And it looks like this parrot, also of remarkable plumage, definitely was not "tired and shagged out after a long squawk" then, eh?! Television viewers in the UK (and perhaps most readers of this blog?) have been fortunate these past few weeks, since the BBC began airing the new documentary series "Last Chance to See" where Stephen Fry joined zoologist Mark Carwardine in retracing a journey the latter shared with the late Douglas Adams when they went around the world looking for species literally on the brink of extinction!

Adams and Carwardine then wrote one of my favorite books about nature and wildlife conservation, full of delightful stories of strange animal behaviors and wry observations on the business of conservation in different parts of the world. Among the latter, my favorite was probably when they compared the govt. bureaucracies of post-colonial nations to headless chickens that continue to thrash around pointlessly even after being decapitated!

Nevertheless, this snippet (and others like it on Youtube which is all that's available to those of us outside the UK) from the new series suggests that 2 decades on since the original journey, some of these wonderful creatures are still hanging on, i.e., Carwardine did get more chances to see them. I hope our future generations do as well! And I hope we get to see this series on television in our part of the world soon also.

What we won't see ever again, unfortunately, is the like of Douglas Adams, who considered Last Chance to See as his own favorite book, even though it was something of a "runt of the litter" not selling quite as many copies as his other bestsellers! Here he is speaking about his experience writing the book, and about the oddities of animal behavior and evolution, in one of his last lectures:

{Crossposted at Reconciliation Ecology]