We screeched to a halt outside the gate set in a six foot high stone wall and went in.

Inside was a large sandy courtyard, ringed with low wooden buildings, large aviaries and cages. The warm air was rich with the sounds of flapping and cooing and sharp, bracing smells. Several very, very large tortoises were roaming about the centre of the yard completely free, presumably because virtually anybody would be able to beat them to the gate if they suddenly decided to make a break for it.

There you are,' said Richard, pointing at a large cage off to one side in which someone appeared to have hung a number of small broken umbrellas, 'Rodrigues fruitbats. You can relax now, you've seen 'em. Look at them later, they're boring. They're nothing to what else we've got here. Pink pigeons for a start... this place has got some of the rarest, sexiest birds in the world. And you want to see the real stars? I'll see if Carl's in. He should be the one to show you.'

He took us for a quick hunt, but Carl wasn't there. There was, however, someone who was besottedly in love with him. Richard beckoned us in.

`This is Pink,' he said.

We looked.

Pink gazed at us intently with his two large, deep brown eyes. He fidgeted a little with his feet, clawing at his perch, and seemed tense, expectant, and slightly irritated to see us.

`Pink's a Mauritius kestrel,' said Richard, `but he's basically weird.'

`Really?' said Mark. `Doesn't look it.'

'What does he look like to you?

'Well he's quite small. He's got sleek brown outer plumage on his wings, mottled brown and white breast feathers, impressive set of talons...'

`In other words you think he looks like a bird.'

'Well, yes...'

`He'd be shocked to know you thought that.'

'What do you mean?

`Well, one of the problems with breeding birds in captivity is that they sometimes have to be reared by humans, which leads to all sorts of misunderstandings on the bird's part. When a bird hatches from its egg it doesn't have much of a clear picture of what's what in the world, and it falls in love with the first thing that feeds it, which in Pink's case was Carl. It's called "imprinting" and it's a major problem because you can't undo it. Once he's made up his mind that he's a human, he...'

'He actually thinks he's a human?' I asked.

'Oh yes. Well, if he thinks Carl's his mother it more or less follows, doesn't it? They may not be brilliant, but they're logical. He's quite convinced he's a human. He completely ignores the other kestrels, hasn't got time for them, they're just a bunch of birds as far as he's concerned. But when Carl walks in here he goes completely berserk. It's a problem because, of course, you can't introduce an imprinted bird into the wild, it wouldn't know what the hell to do. Wouldn't nest, wouldn't hunt, it would just expect to go to restaurants and stuff. Or at least, it would expect to be fed it wouldn't survive by itself.

`However, he does have a very important function in the aviary.

You see, the young birds that we've hatched here don't come to sexual maturity at the same time, so when the females start getting sexy, the males are not ready to handle it. The females are bigger and more belligerent and often beat the males up. So when that happens, we collect semen from Pink, and...'

'How do you do that? asked Mark.

'In a hat.'

'I thought you said in a hat.'

`That's right. Carl puts on this special hat, which is a bit like a rather strange bowler hat with a rubber brim, Pink goes mad with desire for Carl, flies down and fucks the hell out of his hat.'

`What?

'He ejaculates into the brim. We collect the drop of semen and use it to inseminate a female.'

`Strange way to treat your mother.'

'He's a strange bird. But he does serve a useful purpose in spite of being psychologically twisted.'

Setting up the captive breeding centre on Mauritius is one of Carl's major failures. in fact it is the result of probably the most spectacular and brilliant failure of his life.

`They always thought I would be a failure when I was a boy,' he told us when he turned up later, incredibly late for something. 'I was hopeless, a complete write-off. Never did any work, wasn't interested in anything at all. Well, anything other than animals. Nobody at my school in Wales thought it was very useful being only interested in animals, but I had about fifty of them, to my father's despair, in cages all over the backyard. Badgers and foxes, wild Welsh polecats, owls, hawks, macaws, jackdaws, everything. I even managed, just as a schoolboy, to breed kestrels in captivity.

'My headmaster said it was nice that I had an interest, but I would never get anywhere because I was a lousy scholar. One day he called me into his study and said, 'Jones," he said, "this just isn't acceptable. You spend your whole life going around looking under hedges. You spend no time doing your school-work. You're a failure. What are you going to do with yourself?"

'I said - and remember, this was in Wales , "Sir, I want to go to tropical islands and study birds."

'He said, "But to do that you have to be either rich or intelligent and you're neither."

'I took this as some kind of encouragement, finally managed to pass a few exams, went to college, and when I was an undergraduate I went to a lecture in Oxford by Professor Tom Cade, who's a world authority on falcons. He told us how in America they were working with peregrine falcons by breeding them in captivity and releasing the young back into the wild.

'I couldn't believe it. This was incredibly exciting. Here were these people going out and actually doing something. Then he said that in the Indian Ocean on an island called Mauritius there was a very rare bird, perhaps the rarest of all falcons, called the Mauritius kestrel, which was, at the moment, doomed to extinction, but that it could possibly be saved by captive breeding. And it suddenly came to me that all this work I'd been doing in my back yard as a kid, fiddling round with birds, could actually be used to save a whole species from becoming extinct.

'I was overwhelmed by excitement and I . thought, Christ, I must see if I can do something about this. So in the summer I went to America and studied a number of the projects there, saw how they were doing it, and promised myself that if I possibly could, I'd go to Mauritius and work to save the Mauritius kestrel.

`And they said, "Well, Carl, it's all very well you wanting to go to Mauritius but there's lots of problems out there and you can't save these birds. There just aren't enough of them. just one breeding pair and a couple of other individuals. And with all the local problems and no facilities, it just can't be done. There's a small project there, but it's got to be closed down. It's just throwing good resources after bad."

'But I got the job. The job was to close the project down. That was the job I came here to do, ten years ago, close the whole thing down, what there was of it. None of this was even here then,' he said, looking around at the captive breeding centre in which they had raised over forty Mauritius kestrels for gradual reintroduction to the wild, two hundred pink pigeons, and even a hundred Rodrigues fruitbats. `I suppose I have to admit,' he said with a naughty smile, `that I've been a complete failure.'

As he finished his story his hand dropped to his knee and he happened to catch sight of his watch. Instantly a distraught expression came into his face and he jumped to his feet, clapping his hand to his head. He was late for a fund raising meeting.