens every two years. Until it does, the male can boom all he likes, it won't do him any good. The kakapo's pernickety dietary requirements are a whole other area of exasperating difficulty. It makes me tired just to think of them, so I think we'll pass quickly over all that. Imagine being an airline steward trying to serve meals to a plane full of Moslems, Jews, vegetarians, vegans and diabetics when all you've got is turkey because it's Christmas time, and that will give you the idea.

The males therefore get extremely overwrought sitting in their bowls making noises for months on end, waiting for their mates who are waiting for a particular type of tree to fruit. When one of the rangers who was working in an area where kakapos were booming happened to leave his hat on the ground, he came back later to find a kakapo attempting to ravish it. On another occasion the discovery of some ruffled possum fur in the mating area suggested that a kakapo had made another alarming mistake, an experience which is unlikely to have been satisfying to either party.

The net result of all these months of excavating and booming and walking and scrarking and being fussy about fruit is that once every three or four years the female kakapo lays one single egg which promptly gets eaten by a stoat.

So the big question is: How on earth has the kakapo managed to last this long?

Speaking as a non-zoologist confronted with this bird I couldn't help but wonder if nature, freed from the constraints of having to produce something that would survive a great deal of competition, wasn't simply making it up as it went along. Doodling in fact. 'How about sticking this bit in? Can't do any harm, might be quite entertaining.'

In fact the kakapo is a bird that in some ways reminds me of the British motorbike industry. It had things its own way for so long that it simply became eccentric. The motorbike industry didn't respond to market forces because it wasn't particularly aware of them. It built a certain number of motorbikes and a certain number of people bought them and that was that. It didn't seem to matter much that they were noisy, complicated to maintain, sprayed oil all over the place and had their own very special way, as T.E. Lawrence discovered at the end of his life, of going round corners. That was what motorbikes did, and if you wanted a motorbike, that was what you got. End of story. And, of course, it very nearly was the end of the story for the British industry when the Japanese suddenly got the idea that motorbikes didn't have to be that way. They could be sleek, they could be clean, they could be reliable and well-behaved. Maybe then a whole new world of people would buy them, not just those whose idea of fun was spending Sunday afternoon in the shed with an oily rag, or marching on Aqaba.

These highly competitive machines arrived in the British Isles (again, it's island species that have never learnt to compete hard. I know that Japan is a bunch of islands too but for the purposes of this analogy I'm cheerfully going to ignore the fact) and British motorbikes almost died out overnight.

Almost, but not quite. They were kept alive by a bunch of enthusiasts who felt that though ,the Nortons and Triumphs might be difficult and curmudgeonly beasts, they had guts and immense character and the world would be a much poorer place without them. They have been through a lot of difficult changes in the last decade or so but have now re-emerged, re-engineered as highly prized, bike-lovers' bikes. I think this analogy is now in serious danger of breaking down, so perhaps I had better abandon it.

A few days earlier I had had a dream. I dreamt that I awoke to find myself lying on a remote beach spreadeagled on huge round pink and pale blue boulders and unable to move, my head filled with the slow roar of the sea. I awoke from this dream to find myself lying spreadeagled on huge round pink and pale blue boulders on a beach and dazed with confusion. I couldn't move because my camera bag was slung around my neck and jammed behind a boulder.

I struggled to my feet and looked out to sea, trying to work out where on earth I was and if I was still embroiled in a recursion of dreams. Perhaps I was still on a plane going somewhere and was just watching an in-flight movie. I looked around for a stewardess but there was no one coming along the beach with a tray of drinks. I looked down at my boots and that seemed to trigger something in my head. The last clear memory that came to mind of looking closely at my boots was after emerging from a bog in Zaire when they were sodden with African mud. I looked around nervously. There were no rhinoceroses on the beach either. The beach was clearly not in Zaire because Zaire is landlocked and doesn't have them. I looked at my boots again. They seemed oddly clean. How had that happened? I remembered someone taking my boots away from me and cleaning them. Why would anyone do that? And who? An airport came swimming back to me and I remembered being questioned about my boots and where I had been with them. Zaire, I said. They took my boots away and returned them to me a few minutes later spotlessly clean and glistening with disinfectant. I remembered thinking at the time that any time I wanted to have my boots really cleaned properly I should remember to fly to New Zealand again. New Zealand. They were quite naturally paranoiac about any foreign bacteria being imported into one of the most isolated and unspoilt countries in the world. I tried to remember flying out of New Zealand and couldn't. Therefore, I must still be in New Zealand. Good. I'd narrowed it down a bit. But where?