The last of their kind
 (orig. Last Chance to See ) |
|
|---|---|
| Radio feature from UK | |
| original language | English |
| publication | Nov. 1, 1985-8. Nov 1989 |
| genre | Nature documentation |
| consequences | 7th |
| production | BBC Radio 4 |
| Contributors | |
| author | Douglas Adams , Mark Carwardine |
| Moderation | Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine |
The last of their kind (original title: Last Chance to See , first edition 1990) is a radio series and an accompanying book by the English writer Douglas Adams and the zoologist and photographer Mark Carwardine . Adams himself described it as the book that gave him the greatest satisfaction.
The book is about several trips between 1985 and 1989 that the two authors took around the world, to Madagascar , Indonesia , New Zealand , Zaire , the People's Republic of China and Mauritius . Here they went in search of the most endangered species in the world.
The division of labor between the two is described in the book as follows:
- Mark is an extremely skilled and accomplished zoologist who worked for the World Wildlife Fund at the time and whose job was essentially to have an idea of everything. My job - one for which I am perfectly qualified - was to be an immensely ignorant non-zoologist for whom everything had to come out of the blue.
Creation of the book
The concept of the book originally goes back to a project of the World Wildlife Fund and the British weekly newspaper The Observer , for which renowned authors wrote reports on rare animal species. Adams traveled to Madagascar in 1985 to discuss the rare lemurs aye-aye ( aye-aye to report), and concluded there friendship with the zoologists Carwardine, who was then working for the WWF.
The idea for their own project, which was initially conceived as a television series, arose from the joint work. For financial reasons, however, Adams and Carwardine decided to produce a radio series for the British broadcaster BBC , which was broadcast in six episodes in October and November 1989. An original version of the episode about the Aye-Aye was broadcast as a ten-minute short contribution back in 1985.
At the same time as the series, the book of the same name was published, which was actually intended as a compendium, although its content differs significantly from the radio reports. In the book, for example, the article about the Amazon manatee is missing because Adams said he was not finished with the processing in time.
Chapter overview
1. "Branch Technology"
In Madagascar , Adams and Carwardine were looking for the aye-aye , an almost extinct, nocturnal lemur species . Formerly inhabitants of the African mainland, this species was initially only found in Madagascar, until it became less and less here too. As a result, an island off the island of Nosy Mangabe was set up as the last place of refuge - people are only allowed to come here with permission. How big the population is now can no longer be determined. However, the authors managed to see one of the animals.
2. "Here chickens"
On Komodo , the destination of the trip was the Komodo dragon , a man-eating lizard that can be up to 3.50 meters long ( “which inevitably appears to be a completely unsuitable size for a lizard, especially if it is an ogre and you intend to to stay on the same island as them. " ). One bite of this " dragon " can kill a person from the infection caused by the bacteria living in his saliva. There are still 5,000 specimens, but only 350 of them are sexually mature females. Since this population lives in a very confined space and changes in their environment can easily affect their numbers, the Komodo dragons are also classified as threatened.
3. "A pill box hat made of leopard skin"
In Zaire , the authors went in search of the white rhinoceros , of which only 22 specimens were still alive at the time of the visit, and also looked for the equally endangered mountain gorillas .
4. "Heart palpitations at night"
This is about the fjord country in New Zealand , which Adams describes as follows: “If you took all of Norway, chewed it through a bit and shook out all the moose and reindeer, then hurled it ten thousand miles around the world and filled it up with birds, that would be a waste of time, because obviously someone else has already done it. ” The authors report on the kakapo , a flightless parrot , and its reproductive difficulties. The male's call is so deep that the female cannot locate it exactly when he hears it - so it depends on chance whether the two meet.
5. "Blind Panic"
This chapter explains why the water flows into the drain differently in Australia than in Europe . But that doesn't explain why the numbers on the phones are arranged differently. In the People's Republic of China , where the water and the telephone are like in Europe, but everything else is different, Adams and Marc Carwardine are looking for the blind Yangtze dolphin . When the book was published, this was on the verge of extinction because the river was poisoned and too heavily used by motorboats. This makes acoustic orientation impossible for the dolphins. Around 2006 it was assumed that the species was now extinct.
6. "Seldom or rarely rarely?"
The authors originally wanted to find the Rodrigues fruit bats on Mauritius - but they were convinced that there are far rarer (and stranger) animals, especially birds , on the island . Therefore they changed their plans at short notice and visited u. a. the Mauritian parakeet , the pink pigeon and Mauritius falcon .
TV series 2009
A conversion of the series into television format seems to have been considered several times. According to the BBC website, Adams and Carwardine discussed a revival of the series by 2001 at the latest and also undertook research trips together. Adams' death in the same year initially prevented implementation.
In April 2007, the BBC actually announced the production of a television series entitled Last Chance to See . In Adams' place, Carwardine was now accompanied by actor and writer Stephen Fry , who was a close friend of Adams. Originally, the production was primarily supposed to report on what had become of the animal species dealt with in the original series and book 20 years later, but then made a few deviations. (For example in the case of the now extinct Yangtze River dolphin , which is no longer featured in the new series.) The episodes were produced between December 2007 and April 2009 and broadcast from September 2009. The TV series is also accompanied by a book written by Mark Carwardine.
| Original title | German title |
|---|---|
| Amazonian manatee | The Amazon Manatee |
| Northern White Rhino | The end of the white rhinos |
| Aye-aye | The aye-aye - the ugliest animal in the world |
| Komodo Dragon | The island of the Komodo dragons |
| Kakapo | Funny bird kakapo |
| Blue whales | The bay of the blue whales |
expenditure
- Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine: The Last of their Kind , Heyne 1992, ISBN 3453061152
- Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine, Rainer Gussek, Dietmar Mues : The last of their kind (audio book German) , Dav 2003, ISBN 3898132285
- Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine: The Last of their Kind (CD-ROM) , Systhema 1995, ISBN 3634230002