Last Chance to See

Last Chance to See is a 1990 nonfiction book accompanying a 1989 BBC radio documentary series of the same name. In both, author Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame and zoologist Mark Carwardine travel to exotic locations to find endangered species on the brink of extinction.

The book begins in Madagascar. Adams and Carwardine are on separate assignments to find the elusive Aye-Aye, a primate once considered extinct. Based on their experience searching for the Aye-Aye, they decide to begin a larger search for the critically endangered species of the world.

Three years later, their first stop on this larger tour is a government preserve in Indonesia to find the Komodo Dragon. There, they encounter obtrusive bureaucracy and meddlesome tourists in Bali. They fly next to what was then known as Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) on a plane full of smiling missionaries and battle corrupt officials to visit mountain gorillas in the Virunga Volcanos. In Garamba National Park, they find some of the last surviving northern white rhinoceroses left in the wild.



Their next adventure takes them to remote Fiordland National Park on the South Island of New Zealand. A helicopter pilot takes them deep into the bush to find the kakapo, a flightless parrot, but they don’t find one until they visit a preserve on Codfish Island.

China is the next destination as Adams and Carwardine search for the Yangtze River dolphin, or baiji. First acclimatizing in Beijing, they travel south to the Yangtze River where a conservation group raises money through branding and licensing to save the remaining dolphin population, thought to be the reincarnation of a princess. The dolphins are under a lot of stress as the river becomes increasingly noisy and polluted.

They travel to Mauritius where they search for a rare fruit bat on Rodrigues Island. While in the country, they meet Carl Jones who runs a captive breeding center for local endangered species including the Mauritius kestrel, pink pigeons, and the fruit bats Adams and Carwardine sought on Rodrigues Island. In ten years, the center has helped the populations of these species rebound.



In the chapter “Mark’s Epilogue,” the voice shifts from Adams’s to Carwardine’s. Carwardine, cautioning that growing numbers is no guarantee of success, shares some conservation success stories. The Juan Fernandez Seals, for instance, which were reduced from millions to one hundred by 1965, stand at three thousand at the time of publication. The Chatham Island robin was once reduced to one pregnant female but has rebounded to fifty. At the same time, though, poaching is still causing considerable population decline for species such as the African elephant.

In the final chapter, Adams is haunted by a parable from his boyhood about the Sibylline books. In the parable, a wealthy city repeatedly refuses to pay for all the knowledge in the world. Each time the city refuses, half of the knowledge is destroyed and the price increases. In the end, they pay a far higher price for only a fraction of what knowledge remains. So too, Adams warns, might we extract a terrible price for what remains of the earth’s wildlife and wild places if we don’t act soon.

Those familiar with Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series will recognize his sense of humor in the way he depicts his adventures with Carwardine. Alongside the humor, however, is a sad recounting of the destruction of species on earth. Poaching is a frequent theme that appears throughout the book as many of these creatures are hunted for sport, out of superstition, or for large sums of money. Environmental degradation reappears as well, as habitats shrink or are broken up. The book examines the likelihood that the featured creatures will survive; the prognosis is never encouraging.



Last Chance to See was well received by critics, who noted the book’s humor and inspiring stories of people working to save endangered species. The Boston Sunday Herald said, “Perhaps Adams and Carwardine, with their witty science, will help prevent such misadventures in the future.” In 2009, the BBC broadcast a follow-up TV series chronicling the status twenty years later of the creatures featured in the original radio show and book. Adams, who passed away in 2001, was replaced by actor and friend Stephen Fry who accompanied Carwardine across the globe. The show did not include the Yangtze River dolphin, which is very likely extinct.