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The Good Nature podcast comes to you from conservation, optimism and its founding partners, Synchronicity URF and the University of Oxford.

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Welcome to Good-Natured, a podcast where you can join us for uplifting tots that shine a light on conservation challenges.

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In each episode, we interview an inspiring conservationist. A fascinating guest come from many backgrounds artist, scientist, activist and many more.

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I'm Sophia APHC student focussing on marine conservation.

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I love doing science and telling stories through film writing, improvised comedy and now podcasts.

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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.

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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.

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Hydrophobia. Hi, Sophia. I'm super excited to announce that today we've got Professor Carl Jones on the podcast.

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For anyone who doesn't know who Caldrons is is a wealth biologist. And he's really famous for his work in Mauritius.

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He's been working with lots of different species like the marshes, kestrels, the pink pigeon and the eco parakeets as well.

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Carl is the scientific director at the Migration Wildlife Foundation, and he's also the chief scientist at Dorell Wildlife Conservation Trust.

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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.

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I completely agree. I think we're really lucky to be speaking with call today.

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And if you look at some of the stories of the species that he's worked with, that just incredible.

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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.

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And at some point people had just given up on the idea that they would ever be a viable population again.

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So it's a really impressive conservation success story, I think, for sure.

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And another really interesting thing about Carl is the fact that he has this incredibly optimistic outlook.

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So I remember reading this article in The Guardian, and the main clue, I think was the headline was Saving Species is Easy.

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And it's just amazing to just think, you know,

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you could think that saving species is easy and just to have that optimism and positive attitude towards it.

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I think it's gonna be really interesting to hear a bit more about those stories. Absolutely.

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I saw that article as well. And I remember thinking just not many conservationists would think that saving a species is easy.

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But Carl just has so much conservation experience and he has been through so many phases and types of conservation

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that I think it'll be really interesting to hear about how his perspective on it has changed through time.

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Definitely. So let's not wait longer. And let's hear what Carl has to say.

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Thank you so much for joining us today. We're so excited to hear about all of the conservation work that you've done.

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You're well-known in the conservation world for your work in Marysia specifically.

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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?

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Well, as a young boy, I was very interested in natural history indeed, like many young people.

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And I kept some animals in my backyard. I had some injured birds that I was looking after.

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And I started to keep and study these birds.

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And I thought, wow, when you've got species in captivity, you can find out so much about them.

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And I was very lucky that I was able to breed some European kestrels.

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And at the time, it was actually quite difficult to breed birds of prey in captivity.

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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?

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And then one day I heard about the plight of the malicious kestrels, which in the.

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1970S was reduced to just a handful of birds. And I kept thinking, wow.

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Just think the knowledge I have gained in my back garden could be used to save a species.

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And I thought to myself, one day I have to go to Moriches to see this kestrels.

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And I made some enquiries and I heard that there was a conservation programme to try and save them Rishis Kestrels,

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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.

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Kestral and cut a long story short, a few months later, I had a telephone call and they said,

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Karl, would you like to go to Orishas and work with the precious kestrels?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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But I was also very interested by knowledge and how I could use captive animals to actually learn about their biology.

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And when I started to study and read books, I realised there was a lot that was known about many of these species.

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And so very early on,

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I realised that we could use captive animals to fill in knowledge gaps and then apply that knowledge to help species in the wild.

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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.

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And it's interesting, actually, how your talking about the evolution of conservation and the techniques that have slowly evolved through time.

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And actually, if my numbers are correct, I believe you've been working in conservation, is it for almost 40 years.

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So why would you say are some of the trends you've observed in terms of conservation efforts throughout the years?

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Well, there's been a huge change because when I was a student, conservation biology was not really recognised as a discipline.

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Yes, you could study a little bit of conservation,

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but it was essentially a applied population management and people didn't recognise the subject as they do today.

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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.

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And so one of the big changes that's happened is our approach to conservation.

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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.

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And that's what people thought.

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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.

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Whereas in reality, in places like Marysia, where the ecosystem is hugely modified, protectionist type approaches don't necessarily work.

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And I think there's been a change in philosophy that we've moved away from just straight protectionism

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to actually understanding the biology and seeing how we can manipulate that to benefit the species.

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And also, I think that one of the great realisations of the last 20 years is that by working with endangered species,

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you can actually use that as a driver for conserving whole ecosystems or certainly you species as a driver for rebuilding systems.

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You've not been credited with saving a number of species.

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So amongst them, the is Castro, which we were talking about earlier, that the pink pigeon, the eco parakeet.

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To you, what does it mean to save a species?

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Is the work ever really done or at what point can you start to feel safer or calmer about where our species is at?

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That's actually a very interesting question, because when I went to Marysia is the thought that I could possibly help save them.

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Rishis Kestral was just a dream. And I thought, wow, if I can save them, Orishas Kestral, that would be amazing.

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And for me, it was one of those things that seemed unobtainable.

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But what's interesting is as we actually progressed with the malicious Kestral and we found that we could breed them in captivity,

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we could put them back in the wild, we could start to restore the whole population.

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I started to get the feeling well. This isn't the end of the work.

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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.

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And at the time, there were many other critically endangered species on Rishis,

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as you mentioned, the pink pitch and the eco parakeet, but also a host of others.

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And I never, ever felt that we'd we'd done it.

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We'd save diminishes Kestral. I just felt, wow, we've got to now move on to the next species.

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And it's quite interesting that 40 years after I started working with malicious kestrels, we're still actually thinking about the conservation.

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We've got a long term programme studying them, and actually they need quite a lot of help.

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And one of the big realisations is that with critically endangered species, they're very often going to need long term care and management.

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And certainly in greatly modified habitats, we will be looking after species like Rishis,

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Kestrels and pink pigeons perhaps for the next decade, if not indefinitely.

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And I think we're beginning to see that worldwide. And I think that's the case with most endangered species.

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You start working with them and it is something that you've got to carry on for many generations.

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But what's really interesting is that when you actually do that, it's driving a bigger conservation agenda.

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And it is actually a permanent job. Conservation isn't something you do.

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And then you sit back and say, I've done it, but it's something that carries on indefinitely.

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And I've seen you've often spoken about the importance of hands, conservation of getting out there and taking action.

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So you've been talking about this a little bit already. But how active of a role should people have in shaping nature now?

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And how do you decide which actions to take?

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I really believe that one of the great realisations of the last few years is that human beings need nature.

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There was always this thought when I was growing up that human beings were apart

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from nature and we sort of looked after it because it was a nice thing to do.

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Whereas actually, of course, it was those Sayegh that we are a part of nature.

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We need nature. And I think this is one of the big problems that we have in the world is that

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human beings have tended to stand back from nature and to look at it from afar.

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I think the real approach has to be that we embrace the world, we embrace nature.

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We are empathetic with it.

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How much we interfere, how much we involve ourselves is an interesting question because the world has become so hugely modified.

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I think we can only actually save die of biodiversity and manage biodiversity by getting hugely involved with it.

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We don't have to look at the huge damage we have done to the planet over the last few centuries to see that

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we have no option but to actually try and reverse a lot of that damage by preserving intact areas of nature.

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If there are many left, but also to start thinking about how do we rebuild damaged nature.

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And I think in the future we will be looking at some of the hugely modified parts

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of of this planet and trying to put them back into some semblance of order.

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And I think that in the future, we will be rebuilding systems which will contain many novel elements.

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And I think that we will embrace it. We will be embracing the idea of novel ecosystems.

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And instead of trying to turn the clock back so much,

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we will be thinking about how can we rebuild functional systems that benefit a maximum number of species.

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Makes a lot of sense, actually. When you when you say it like that is just things have changed so much.

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It's it's almost you have to adapt to this reality and then see where to go from there.

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Given that you were saying kind of how important it is to have these long term plans,

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to what extent and in what ways do you collaborate with local people and organisations in militias to carry out these conservation projects?

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That's a wonderful, wonderful question. It's actually a very interesting question.

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And if we actually one of the questions you asked me earlier on was how conservation has changed.

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And you just think of it.

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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.

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And I think that sort of epitomised much of the conservation scene as it happened in those days.

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It was very much the developed countries, Kallum telling the developing countries how.

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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.

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We're now working with other countries and we working together to try and save biodiversity.

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I worked and lived in Marysia for 20 years.

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And when I was there, I helped start a small conservation non-government organisation there called the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation.

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And in 1999, I actually stepped back from Orishas.

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And one of the reasons I stepped back was because while I was there.

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People saw me as the person running the organisation. And they came to me to help with various conservation issues,

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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.

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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.

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Conservation biologists and resources from all over the world.

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So it's an international effort. But the day to day running of the conservation is by young musicians,

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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.

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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

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together rather than having Western people telling people in some of the other countries how to look after their wildlife.

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And something which I've always embraced is that if you're going to act as a mentor and a teacher,

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you must always ensure that your students and being far more confident than yourself.

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And I've been very fortunate in my career that I've found people that I can work with,

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that I've actually been able to take the work far further than I could ever have imagined.

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And so on. Marysia, today we have some of the most competent young biologists that are doing work,

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which is far more advanced than anything I could have ever hoped for in Mauritius.

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We have actually saved from possible or probable extinction.

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Nine species of vertebrates, five species of birds, three reptiles and a fruit.

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But as well as numerous plants and presumably lots of lots of invertebrates as well.

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So we've been able to reverse the trend where species were slipping to extinction, actually seen populations recover.

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And that was done as a result of teamwork and international teamwork.

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And that is now being driven by young Morison's.

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What would be your top tips for budding conservationists for the future generation?

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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.

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Everybody asks this question, what can I do? And of course, nobody can really answer that except yourself.

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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.

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And I remember as a young lad speaking to my headmaster and he said to me said, Carl, you're doing terrible in school.

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You're failing all your exams. What are you going to do for a job?

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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

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most critically endangered species and try and save them from extinction.

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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.

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And I want to apply this technique to saving the world's most endangered species.

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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.

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You either have to be intelligent or rich and you're neither.

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Anyway, I ignored my headmaster. I pursued my dreams.

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And I've been able to make a bit of a difference.

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And I think this is something we've all got to embrace, is that we can all make a difference if we really try.

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And I really believe passionately that the differences in this world happen as the result of individuals.

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They don't happen as a result of committees on organisations, but it is driven people who are pursuing their dreams.

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I agree. I think that's a really nice way of putting it.

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I'm talking about the agency that each of us could have in maybe following the things that we think are important to us.

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So I wanted to ask you. It seemed like you believed that the Mauritius.

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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.

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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?

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I think that the biggest challenge that I faced, especially in the early days, was a philosophical one in the 1970s and early 1980s.

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A lot of conservation organisations tended to think that we could do conservation piecemeal, that we could invest in a species like the militias,

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Kestral, for three to five years, and then perhaps help it and then move on to something else.

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And there was never this sort of idea that it would perhaps take decades to save his species.

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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.

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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

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Kestral and the other endangered species in Marysia is what we had to do was protect them,

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educate the local people, set up a national park and step back on, of course.

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That is quite inadequate. So one of the big challenges that I had was to be able to convince my bosses that

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we had to get hands on with this species to actually get to know them intimately,

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understand their problems, understand what was regulating their populations,

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to be able to correct those problems and to use manipulative techniques such as captive breeding,

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managing this species in the wild, or providing nest boxes of supplemental feeding, controlling exotic predators,

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essentially correcting the problems and then rebuilding the system as it once was, or the system as it should be to function.

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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.

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I was the greatest gift that I had was to know some people who could guide me and were my mentors.

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So I knew Gerald Durrell,

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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.

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I was also working with an American academic called Professor Tom Cage, who was a pioneer of.

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Population management about managing species in the wild.

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And I also was working with a New Zealander called Don Merton,

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who was one of the pioneers of controlling exotic species on islands and the intensive management of critically endangered species.

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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.

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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.

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We mustn't be thinking about what are we going to do in the next five years?

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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.

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We've got to have a long term vision and we build our five and 10 year plans into that 100 year vision.

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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.

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And it has to be the one that we all embrace. There is too much doom and gloom.

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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.

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Whereas in reality, yes, of course, there are big problems out there.

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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.

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But if you're going to tell people, we can really make a difference. Well, then they will go out there and do something.

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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.

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I love this vision, really, because it obviously fits perfectly with conservation optimism.

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But also it's just these echoes of how do you keep going if you just think it's all doom.

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Like, for me, that doesn't work. Personally, I have to have this hope and there's optimism that things can get better.

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And the next question we've got for you actually touches on optimism again.

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So it's a question we ask all our guests on the podcast.

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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?

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That's a very difficult question for me, because I really love the species I'm working with at the Times.

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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.

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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.

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When I went to my Rishis, I was excited to go to a tropical island.

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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.

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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,

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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.

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I felt, my gosh, those animals are so close, suck and actually touch their remains.

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And I started to read about the wonderful, wonderful island that Marysia once was.

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And I kept thinking, Mauritius is still a beautiful country, but it's a very changed country.

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It's got one of the highest extinction rates in the world. And all these species have disappeared.

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And I couldn't help but be haunted by this vision of what once was not haunted but enlightened by it, if you like,

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but haunted by the thought that it had disappeared, that these vast herds of tortoises had disappeared.

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Unaccept saying to my colleagues, what a shame that we've lost all the giant tortoises.

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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.

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And I kept thinking, well, we have other species of giant tortoises elsewhere in the world.

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And I remember 30 odd years ago saying to my colleagues,

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do you think you'd be a good idea if you could get giant tortoises from elsewhere and release them on militias?

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And they said, don't be so stupid.

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You can't put an exotic species on an island because that's what's caused a lot of the problems anyways, exotic species.

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And I kept thinking about this and I kept thinking, well, the giant tortoises weren't just there as a single species.

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They were there and fulfilled in ecological function.

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All the other or many of the other species would have interacted with them in different ways.

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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.

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And so I thought about it and I studied a lot of these plants and I discovered

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that many of the endemic plants in Marysia were now critically endangered.

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Some of them were down to just single populations or some of them just down to a handful of individuals.

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And the more I looked at these plants, I kept thinking. Why are they so rare?

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Well, I have started to put it in the context of a functional system. It started to become clear.

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The dispersers had disappeared. The pollinators had disappeared. So I started to reframe this whole idea of bringing back giant tortoises.

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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,

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they may have a profound impact by spreading seeds, by creating open areas where some of the grazing climax plants can survive.

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And I suggested to my colleagues and my my bosses that we should bring back tortoises, not because tortoises were once on malicious,

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but to bring them back as graziers and see disperses to help some of these rare plants.

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And of course, they didn't like the idea.

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But when I actually said to them, if we don't bring back tortoises, all these plants are going to become extinct.

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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.

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We really do need to bring back seed dispersers.

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And so we started a whole series of detailed studies looking at tortoises and how they impacted upon the plants.

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And we found that, yes, we did need giant tortoises.

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And so about 20 years ago, we started putting giant tortoises on islands around malicious.

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And we now have two populations of giant tortoises, one on an island called Elastic Gretsch,

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which is 25 hectares and another on an island called Round Island, which is 215 hectares.

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And we have on on Rung Island, we have well over 600 tortoises there.

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And they are starting to restore the community, the plant community that was so badly damaged.

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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.

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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,

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but can also be a part of a larger whole and can contribute in different ways to the overall function of a place.

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So thank you so much for chatting with us, for telling us about your varying perspectives on conservation and how it's changed,

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but also sharing your experiences with all of these amazing multiple species.

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Thank you. That was brilliant.

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I loved hearing about all the work that Karl has done.

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Yeah, it was amazing, just such a diversity of projects and tension and just, you know,

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I really enjoyed the back and forth looking backwards in what happened in the past,

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but also then looking at what needs to happen for the future of nature.

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I felt it was a really interesting conversation because of that.

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I love the way that he talked about saving a species because sometimes that will

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be talked about in conservation and it will just seem like a finite thing.

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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.

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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,

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but also the fact that it was not just about him going to more issues and saving lots of species.

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He was very clear explaining how other people were involved and how the Martian Wildlife

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Foundation is now doing the work with with musicians do it doing all the conservation work.

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I think it's also fascinating to hear about his head teacher just telling him that he would never

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be able to do anything to protect and injured species because he was neither intelligent or rich.

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And look at what is accomplished.

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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,

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sometimes things can just happen. And also, it's just starting with things that you enjoy and you're interested in and doing that.

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And then it will get you to the next to the next phase of what you'd like to do.

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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.

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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.

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Writing is absolutely beautiful.

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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.

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And I think the last point for me. I didn't really expect was Wende called, picked a tortoise, as is species of choice,

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because obviously he's been working with lots of different bird species. I was expecting a bird.

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And the story behind that choice was so interesting, looking about invasive species,

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but also about different ecosystems and what they need to be actually functional.

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I thought the whole narrative around why you pick that species was incredibly interesting.

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The thought of him wandering into this museum as a young conservationist and having this idea of like, oh, well,

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what would it be like if we tried to rebuild this and then coming up with these

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functional components and thinking through how that could actually work?

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Interesting. Well, I think for sure he gave us lots of food for thought. Exactly.

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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.

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Or if you want to send us voice notes, you can do this podcast at Conservation Optimism dot org.

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And if you have anything you want to share, you can also use the hashtag conservation optimism on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

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This episode was funded by an s r c impact exploration account grant through the University of Oxford.

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Original theme music composed and produced by Matthew Kemp.