The Good Nature podcast comes to you from conservation, optimism and its founding partners, Synchronicity URF and the University of Oxford.
Welcome to Good-Natured, a podcast where you can join us for uplifting tots that shine a light on conservation challenges.
In each episode, we interview an inspiring conservationist. A fascinating guest come from many backgrounds artist, scientist, activist and many more.
I'm Sophia APHC student focussing on marine conservation.
I love doing science and telling stories through film writing, improvised comedy and now podcasts.
And I'm Julia, a science communicator and journalist, I am passionate about sharing what people are doing to make the world a better place.
We know these are quite hard times and everyone needs to have a bit of a pick me up or so we hoping that these conversation will inspire you.
Hydrophobia. Hi, Sophia. I'm super excited to announce that today we've got Professor Carl Jones on the podcast.
For anyone who doesn't know who Caldrons is is a wealth biologist. And he's really famous for his work in Mauritius.
He's been working with lots of different species like the marshes, kestrels, the pink pigeon and the eco parakeets as well.
Carl is the scientific director at the Migration Wildlife Foundation, and he's also the chief scientist at Dorell Wildlife Conservation Trust.
I've heard so many amazing stories about call and the work he does that I just can't wait to have that chat with him.
I completely agree. I think we're really lucky to be speaking with call today.
And if you look at some of the stories of the species that he's worked with, that just incredible.
So with the Marysia Kestrel, I was reading about it earlier. And at one point they had something like four individuals and now there are hundreds.
And at some point people had just given up on the idea that they would ever be a viable population again.
So it's a really impressive conservation success story, I think, for sure.
And another really interesting thing about Carl is the fact that he has this incredibly optimistic outlook.
So I remember reading this article in The Guardian, and the main clue, I think was the headline was Saving Species is Easy.
And it's just amazing to just think, you know,
you could think that saving species is easy and just to have that optimism and positive attitude towards it.
I think it's gonna be really interesting to hear a bit more about those stories. Absolutely.
I saw that article as well. And I remember thinking just not many conservationists would think that saving a species is easy.
But Carl just has so much conservation experience and he has been through so many phases and types of conservation
that I think it'll be really interesting to hear about how his perspective on it has changed through time.
Definitely. So let's not wait longer. And let's hear what Carl has to say.
Thank you so much for joining us today. We're so excited to hear about all of the conservation work that you've done.
You're well-known in the conservation world for your work in Marysia specifically.
So do you think you could tell us a bit more about what drove you to work in conservation and then particularly to focus on Morrisson species?
Well, as a young boy, I was very interested in natural history indeed, like many young people.
And I kept some animals in my backyard. I had some injured birds that I was looking after.
And I started to keep and study these birds.
And I thought, wow, when you've got species in captivity, you can find out so much about them.
And I was very lucky that I was able to breed some European kestrels.
And at the time, it was actually quite difficult to breed birds of prey in captivity.
Very few people had done it. And I kept thinking, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could use these techniques to save an endangered species?
And then one day I heard about the plight of the malicious kestrels, which in the.
1970S was reduced to just a handful of birds. And I kept thinking, wow.
Just think the knowledge I have gained in my back garden could be used to save a species.
And I thought to myself, one day I have to go to Moriches to see this kestrels.
And I made some enquiries and I heard that there was a conservation programme to try and save them Rishis Kestrels,
and they were looking for somebody to run it. And so I said, well, I'd really love to go to boorishness and work on the militias.
Kestral and cut a long story short, a few months later, I had a telephone call and they said,
Karl, would you like to go to Orishas and work with the precious kestrels?
And so it was a dream come true. And then at the age of 24, I flew out to Precious to work on what was the world's rarest bird.
How amazing to think that, you know, you gain that knowledge first in your back garden and then you could apply it to species that is so far away.
That's quite and that's truly amazing. As a young lad, I was very interested in natural history and I was fascinated by the natural world.
But I was also very interested by knowledge and how I could use captive animals to actually learn about their biology.
And when I started to study and read books, I realised there was a lot that was known about many of these species.
And so very early on,
I realised that we could use captive animals to fill in knowledge gaps and then apply that knowledge to help species in the wild.
So, yes, it was fortuitous that I worked on some common kestrels and was then able to apply that to work on the Mauritian kestrel.
And it's interesting, actually, how your talking about the evolution of conservation and the techniques that have slowly evolved through time.
And actually, if my numbers are correct, I believe you've been working in conservation, is it for almost 40 years.
So why would you say are some of the trends you've observed in terms of conservation efforts throughout the years?
Well, there's been a huge change because when I was a student, conservation biology was not really recognised as a discipline.
Yes, you could study a little bit of conservation,
but it was essentially a applied population management and people didn't recognise the subject as they do today.
And I think that the big change has come that we've actually now realised that we can actually manage wildlife or we can manage it quite effectively.
And so one of the big changes that's happened is our approach to conservation.
When I went to my precious. It was very much a protectionist type approach that we can save endangered species by protecting them in the wild.
And that's what people thought.
They thought that to save an endangered species, you set up a national park or you set up a nature reserve and you just protected it.
Whereas in reality, in places like Marysia, where the ecosystem is hugely modified, protectionist type approaches don't necessarily work.
And I think there's been a change in philosophy that we've moved away from just straight protectionism
to actually understanding the biology and seeing how we can manipulate that to benefit the species.
And also, I think that one of the great realisations of the last 20 years is that by working with endangered species,
you can actually use that as a driver for conserving whole ecosystems or certainly you species as a driver for rebuilding systems.
You've not been credited with saving a number of species.
So amongst them, the is Castro, which we were talking about earlier, that the pink pigeon, the eco parakeet.
To you, what does it mean to save a species?
Is the work ever really done or at what point can you start to feel safer or calmer about where our species is at?
That's actually a very interesting question, because when I went to Marysia is the thought that I could possibly help save them.
Rishis Kestral was just a dream. And I thought, wow, if I can save them, Orishas Kestral, that would be amazing.
And for me, it was one of those things that seemed unobtainable.
But what's interesting is as we actually progressed with the malicious Kestral and we found that we could breed them in captivity,
we could put them back in the wild, we could start to restore the whole population.
I started to get the feeling well. This isn't the end of the work.
We've got to carry on working with them, Rishis Kestral. And we've also got to start correcting some of the other problems in its environment.
And at the time, there were many other critically endangered species on Rishis,
as you mentioned, the pink pitch and the eco parakeet, but also a host of others.
And I never, ever felt that we'd we'd done it.
We'd save diminishes Kestral. I just felt, wow, we've got to now move on to the next species.
And it's quite interesting that 40 years after I started working with malicious kestrels, we're still actually thinking about the conservation.
We've got a long term programme studying them, and actually they need quite a lot of help.
And one of the big realisations is that with critically endangered species, they're very often going to need long term care and management.
And certainly in greatly modified habitats, we will be looking after species like Rishis,
Kestrels and pink pigeons perhaps for the next decade, if not indefinitely.
And I think we're beginning to see that worldwide. And I think that's the case with most endangered species.
You start working with them and it is something that you've got to carry on for many generations.
But what's really interesting is that when you actually do that, it's driving a bigger conservation agenda.
And it is actually a permanent job. Conservation isn't something you do.
And then you sit back and say, I've done it, but it's something that carries on indefinitely.
And I've seen you've often spoken about the importance of hands, conservation of getting out there and taking action.
So you've been talking about this a little bit already. But how active of a role should people have in shaping nature now?
And how do you decide which actions to take?
I really believe that one of the great realisations of the last few years is that human beings need nature.
There was always this thought when I was growing up that human beings were apart
from nature and we sort of looked after it because it was a nice thing to do.
Whereas actually, of course, it was those Sayegh that we are a part of nature.
We need nature. And I think this is one of the big problems that we have in the world is that
human beings have tended to stand back from nature and to look at it from afar.
I think the real approach has to be that we embrace the world, we embrace nature.
We are empathetic with it.
How much we interfere, how much we involve ourselves is an interesting question because the world has become so hugely modified.
I think we can only actually save die of biodiversity and manage biodiversity by getting hugely involved with it.
We don't have to look at the huge damage we have done to the planet over the last few centuries to see that
we have no option but to actually try and reverse a lot of that damage by preserving intact areas of nature.
If there are many left, but also to start thinking about how do we rebuild damaged nature.
And I think in the future we will be looking at some of the hugely modified parts
of of this planet and trying to put them back into some semblance of order.
And I think that in the future, we will be rebuilding systems which will contain many novel elements.
And I think that we will embrace it. We will be embracing the idea of novel ecosystems.
And instead of trying to turn the clock back so much,
we will be thinking about how can we rebuild functional systems that benefit a maximum number of species.
Makes a lot of sense, actually. When you when you say it like that is just things have changed so much.
It's it's almost you have to adapt to this reality and then see where to go from there.
Given that you were saying kind of how important it is to have these long term plans,
to what extent and in what ways do you collaborate with local people and organisations in militias to carry out these conservation projects?
That's a wonderful, wonderful question. It's actually a very interesting question.
And if we actually one of the questions you asked me earlier on was how conservation has changed.
And you just think of it.
When I was in my 20s, I was an educated white biologist from Britain and I went out to my Rishis to help save an endangered Kestral.
And I think that sort of epitomised much of the conservation scene as it happened in those days.
It was very much the developed countries, Kallum telling the developing countries how.
To save their wildlife. And you only have to look at the way conservation is developed and we've seen that we moving away from that model.
We're now working with other countries and we working together to try and save biodiversity.
I worked and lived in Marysia for 20 years.
And when I was there, I helped start a small conservation non-government organisation there called the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation.
And in 1999, I actually stepped back from Orishas.
And one of the reasons I stepped back was because while I was there.
People saw me as the person running the organisation. And they came to me to help with various conservation issues,
whereas I thought it was time that I stepped back to allow young variations to grow into the role that I had developed in Mauritius.
And so the work in Marysia today is run 100 percent by Morison's with the help and guidance of academics from all over the world.
Conservation biologists and resources from all over the world.
So it's an international effort. But the day to day running of the conservation is by young musicians,
and I think this has to be the role of conservation organisations is to act as mentors rather than to go to countries and solve the problems.
I think that's a very imperialistic view that we've got to banish and we've got to think globally and internationally about working
together rather than having Western people telling people in some of the other countries how to look after their wildlife.
And something which I've always embraced is that if you're going to act as a mentor and a teacher,
you must always ensure that your students and being far more confident than yourself.
And I've been very fortunate in my career that I've found people that I can work with,
that I've actually been able to take the work far further than I could ever have imagined.
And so on. Marysia, today we have some of the most competent young biologists that are doing work,
which is far more advanced than anything I could have ever hoped for in Mauritius.
We have actually saved from possible or probable extinction.
Nine species of vertebrates, five species of birds, three reptiles and a fruit.
But as well as numerous plants and presumably lots of lots of invertebrates as well.
So we've been able to reverse the trend where species were slipping to extinction, actually seen populations recover.
And that was done as a result of teamwork and international teamwork.
And that is now being driven by young Morison's.
What would be your top tips for budding conservationists for the future generation?
Well, I have to do this where I think it is to pursue your dreams and to realise that you can actually make a great difference.
Everybody asks this question, what can I do? And of course, nobody can really answer that except yourself.
But I think one of the most important things is that if you have a passion in life, if you really want to make a difference, is to go and do it.
And I remember as a young lad speaking to my headmaster and he said to me said, Carl, you're doing terrible in school.
You're failing all your exams. What are you going to do for a job?
And I told him, just start. They said, when I leave school, I want to go and I want to go to different parts of the world and work on the
most critically endangered species and try and save them from extinction.
And I said, sir, I said in my back garden, I've been keeping birds and I've been breeding owls and I've been breeding kestrels.
And I want to apply this technique to saving the world's most endangered species.
And he looked at me and he shook his head and he said, Carl, don't be so silly to be able to do that.
You either have to be intelligent or rich and you're neither.
Anyway, I ignored my headmaster. I pursued my dreams.
And I've been able to make a bit of a difference.
And I think this is something we've all got to embrace, is that we can all make a difference if we really try.
And I really believe passionately that the differences in this world happen as the result of individuals.
They don't happen as a result of committees on organisations, but it is driven people who are pursuing their dreams.
I agree. I think that's a really nice way of putting it.
I'm talking about the agency that each of us could have in maybe following the things that we think are important to us.
So I wanted to ask you. It seemed like you believed that the Mauritius.
Castro could still be saved when, as you said, you are down to a handful of individuals and a of other people seemed to have lost hope.
You've since had a lot of success with them and other species. But I just wanted to ask, what are some of the challenges that you faced along the way?
I think that the biggest challenge that I faced, especially in the early days, was a philosophical one in the 1970s and early 1980s.
A lot of conservation organisations tended to think that we could do conservation piecemeal, that we could invest in a species like the militias,
Kestral, for three to five years, and then perhaps help it and then move on to something else.
And there was never this sort of idea that it would perhaps take decades to save his species.
And one of the big challenges I had was to try and convince people that we had to have a long term vision for the species that I was working with.
And also, I've also I've just touched upon it was the fact that a lot of people felt that to save the Marysia
Kestral and the other endangered species in Marysia is what we had to do was protect them,
educate the local people, set up a national park and step back on, of course.
That is quite inadequate. So one of the big challenges that I had was to be able to convince my bosses that
we had to get hands on with this species to actually get to know them intimately,
understand their problems, understand what was regulating their populations,
to be able to correct those problems and to use manipulative techniques such as captive breeding,
managing this species in the wild, or providing nest boxes of supplemental feeding, controlling exotic predators,
essentially correcting the problems and then rebuilding the system as it once was, or the system as it should be to function.
I've been very lucky that I did get a lot of support in the early days from a number of people who shared my views and I think.
I was the greatest gift that I had was to know some people who could guide me and were my mentors.
So I knew Gerald Durrell,
the writer and author who had this strong commitment to helping the species of militias and who believed in the hands on techniques that I was using.
I was also working with an American academic called Professor Tom Cage, who was a pioneer of.
Population management about managing species in the wild.
And I also was working with a New Zealander called Don Merton,
who was one of the pioneers of controlling exotic species on islands and the intensive management of critically endangered species.
So I had those three people that could guide and help me think through some of the problems and give me support when I really needed it.
So what we are now doing on Marysia is that I'm working with my colleagues there and I'm working with the funding organisations and I'm saying.
We mustn't be thinking about what are we going to do in the next five years?
We must be thinking about what we're going to do in the next 10 years. We've got to think about where do we want to be in a century's time.
We've got to have a long term vision and we build our five and 10 year plans into that 100 year vision.
It's been a huge change in the way we view conservation. And I think this whole movement of conservation optimism is a great one.
And it has to be the one that we all embrace. There is too much doom and gloom.
There are too many people going around telling us how many species we're losing about all that devastation and what we can't do.
Whereas in reality, yes, of course, there are big problems out there.
But there's a lot we can do. If you tell people that we're going to lose species, they're not going to do anything about it.
But if you're going to tell people, we can really make a difference. Well, then they will go out there and do something.
So I think that conservation optimism has to be one of the great revelations of the last few years that people realise we can make a difference.
I love this vision, really, because it obviously fits perfectly with conservation optimism.
But also it's just these echoes of how do you keep going if you just think it's all doom.
Like, for me, that doesn't work. Personally, I have to have this hope and there's optimism that things can get better.
And the next question we've got for you actually touches on optimism again.
So it's a question we ask all our guests on the podcast.
If you had to choose one organism to highlight and make a case for and say, can be an animal, a plant, a fungus, what would it be and why?
That's a very difficult question for me, because I really love the species I'm working with at the Times.
But I think that one of the big, weird realisations that I've had is just how saving one species can actually help you save a whole range of others.
And I'd like to choose as one of my favourite species, or should I say my favourite species for the moment, and that is the giant tortoise.
When I went to my Rishis, I was excited to go to a tropical island.
I was excited to go to an island that Darwin had visited. I was excited to go to an island that once had the dodo.
And what was really interesting was that when I set foot on my Rishis and when I went to the museum and I saw Dodo Bones,
and when I saw in other museums the skins of species that once existed on Mauritius and have now disappeared, I felt I was touching history.
I felt, my gosh, those animals are so close, suck and actually touch their remains.
And I started to read about the wonderful, wonderful island that Marysia once was.
And I kept thinking, Mauritius is still a beautiful country, but it's a very changed country.
It's got one of the highest extinction rates in the world. And all these species have disappeared.
And I couldn't help but be haunted by this vision of what once was not haunted but enlightened by it, if you like,
but haunted by the thought that it had disappeared, that these vast herds of tortoises had disappeared.
Unaccept saying to my colleagues, what a shame that we've lost all the giant tortoises.
They're extinct. And they kept saying to me, well, the Mauritian giant tortoise, the good eaten by the early colonisers, they've gone forever.
And I kept thinking, well, we have other species of giant tortoises elsewhere in the world.
And I remember 30 odd years ago saying to my colleagues,
do you think you'd be a good idea if you could get giant tortoises from elsewhere and release them on militias?
And they said, don't be so stupid.
You can't put an exotic species on an island because that's what's caused a lot of the problems anyways, exotic species.
And I kept thinking about this and I kept thinking, well, the giant tortoises weren't just there as a single species.
They were there and fulfilled in ecological function.
All the other or many of the other species would have interacted with them in different ways.
And when we started to look at the plants of militias, we started to see all these adaptations that they had for apparently surviving with tortoises.
And so I thought about it and I studied a lot of these plants and I discovered
that many of the endemic plants in Marysia were now critically endangered.
Some of them were down to just single populations or some of them just down to a handful of individuals.
And the more I looked at these plants, I kept thinking. Why are they so rare?
Well, I have started to put it in the context of a functional system. It started to become clear.
The dispersers had disappeared. The pollinators had disappeared. So I started to reframe this whole idea of bringing back giant tortoises.
And started to look at it and I thought to myself, well, if we could bring back giant tortoises, even if they weren't quite the correct species,
they may have a profound impact by spreading seeds, by creating open areas where some of the grazing climax plants can survive.
And I suggested to my colleagues and my my bosses that we should bring back tortoises, not because tortoises were once on malicious,
but to bring them back as graziers and see disperses to help some of these rare plants.
And of course, they didn't like the idea.
But when I actually said to them, if we don't bring back tortoises, all these plants are going to become extinct.
And by turning the question around and reframing it, people's starts started to say, well, yes, we really do need a graser in the system.
We really do need to bring back seed dispersers.
And so we started a whole series of detailed studies looking at tortoises and how they impacted upon the plants.
And we found that, yes, we did need giant tortoises.
And so about 20 years ago, we started putting giant tortoises on islands around malicious.
And we now have two populations of giant tortoises, one on an island called Elastic Gretsch,
which is 25 hectares and another on an island called Round Island, which is 215 hectares.
And we have on on Rung Island, we have well over 600 tortoises there.
And they are starting to restore the community, the plant community that was so badly damaged.
So for today, my favourite species is going to be the giant tortoise because it is symbolic of how we can re re awaken lost ecological function.
That's such a lovely story. And I think that you're right, a really good illustration of the ways that a species can be important in itself,
but can also be a part of a larger whole and can contribute in different ways to the overall function of a place.
So thank you so much for chatting with us, for telling us about your varying perspectives on conservation and how it's changed,
but also sharing your experiences with all of these amazing multiple species.
Thank you. That was brilliant.
I loved hearing about all the work that Karl has done.
Yeah, it was amazing, just such a diversity of projects and tension and just, you know,
I really enjoyed the back and forth looking backwards in what happened in the past,
but also then looking at what needs to happen for the future of nature.
I felt it was a really interesting conversation because of that.
I love the way that he talked about saving a species because sometimes that will
be talked about in conservation and it will just seem like a finite thing.
It'll just be like, oh, yeah. That species is saved, like done checked off the list, you know, kind of move on to the next one.
And I just loved the way that he talked about still needing to manage these species and still needing to think about them in the long term,
but also the fact that it was not just about him going to more issues and saving lots of species.
He was very clear explaining how other people were involved and how the Martian Wildlife
Foundation is now doing the work with with musicians do it doing all the conservation work.
I think it's also fascinating to hear about his head teacher just telling him that he would never
be able to do anything to protect and injured species because he was neither intelligent or rich.
And look at what is accomplished.
I think it's, again, the proof that when you have an idea in your head and you really want to do it and you're really driven,
sometimes things can just happen. And also, it's just starting with things that you enjoy and you're interested in and doing that.
And then it will get you to the next to the next phase of what you'd like to do.
And maybe you'll end up being able to do it as a career, which is really cool. And I mean, he was talking about Gerald Durrell.
I've read all of Gerald Dahl's books about growing up in Corfu as well, and I find him to be such an inspirational figure like his nature.
Writing is absolutely beautiful.
But also I think his philosophy of coming close with animals and learning about them through observing them is a really lovely wife to share.
And I think the last point for me. I didn't really expect was Wende called, picked a tortoise, as is species of choice,
because obviously he's been working with lots of different bird species. I was expecting a bird.
And the story behind that choice was so interesting, looking about invasive species,
but also about different ecosystems and what they need to be actually functional.
I thought the whole narrative around why you pick that species was incredibly interesting.
The thought of him wandering into this museum as a young conservationist and having this idea of like, oh, well,
what would it be like if we tried to rebuild this and then coming up with these
functional components and thinking through how that could actually work?
Interesting. Well, I think for sure he gave us lots of food for thought. Exactly.
Plenty to think about. Brilliant. So that's it for this episode. We hope that you really enjoyed it and we'd love to hear your thoughts.
Or if you want to send us voice notes, you can do this podcast at Conservation Optimism dot org.
And if you have anything you want to share, you can also use the hashtag conservation optimism on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
This episode was funded by an s r c impact exploration account grant through the University of Oxford.
Original theme music composed and produced by Matthew Kemp.