Researching a book is like pond-dipping in a river. You can dip and sift all you like, but you can’t keep up with the flow. Facts, figures, names and dates churn past in unrecordable quantities, and take no account of your last full-stop. Hence the popularity, among authors at least, of the ‘afterword’ – a few last, frenzied thoughts dashed down before going into print.
In my own case, the remorselessness of flowing water makes an exact metaphor. The bad news floods down day after day in an undammable surge of despair. Numbers of elephants killed. Numbers of rhinos. Numbers of park rangers. Numbers of species shuffling towards the brink. To get the measure of it, here is the tally of seizures at just one port, Hong Kong, in the first eight months of 2013: in January, $1.4m-worth of Kenyan elephant ivory; in July, another 2.2 tonnes, the biggest haul there for a decade; in August, 1,120 tusks, 13 rhino horns and five leopard skins, all hidden in a single consignment of Nigerian timber. One port, three snapshots of a dolorous torrent. Great apes were also being swept away. The UN Environment Programme estimated that some 3,000 were being killed or captured illegally every year.
In Europe there was some better news. The value of targeted conservation was brilliantly illuminated in September 2013 when a coalition of conservation groups, including the Zoological Society of London, published their report Wildlife Comeback in Europe. This showed that a number of once hard-pressed species, including the Eurasian elk, grey wolf, Alpine and Iberian ibex, southern chamois and golden jackal, had made strong recoveries, and that the European bison, once extinct in the wild, had been successfully reintroduced in Poland and Belarus.
For lovers of zoological oddities there were moments of sheer delight. An orange-haired member of an obscure family of raccoon-like mammals called olingos turned out to be an even more obscure ‘new’ species, the olinguito, native to the cloud forests of the Ecuadorian Andes. Delightfully, it resembles a teddy-bear mated with a domestic cat. Even more delightful for me was the discovery at the Museo Civico di Zoologia in Rome of the preserved skin of a previously undescribed species of mole rat. Its origins were uncertain but it was most likely collected at Mogadishu in 1915 (the year it arrived at the museum) or earlier. In glorious addition to the Somali golden mole, therefore, we have the equally rare and even more mysterious Somali mole rat.
Encouraged by the mole, this book has been written in the cause of the small, the obscure and the humble. If you have stayed with me this far, then I hope you might be tempted to go just a little bit further. Good work costs money. Governments, corporations, charitable foundations and individuals are all respectfully invited to dig as deep as they can. Visit the EDGE website, www.edgeofexistence.org, to see how far a pound or a dollar can go. As I write, £10 ($16.16) is enough to keep a camera trap running for a night – the ideal way to survey shy nocturnal animals. A thousand pounds will train a conservation leader.
It could serve as the motto for the furry underworld itself. Every little helps.