It’s a good life, but possibly not a busy one.
The hint comes in the two words ‘inaccessible’ and ‘flightless’, and gently coalesces into the two questions: ‘how the hell did it get there in the first place?’ and ‘what the hell does it do with its life’? For the Inaccessible Island Rail, which is swimless as well, is the world’s smallest flightless bird, and it lives successfully on an island the size of Westminster about 1700 miles west of Cape Town. It’s nearest relative, the Dot-Winged Crake, lives in Uruguay 2500 miles the other way, and the South African bird book Newmans describes it as ‘scurrying between tussocks’ and saying ‘Pseep’ quite a lot. Sometimes, I know how it feels. It survives, indeed 8500 of them at the latest census would suggest that it thrives, purely because mankind’s baleful influence has never quite managed to leave rodents there on their occasional visits, helped by the fact that the island is entirely girt with 1000 foot vertical cliffs. (Rodents are what we normally leave, along with various forms of syphilis). One pregnant rat, and twelve months later ‘pseep’ would have gone the way of a coherent Boris policy statement into the annals of the sound archive. The only scurrying left would be of the four-footed type, plus a few traumatized Rockhopper Penguins quickly trying to get British passports.
Basically, the Inaccessible Island Rail flew to the island about 300 thousand years ago from around Montevideo, and eventually gave up flying because there was simply no point in bothering. Consequently, I would guess it is the world’s most contented creature. How do I know this?
I know this because I am now an academic, and it is my job to know.
Oh. You don’t think I am? You have some dim memory of my being the only one in my family without a degree, do you, or at least with the prospect of one? Long hours have flown by as you have listened to me banging on about strangely ‘excellent’ A Level results and a mysteriously turned down place at Oxford, neither of which I have ever provided a shred of evidence for. You watch me using long words and complicated sentences with poncy adverbs all over the place, and you believe that this is my substitute for the real thing? When my shirt has been off, you have noticed the deep indentation left by the degree-less chip that I still carry on my shoulder forty years later, I suppose? You think I’m thick, but posh enough to disguise it well; basic, but sophisticated enough to confuse it with impressionism.
Well, not any more I’m not. Because I have spent a day doing research behind closed doors at the Museum of Zoology at Cambridge University, which makes me a researcher, which makes me a sort of graduate by one remove. And it was only during the course of it that I got bored with what I was supposed to be researching and started looking into the Rail, with which bird my friend Richard and I have long held an obsession. And I have been in an office for hours with a real professor, looking over our glasses at each other and chewing the academic fat, or something like that. And I was more excited than I can say. I read improving documents on the train, strode into town with an esoteric spring in my step, and tried to look vague but brainy when I bought some dry-roast peanuts for lunch. I was in seventh heaven. I gazed patronisingly at ordinary tourists looking at stuffed albatrosses in the museum, and wished they would go away so that my gargantuan brain could get on with all the weighty things it had to get done. I wrote reams of notes in illegible longhand and then had a delightful meeting with someone else in a hip bar that sells craft lager and Scotch eggs. This is what I was put on earth to do, I thought to myself. Especially the Scotch eggs. And the lager.
And right now, if a graduate walked past me, and if I were an Inaccessible Island Rail, I would say an intellectual ‘pseep’. And I would mean it.
PS And I know that the photo at the top doesn’t work. Anyone who has caught an IAR on camera unsurprisingly wants money for use of the image.
Comments