The Hunt for the Golden Mole (12 page)

The Amur leopard, I discover eventually, is
Panthera pardus orientalis
, also known as the far-eastern leopard, a vanishingly rare subspecies, long-tailed and thickly coated, that clings to life along the Russian–Chinese border in extreme north-eastern Asia. There is a possibility that others may survive in North Korea, but this is not an area open to scientific inquiry, or sensitive to the fears of conservationists. The Amur leopard has been blitzed by a multiplicity of threats, not least the misfortune of occupying such a fraught political hotspot. Much of its habitat has been lost, and the rest fragmented by fires and logging. Its very rarity makes it a target for poachers, and its carnivorous habit provokes retaliation by deer-farmers. To complete the
vicious cycle, its confinement to one small local population means it is being enfeebled by inbreeding.

‘The felling of the woods,' wrote George Perkins Marsh, ‘has been attended with momentous consequences.' It took a perceptive eye to see that in 1864. Anyone can see it now, but – as always with those called ‘doomsayers' – being proved right is a poor sort of consolation. It is not quite too late to listen to those who now echo him. As we begin to feel the unpredicted feedbacks from a disrupted climate, his voice from 150 years ago comes over loud and clear. Our ‘limited faculties', he says, are blinding us to the ultimate consequences of our deeds.

But our inability to assign definite values to these causes . . . is not a reason for ignoring the existence of such causes in any general view of the relations between man and nature, and we are never justified in assuming a force to be insignificant because its measure is unknown, or even because no physical effect can now be traced to it as its origin. The collection of phenomena must precede the analysis of them, and every new fact, illustrative of the action and reaction between humanity and the material world around it, is another step towards the determination of the great question, whether man is of nature or above her.

The language may be archaic, but the wisdom is timeless.

My search for the Somali golden mole takes one step forward and half a step back. Learning my way around the laconic, abbreviated intricacies of zoological literature, I discover that the world expert on golden moles is Gary Bronner at the
University of Cape Town, who declares his principal areas of interest to be ‘phylogenetic systematics, functional morphology and conservation biology of Africa's endemic golden moles; and the structure and ecology of terrestrial small mammal communities'. He it was who wrote the entry for
Calcochloris tytonis
in my new desktop bible,
Mammal Species of the World
. From Bronner I learn that the discoverer of the Somali golden mole was Professor Alberto M. Simonetta, of the Institute of Zoology, University of Florence, and that his description of it was published in the journal
Monitore zoologico italiano
. Nervously, only half understanding the reference and ashamed of my ignorance, I call the library at the Natural History Museum. Can they help? They can indeed. A day later, all twenty-nine pages of Simonetta's paper, ‘A New Golden Mole from Somalia with an Appendix on the Taxonomy of the family Chrysochloridae', dated 30 January 1968, are spread out on my desk.

The story is even better than I had hoped. During the summer of 1964, in a Somali town called Giohar, Simonetta discovered a disused oven in which a family of barn owls – two adults and two fully grown young – had been nesting. ‘The floor of the oven,' he writes, ‘was covered by a layer of dust, feathers, loose bones and owl pellets about three inches thick.' Some people to whom I've recounted this story have not properly understood what an owl pellet is – not faecal matter, but a regurgitated plug containing the undigested parts of what the bird has swallowed (typically fur, feather, bone, beak and claw). If you want to know what an owl has eaten, then the pellets will tell you. The contents of the Giohar oven, however, looked somewhat less than promising. Trampling by the owls, and the destructive attentions of beetles, meant that most of the material was smashed to pieces and only a small number of pellets were still intact. Nevertheless,
with grand scientific impartiality, the debris was all swept up and taken back for analysis in Florence.

Then came the essential stroke of luck. ‘While sorting the material,' Simonetta writes, ‘I found a right ramus of the lower jaw of a Golden Mole, still articulated with the almost complete temporal part of the basioccipital, of the hyoid and the first two cervical vertebrae.'

In layman's language, this translates as the right-hand side of the animal's lower jaw, with temple and bones of the middle ear still attached. It sounds a lot, but it's tiny. The jawbone was not much more than a centimetre long, a scrap that most people would not even have noticed. Simonetta, however, wanted to know what species it was. Theoretically the identification of a mole from such small remains is easier than it sounds – the crucial distinctions are in the size and proportion of the jaws and teeth, exactly what Simonetta had found. It was a golden moment. Comparison showed similarities but no precise match with any other mole. Simonetta had a new species on his hands.

And new it has forever remained. No other sign of
Calcochloris tytonis
has ever been recorded, alive or dead. As a sample of modern mammalian life, Simonetta's specimen MF4181 was, as I had supposed, the ultimate rarity. But I read and digested all this with mixed feelings. Whereas I was pleased that the specimen had been located, and a trip to Florence would be a pleasure, I was disappointed that it had not given me the satisfaction of a harder chase. The disappointment did not last long. As far as I knew, only one other man in the world – Gary Bronner – had any interest in tracking down
Calcochloris tytonis
, and I emailed him for advice. He was the leading specialist in the field, a scientist of international repute, and years ahead of me in the quest. His reply astonished me. Like me, he had expected to find the mole at the University of Florence, or at
the Florence Natural History Museum or Institute of Zoology. As I intended to, he had asked after Simonetta's specimen at each of these venerable institutions, and at each one he had drawn a blank.

The hunt was still on.

CHAPTER FIVE

Penitent Butchers

B
rumas was born on 27 November 1949, thirteen days after my own fourth birthday. Son of Mischa and Ivy, and named after his keepers Bruce and Sam, he was the first polar bear to be born and raised in Britain. He was an immediate and lasting sensation. In 1950 he boosted attendances at London Zoo to an all-time record of three million, and inspired a profitable trade in Brumas-themed books, postcards and souvenirs. There was something very odd about it, though. For reasons never properly explained, my use here of the words ‘son', ‘he' and ‘his' perpetuate a bizarre error made in the newspapers and allowed to pass uncorrected by the zoo. Brumas was a
girl
, but for as long as she lived (she died in May 1958) the public went on believing her to be a male.

I suspect that my memory of her/him is more imaginative reconstruction than genuine recollection (I conjure a vague picture of mother and infant on a rock, and a faint smell of fish) but it is indelible. It is one of many cherished memories of the 1950s. This was not just the decade of the ‘family values' (board games, side partings and Bisto) that still drive the politics of nostalgia. More importantly, it was the decade in which television sets first began to appear in ordinary homes such as my own. Two genres dominated my early viewing: the heroic
adventures of cowboy avengers such as Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger, and wildlife shows. From the middle years of the decade, the much-parodied husband-and-wife team of Armand and Michaela Denis were a regular favourite with their
On Safari
series. Armand was a burly, bristly moustached, bespectacled and thickly accented Belgian film-maker; Michaela a glamorous blonde English ex-fashion designer. Clamped to their binoculars, they trekked by Land Rover in a never-ending African safari, filming as they went. An early, flickering fragment shows Michaela cuddling a jackal. I discovered only recently that Armand's earlier credits as a director included Frank Buck's 1934 film,
Wild Cargo
. (‘Although it may seem as though several incidents in the screen work were prearranged,' said
The New York Times
, ‘they are nevertheless quite thrilling, especially when the hunter depicts the ingenious methods by which he traps wild beasts and reptiles.')

On Safari
now seems every much a bygone as Hopalong and the Lone Ranger, a faintly embarrassing relic of a colonial age in which African people could be captioned on-screen as ‘the Natives'. But there were two other popular shows which, on one young mind at least, would have a deeper and much more lasting impact. One of these was presented by a gawkily handsome, toothy young man whose cheerful disposition reminded me of my favourite schoolmasters – engaging, brimming with enthusiasm but not didactic. The other was (misleadingly, as it would turn out) a more headmasterly figure – bald, somewhat older than the first, and stuffed with knowledge. The handsome young man was twenty-eight-year-old David Attenborough, just hitting his stride with
Zoo Quest.
The other was Peter Scott, with
Look
.

As Attenborough recalled in a filmed interview in 2007, animal programmes hitherto had been of two contrasting types. In the
first type – a kind of prototype
Blue Peter
– live animals would be brought to the studio from the zoo. ‘You stuffed them in a sack,' said Attenborough, ‘and brought them in the middle of the night in a taxi up to Alexandra Palace, and then hoiked the poor things out on to a table covered with a doormat.' The programmes went out live, and the thrill for the audience was the sheer unpredictability of a bewildered animal with fully functioning bladder and bowels, and a yen for freedom. The risk to the presenter's dignity made it ‘great television', but it revealed almost nothing about the animal's nature.

The other strand was the Armand-and-Michaela-type film of creatures in the wild, shot usually in Africa. This was more informative, but it lacked the immediacy of live animals in the studio. Attenborough's brainwave was to combine both strands into a single format. The idea was to travel to remote parts of the world to hunt, film and catch rare species never before seen by the public, and – with a modest echo of Frank Buck – to bring them back alive to London Zoo. Hence the title,
Zoo Quest.
The animals then could be brought to the table to entertain the live audience. The plan was for Attenborough to produce the series, and for his friend Jack Lester, the zoo's curator of reptiles, to appear on screen.

For some reason they elected to start on the west coast of Africa, in Sierra Leone, 1,700 miles north and west of the point where Hanno the Navigator had turned for home 2,500 years earlier. In the days before intercontinental jets, it still took them three days to fly there from London (the first leg in a Dakota) via Casablanca and Dakar. ‘Sierra Leone' translates invitingly as ‘Mountains of the Lion', but the quarry necessarily had to be a bit less daunting than the fabled king of the jungle. London Zoo in any case had had a lion house since 1876, so
Panthera leo
wouldn't fit the criteria of rare and unseen. But neither, it
seemed, was there much else in Sierra Leone that could satisfy Attenborough's desire for ‘the ultimate rarity'. The best candidate, it turned out, was a bird. To modern ears, the white-necked rockfowl,
Picathartes gymnocephalus
, doesn't sound too much like the stuff of compulsive viewing, or the springboard for one of the greatest careers in broadcasting history. But so it proved, though it was a triumph that grew out of tragedy. In Africa Jack Lester caught a tropical disease from which he was never to recover, and which eventually killed him. He was able to present only the first episode, after which the producer had to step out from behind the camera and fill the gap. As I write, he's still there.

Peter Scott's
Look
series was of the more traditional studio-based kind, though it also made use of film. The very first programme featured a live fox and launched a series that would make Scott, like Attenborough, a household name. Scott might have been remembered for many different things. He was a distinguished wartime naval commander, an Olympic sailor, British gliding champion and a popular artist whose prints – typically of flighting wildfowl – were the only art that many families hung on their walls. He was also an expert ornithologist. For a full account of his extraordinary life, Elspeth Huxley's biography (foreword by David Attenborough) does a rather better job than his autobiography,
The Eye of the Wind.
Better than Scott himself, Huxley describes how his feeling for nature developed through his passion for wildfowling, and how by the early 1950s his shocking proficiency with the gun had turned him away from killing. His decisive conversion to the preservation of life is one of the reasons why, today, I receive yet another invitation from the WWF to support a species under threat – this time the jaguar,
Panthera onca
, largest cat of the Americas. If I prefer, I could choose instead a giant panda, a polar bear,
orang-utan, bottlenose dolphin, Bengal tiger, Asian elephant, black rhinoceros, hawksbill turtle or Adélie penguin, and I could receive a ‘gorgeous soft toy' of my favourite species. The populism and ubiquity of wildlife conservation now would astonish the far-sighted few who got it moving.

Throughout recent history, the name Huxley has been one of the most prominent in contemporary thought. Scott's biographer Elspeth Huxley was married to a cousin of the writer Aldous and of the evolutionary biologist Julian, grandsons of ‘Darwin's bulldog' Thomas Henry Huxley (a younger contemporary of George Perkins Marsh). It was Thomas Henry, inventor of the word ‘agnostic', who objected to Richard Owen's Creationist vision of the Natural History Museum, and who opposed Owen and ‘Soapy Sam' Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, in the famous debate at Oxford in 1860. Soapy Sam made the mistake of trying to demolish Darwin by scorn. Was it through his mother's or his father's side, he wondered, that Huxley had descended from a monkey? In modern political debate, Huxley's riposte would be called a zinger. He would ‘not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor', he told the unfortunate bishop, ‘but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth'. No smirk has ever disappeared more swiftly from episcopal lips, and literal-minded biblical fundamentalism has seldom taken a longer step backwards.