ציפור נפשי

[kakapo]

סטיבן פריי ומארק קרוורדיין מחפשים את הקקפו ועוד כמה חברים.

וואו.

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Every campaign needs heroes, faces that represent the issue at stake. Icons, we would say now. It was typical of Douglas and, as I later found out, of Mark too, that their icons should be such strange and (at first glance) unprepossessing animals as the Amazonian manatee, the aye-aye and the kakapo.

There is something in the solemn oddity, the idiosyncratic earnestness of these species that tears at the heart with greater urgency and pathos than the more photogenic and glamorous pumas, dolphins and pandas. Nature admits of no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance. We like to think, entirely wrongly, that we, mankind, are nature's last word, at the summit of evolution, or that animals "at the top of the food chain" are somehow more important than animals at the bottom. Last Chance to See showed us all that a bumbling earth-bound parrot is as good a symbol of the beauty and fragility of the natural world as a soaring condor and that a plug-ugly nocturnal lemur with a Twiglet for a middle finger can represent the glory of creation quite as aptly as a meerkat or an orang-utan.