Another hard winter took its toll on the city and they had a little trouble with famine and disease, but trade was good and they were in reasonably good shape again by the following summer when, once again, the old woman appeared.

`You're early this year,' they said to her.

`Less to carry,' she explained, showing them the three books she was still carrying. `A quarter of all the knowledge and wisdom in the world. Do you want it?'

`What's the price?'

`Four sacks of gold.'

'You're completely mad, old woman. Apart from anything else our economy's going through a bit of a sticky patch at the moment. Sacks of gold are completely out of the question.'

`Firewood, please.'

`Now wait a minute,' said the people of the city, `this isn't doing anybody any good. We've been thinking about all this and we've put together a small committee to have a look at these books of yours. Let us evaluate them for a few months, see if they're worth anything to us, and when you come back next year perhaps we can put in some kind of a reasonable offer. We are not talking sacks of gold here, though.'

The old woman shook her head. 'No,' she said. `Bring me the firewood.'

'It'll cost you.'

`No matter,' said the woman, with a shrug. `The books will burn quite well by themselves.'

So saying, she set about shredding two of the books into pieces which then burnt easily. She set off swiftly across the plain and left the people of the city to face another year.

She was back in the late spring.

`Just the one left,' she said, putting it down on the ground in front of her. `So I was able to bring my own firewood.'

`How much?' said the people of the city.

`Sixteen sacks of gold.'

'We'd only budgeted for eight.'

`Take it or leave it.'

'Wait here.'

The people of the city went off into a huddle and returned half an hour later.

`Sixteen sacks is all we've got left,' they pleaded. `Times are hard. You must leave us with something.'

The old woman just hummed to herself as she started to pile the kindling together.

`All right!' they cried at last, opened up the gates of the city and led out two oxcarts, each laden with eight sacks of gold, `but it had better be good.'

`Thank you,' said the old woman, `it is. And you should have seen the rest of it.'

She led the two oxcarts away across the plain with her, and left the people of the city to survive as best they could with the one remaining twelfth of all the knowledge and wisdom that had been in the world.

Mark's Last Word ...

Was this really our last chance to see these animals? Unfortunately, there are too many unknowns for there to be a simple answer. With strenuous efforts in the field, the populations of some have actually begun to rise. But it is clear that if those efforts were suspended for a moment, the kakapos, the Yangtze river dolphins, the northern white rhinos and many others would vanish almost immediately.

Not that a large population necessarily guarantees an animal's future survival, as experience has shown many times in the past. The most famous example is the North American passenger pigeon, which was once the commonest bird that ever lived on earth. Yet it was hunted to extinction in little more than fifty years. We didn't learn any lessons from that experience: ten years ago, there were 1.3 million elephants in Africa , but so many have been killed by poachers that today no more than 600,000 are left.

On the other hand, even the smallest populations can be brought back from the brink. Juan Fernandez fur seal numbers dropped from millions to fewer than one hundred by 1965; today, there are three thousand. And in New Zealand in 1978, the population of Chatham island robins was down to one pregnant female, but the dedication of Don Merton and his team saved the species from extinction and there are now more than fifty.

The kakapo may also be on a slow road to recovery. Soon after we returned to England , we received the following letter from New Zealand :

P.O. Box 3 Stewart Island

Dear Douglas and Mark, I hope this reaches you quickly - I have some good news from kakapo country on southern Stewart Island At 08.45 hrs on 25 August 1989 one of our dog. handlers, Alan Munn, and his English setter `Ari' located a new female kakapo near Lees Knob, at an altitude of 380 metres. `Jane' weighed 1.25 kg and she scrarked a lot when Alan picked her up. She had just finished moulting but looked in good condition, so in a few days she will be flown to her new home - Codfish Island . Once again, thanks very much for your visit. It certainly helped give those Big Green Budgies some of the attention they deserve.

Yours sincerely,

Andy Roberts (kakapo project manager)

for R Tindal, District Conservator,

Department of Conservation, Rakiura.

We later received some further good news about the kakapos. Two more females have been found on Stewart Island and transferred to Codfish, bringing the total kakapo population up to forty-three.

Meanwhile, on little Barrier Island , several of the males there have been booming for the first time including, to everyone's delight, a nine-year-old called `Snark'. Born on Stewart Island in 1981, Snark was the only kakapo chick to have been seen by anyone this century.

But the best news of all was still to come. just before going to press, a very excited Don Merton telephoned to say that a newly made kakapo nest has just been found on Little Barrier island. Inside the nest, which was built by a nine-year-old female called `Heather', was a single kakapo egg.

Transferring kakapos to Little Barrier and Codfish Islands has been a calculated risk - but it is the only hope of saving the kakapo from extinction. Heather's nest is the first encouraging sign that the project is actually working and now everyone is waiting nervously to see if her egg will hatch and if she can raise the chick in her adopted home.

We also received a letter from Kes Hillman-Smith in Zaire to say that three baby northern white rhinos have been born in Garamba since we left, bringing the total population up to twenty-five. The enthusiastic park staff have named them 'Mpiko', meaning courage; `Molende', meaning perseverance; and `Minzoto', meaning a star.

It's important to recognise that not every conservation strategy necessarily works: we are often experimenting in the dark. During the early stages of the Garamba project a lot of pressure was put on the Zairois to have all of their northern white rhinos captured and taken into captivity. The government of Zaire would not agree to this. They said that the rhinos belong to them and they didn't want them to go to zoos in other parts of the world. Fortunately it seems that this was the right decision. Northern white rhinos, it turned out, do not breed well in captivity - the last one was born in -1982 - whereas more than ten have been born in the same period in the wild.

The news from Mauritius has been more mixed. The kestrels are doing well and Carl believes that there could now be as many as a hundred of them in the wild, including twelve breeding pairs. However, the population of truly wild pink pigeons has dropped to fewer than ten. Some of the pigeons that have been bred in captivity are being released again. So far, they have escaped the hunters and appear to be doing well.