The Hunt for the Golden Mole (32 page)

In one way Jonathan's optimism was fully justified. Before EDGE was launched, sceptics told him not to expect much in the way of interest from an apathetic media. In the age of celebrity, they said, people were not going to care about species they had never heard of. Aardvark, schmaardvark. What does it matter? But the pessimists were wrong. For two whole weeks, Jonathan had to clear his diary for interviews. ‘It was just madness,' he now says. ‘People loved hearing about these creatures and were really shocked that they were threatened.' Talk, however, runs out of the radio like water. Turn the knob and there it is, a constant stream of catastrophes, good causes and special pleadings. People may be shocked by the rate of extinction, and fascinated by oddities like the poisonous solenodons, but converting interest into action calls for something closer to alchemy. The scale of the challenge is enormous. Against each species in the EDGE top 100 is an assessment of the conservation effort being devoted to it. There are three categories –
active
,
limited
and
none
. For the top five species – Attenborough's long-beaked echidna, the eastern long-beaked echidna, western long-beaked echidna, New Zealand greater short-tailed bat, baiji, all of them critically endangered – the conservation assessments read
none
,
limited
,
none
,
none
,
none
. In all, forty-four of the top 100 have no ongoing conservation of any kind; twenty-two have limited action and only thirty-four are active.

We should remember that the EDGE scores are composites, taking account of both evolutionary distinctiveness and vulnerability. This is why the aardvark – world champion for distinctiveness, but of ‘least concern' to the IUCN – is only 313 in the list. Like many of the golden moles it is not often seen but is relatively common in its local habitats. In fact three species of golden mole rank higher than the aardvark. One of them, Marley's golden mole (
Amblysomus marleyi
), is only two places
outside the favoured top 100. Juliana's (
Neamblysomus julianae
) comes in at Number 295, and the rough-haired (
Chrysospalax villosus
) at 304. The Somali golden mole, being in IUCN terms ‘data deficient', is listed but unranked. Low rankings may be reassuring. It's encouraging for friends of the gray brocket to know that its numbers around the forest margins of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay are sufficient for it to arouse little or no concern and to be EDGE's lowest ranked species at Number 4,436. But much depends on your standpoint. It's not much consolation for a British wildlife-lover to see the red squirrel down in 4,123
^rd
place as a species of least concern. In Britain it's a goner. Nor is one cheered by the fact that the highest ranked British terrestrial mammal, the common dormouse,
Muscardinus avellanarius
, comes no higher than 840th. It simply reminds us that we have so few species left to care about.

I made some resolutions when I began this book. I would not pretend to knowledge I did not possess (resolution kept); I would not write in anger or deliver homilies (resolutions failed or wavering); and I would not heap opprobrium on men of the past who inhabited a different moral landscape (resolution kept). But a question remains: through what moral prism should we view the behaviour of our own generation? How might we be regarded by generations in the future? Let us not be lured into making false comparisons. It is on the basis of
mens rea
– the guilty mind – that the old-timers may be acquitted. They did not know – indeed, they had no way of knowing – that they might be stripping the planet of life or, through their God-given technological genius, putting an intolerable strain on the climate. They might have been immodest in dealing with their fellow man, but they knelt to God and saw no possibility that they could undo the work of Genesis. This is an opinion that now
survives only in the minds of extreme libertarians who would rather boil the oceans than submit to regulation of the free market. Whatever we do, we do it in the full knowledge of its likely consequence. We cannot plead ignorance.

Modern warfare is wholly impersonal. No one sees the whites of their enemies' eyes any more. Remote push-button deaths are a mathematical abstraction, swiftly escalating beyond the point at which the numbers can be visualised. They are always there, a muffled drumbeat in the broadcast news. ‘Yesterday in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia. . . .' Self-censoring news media spare us the kind of film and photography that would rub our noses in the reality of it. The war on wildlife is just as impersonal and even less visible. There is no ‘Yesterday in Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal, China, Brazil, Indonesia . . .' Just occasional round-ups of numbers pushed to the brink. Even these are wildly theoretical. To make such a calculation we would have to know how many species there were in the first place, and have some reliable idea of what existed where. This is extremely difficult – one might better say impossible – and it's an uncertainty that gnaws at the soul of everyone seriously involved in conservation. You can't conserve a critically endangered species unless you know where it is. You can't know where it is unless you mount a very expensive – and very likely inconclusive – expedition to find it. The obstacles are financial, logistical, political, physical and technological.

Jonathan Baillie spends more time on management now than he does on field work, but he did lead an expedition in 2007 to search for Attenborough's echidna, now the EDGE list's Number One species. The echidna had a significant advantage over the Somali golden mole in that a specimen, just one, had actually been seen alive, though this was a very long time ago – in 1961, three years before Alberto Simonetta found his owl
pellet. The animal was collected 1,600 metres above sea level, on Berg Rara in the Cyclops Mountains of Indonesia. It earns its position at the top of the list by being both extravagantly rare and, as Jonathan puts it, ‘one of the most distinct mammals on the planet' – a small, spiny creature that looks superficially like a hedgehog but with a long, bird-like beak. It amazed him that so little effort had been made to find it.

Jonathan Baillie in Papua New Guinea

But the looking is the easy bit. First you have to define the field of search (not especially difficult in the case of an animal seen only once), and then you have to get yourself there. This is difficult in all the ways you would expect – steep, thorny, unmapped and treacherous mountain terrain – and in many ways that you perhaps would not. Particularly in tribal lands, where there are often invisible layers of bureaucracy and a variety of spoken languages, the territory is full of diplomatic tripwires. This was certainly the case with the echidna. ‘You have to speak
to the Indonesian representatives,' says Jonathan. ‘You have to speak to the local forestry representatives, you have to speak to the local tribal leadership, and you have multiple conservation groups that you'll be working with, so you have to meet with the head of each one, and then you have to deal with the military, because they have a base on the side of the mountain.' You then need transport (including, in this case, a boat to reach the coastal villages), guides, interpreters, all the paraphernalia of a scientific expedition. Then it comes down to talking; moving from village to village, each one with a different language and cultural traditions, trawling for news of the species. ‘You have to make contact. You can't just walk in and start demanding things. You have to see if they're interested in the species. You get them to tell about their history and the animals and the different things they hunt and how far they go in the forest.' The questioning has to be indirect. You can't just show pictures, or describe an echidna, and say, ‘Have you seen one of these?' Leading questions produce biased results. You have to get people to describe all that they've seen, and it takes time. ‘There's tons of local knowledge if you sit and listen, and it doesn't always come out right at the very beginning. You have to build trust. You're building also an understanding of all the other species and what their ecological parameters are. And you're looking at opportunity. What's the best and most feasible route to get in and start looking? And obviously listening to where they've seen the animals last.'

With the echidna it worked perfectly. The descriptions were so precise, and so consistent from village to village, that Jonathan was in no doubt. Forty-six years after the first and only sighting, the animals were still there. After that, it was just a question of deciding where to set up camp and where to search. Attenborough's long-beaked echidna sets a number of
challenges typical of EDGE species. It is small, nocturnal and confined to hard terrain, in a faraway country with an ambivalent attitude to conservation (the illegal burning of Indonesian forests to make way for palm oil plantations, a catastrophe for orang-utans, is a scandal without parallel). For a small search team working by torchlight, the difficulties are formidable. Diligence alone is never going to be enough. You need the gods to smile, and the best you can do is to be ready to capitalise on any stroke of luck.

For the echidna team, luck came in the form of nose-pokes. This is not the rude awakening it sounds. Echidnas have a very distinctive way of feeding. Their preferred food is worms, which they find by prodding the ground with their long tubular beaks. Hence the nose-pokes, which they leave as evidence of their passing. There, however, the team's luck ran out. The architects of the nose-pokes declined to show themselves, alive or dead. Even so, it was a result. Enough for the
Red List
to declare with confidence that
Zaglossus attenboroughi
still existed, though the impacts of hunting, its restricted range and shrinking habitat meant that it remained critically endangered.

In terms of conservation status, an EDGE listing is a badge of honour. A species may gain enormously from its imprimatur, especially if it is highly ranked. In particular, it significantly improves the chances of funding. There is a real hope that Attenborough's long-beaked echidna will be saved, though the current conservation effort is only ‘limited' and there are no guarantees. The sad story of the baiji,
Lipotes vexillifer
, stands as stark evidence of the abyss that stands between recognising a species in need and doing something effective to save it. When EDGE published its first mammals list in 2007, the baiji stood where Attenborough's long-beaked echidna now stands, at Number One. By 2011 it had slipped
to fifth, though not because there had been any lessening of risk. On the contrary, by then its chances of survival were vanishingly faint. The alternative common name for
Lipotes vexillifer
is Yangtze River dolphin, which describes it perfectly. It is, or was, a freshwater dolphin found exclusively in the Yangtze, a species of beauty and grace, which, according to legend, was the reincarnation of a drowned princess. The lovely animal and the densely polluted shipping highway, booby-trapped with fishermen's nets, in which it found itself struggling to survive were a gross mismatch, which, without intervention, could have only one outcome. Saving the baiji became an international
cause célèbre
. The tragedy, the
disgrace
, is that it should have succeeded. An appalled witness to the debacle was one of Jonathan Baillie's colleagues at the Institute of Zoology, Dr Sam Turvey. An hour-long conversation with him, I now confess with some embarrassment, fell victim to my incompetence as a sound engineer, producing a fine recording of my questions but nothing at all of his answers. Never mind. Making no attempt to conceal his distress at what he had seen, Sam set it all down in a book with the no-frills title
Witness to Extinction: how we failed to save the Yangtze River dolphin.
Everyone knew what needed to happen. Baijis should be caught alive and transferred away from the unsurvivable river channel to breed
ex situ
in an oxbow lake. But the Swiss-funded rescue plan turned into a rolling farce of obfuscation, procrastination and tragi-comical bungling, exacerbated by a malign Chinese bureaucracy constitutionally unable to match actions to words. In effect, the baiji was talked out of existence. In late 2006, a year before EDGE came into being, Sam Turvey joined an expedition that combed the Yangtze from one end to the other of the baiji's historic range, and back again. Not a single dolphin did they see. The baiji
had gone, with the result that – ‘evolutionary distinctiveness' meaning what it says – there was nothing like it left anywhere on earth. Biodiversity had just taken an almighty hit.

Sam chides international conservation organisations for failing to put their weight behind the baiji. ‘This looks like a good project. Good luck. Let me know how it goes,' was a typical response to his plea for help. It led him to ask a sharp political question. Is extreme vulnerability actually a hindrance to conservation effort? Conservation charities like to be associated with success, and the risk of failure may be a powerful brake on their willingness to intervene. Could it be that some species of extreme rarity were deemed too high a reputational risk even to try to save? ‘On the other hand,' he writes, ‘organisations which are too timid to put themselves on the line instead only fail passively, and can cover their tracks and justify their inaction without even needing to apply too much spin. Paradoxically, if conservation organisations are run like businesses, then maybe not trying at all might even become the better option.' You could argue that the NGOs had a point. It's no good throwing money at lost causes. But then the baiji turned into a lost cause only because the chance to save it was missed. If the world needed an object lesson in how not to protect a unique species, then this was it. As Sam persuasively argues, the triage system should not be an excuse for inertia. What the world
did
clearly need was a pro-active standard-bearer for threatened wildlife that would identify priorities, draw up action plans, lead and coordinate the efforts to see them through. Out of necessity, EDGE was born.