Professor Carl Jones, conservation biologist

0:00BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:44My castaway this week is the award-winning conservation biologist Professor Carl Jones. He's one of the most successful conservationists in the world, best known for saving the Mauritius kestrel from extinction. The roll call of other creatures he has brought back from the brink include the evocatively named Echo Parakeet, Gunther's gecko, the orange-tailed skink and the round island boa. Not only has he revived their populations, he's rebuilt entire ecosystems, sometimes using controversial means. He started out as a teenage ornithologist, rearing rescued common kestrels, owls and hawks in his back garden in Carmarthenshire.

1:22When he first heard about the plight of the Mauritius kestrel, the world's most endangered bird, he decided he would go there and use what he knew to rescue the species. By the time he arrived in Mauritius in 1979, there were only two known breeding pairs left in the wild. Thanks to his work, hundreds of Mauritius kestrels now fly freely over the islands where he spent decades working, and they are now the national bird. His success earned him the conservation world's highest honour, the Indianapolis Prize. He says, when you get to know an animal really well and you can actually enter its world, you start feeling the wind on your skin and it's like seeing the world in technicolour.

2:02You become alive. Professor Carl Jones, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much. We're so glad to have you, Carl. And I want to start with that relationship you have with the animals that you work with. You breed Andean condors at home in southwest Wales. So they're vultures, one of the largest flying birds in the world. Why are they so special to you? When I got them, they were both hand-reared birds. They come from zoos. The parents had not incubated the eggs. They'd been hatched in an incubated and hand-reared. So they were very humanised. And I got them because the various zoos felt they could never breed from them because they didn't think they were condos.

2:42So the birds thought they were humans. They thought they were humans, yes. So when I first got these birds, very, very tame, interacting with me a great deal. and my job was to try and sort them out, understand their psychosis, try and understand their behavioural development and try and make them interact in condos and so that's what I eventually did over several years. I had to keep them in adjacent cages for a while so they'd get used to each other and I used to let them together for short periods of time because the males are very large and they can be exceedingly aggressive. So to do that, Carl, do you have to get in touch with almost like a bird psychology?

3:24You have to become part bird to try and get them to do what they should be doing. What's really important is you actually have to empathise with the birds to be able to think like the birds. And it's really quite interesting because I've been trained as a scientist. And in science, they teach you to be objective, to stand back and to not be emotionally involved with your animals. Whereas the approach I've got is very much an approach that was developed by German animal behaviourists in the 1930s, that to really be a good biologist, a conservationist, you have to empathise with your animals. You have to be intuitive about them as well as being objective.

4:07And where do you stand on things like naming the animals that you live with? All my birds have names and of course they all have personalities and I love that. So what are your condos called? Well, the male had a name before he actually came to me. He's called Carlos. And the female has got the name Baby. I didn't call her Baby. Carlos and Baby, amazing. Baby, presumably, because when it was a tiny little baby, it was being had reared and the name Baby stuck. But they're the names we call them. I'm quite embarrassed to admit to having an Andean condo called Baby, but that's it, I'm afraid. And you've eaten their eggs, I think, your condors.

4:46I have, yes. Initially, both of them had these behavioural issues and they certainly wouldn't mate. And the female started laying eggs. I was going to keep the egg, of course, as a specimen. I was going to blow the egg and I thought, well, it's a shame to waste the contents. So I had scrambled condo egg. How was it? It was pretty grim, actually, because I shouldn't be admitting this. She'd been sitting on it for quite a while. Although it looked reasonably fresh, it tasted a little bit like mud. But it was all right. I did eat it. You also have experimented with taxidermy. I'm interested in biological specimens.

5:28Yeah, I have mounted lots of different species over the years, but by no means am I a professional. And what do your family make of these pursuits? I mean, how do they react to you bringing a new specimen home or something that they discover in the freezer when they're looking for the ice cream? Well, we have a rambling farmhouse where we live and there are my rooms and they're the rooms that belong to the rest of the family. There is a bit of leakage from one room to another, but most of the taxidermy is in two or three rooms. That's probably just as well, isn't it? So let's get started with your first disc, Carl.

6:03What have you chosen and why? Every Monday I used to come home from school and I used to look forward to Zoo Time with Desmond Morris. and the theme tune was Peter and the Wolf which brings back wonderful evocative memories. And Desim Norris, he's still alive, he's 97 years old but he's been a bit of a hero of mine for my whole career. He thinks like a biologist but sees the world through an artist's eyes. I've been trained as a scientist and although I love being a scientist it also means that you look at the world in a very narrow way and sometimes it really helps to be able to step back and to be able to cross disciplines.

7:20MUSIC PLAYS

7:39by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Adrian Bolt. Professor Carl Jones, that takes us back to your childhood then. You still live in Carmarthenshire, not far from where you were born, in 1954. When did your love of animals first become apparent? My parents used to tell a story that when I was a baby in the cot and they couldn't console me, I was crying, that one night an owl was calling outside and I looked up and smiled and I went to sleep. And when I was very small, I used to collect animals in my back garden, insects and so on. And as I got older, I started to rescue animals, pigeons with broken wings, abandoned jackdaws.

8:23And then as I got a bit older, I did some really serious rehabilitation, taking these injured birds and being able to release them. But those that were unreleasable, I kept and I studied and I was able to learn how to breed them in captivity. And as a teenager, I was successful in breeding owls and kestrels. But also I had wild Welsh polecats and I had pet foxes and badgers. So this is quite a menagerie. I mean, did it expand over the years if you breeded the animals as well? I mean, what size was it, this mini zoo? Well, I had quite a big menagerie in the back garden of a semi-detached house in Carmarthen.

9:05And at the most, I would have had up to about 40 different animals there. And your parents sound like they were supportive, presumably giving over the back garden to your menagerie. My father dispaired. He always used to say, what are you going to do with yourself, Carl? But my mother was very supportive and she always used to let me get away with all sorts of things. And there was actually a limit because one day I had an adder that I'd caught a snake. and, of course, had us a poisonous and escaped in the living room. And that caused some mayhem in the house. And, of course, they then became a bit stricter about what I kept and where I kept it.

9:44So your dad despaired you, sir. Tell me a little bit more about him. Your father, Daniel, he ran a tyre company in Carmarthenon. You have described him, I think, as complex. Why was he complex? My dad was a really interesting man. He was hugely intelligent, very interested in music. He was a very sensitive man. and he never quite fulfilled all his dreams in life. I think that early on he wanted to become an actor and I think he actually won a scholarship to go to a drama school but his parents despaired and they didn't think that it was a suitable career. So he started off by being a teacher, which he didn't like and then he became a businessman and a very successful businessman.

10:28I never really spoke to him about it. It wasn't the sort of thing you would have discussed with your father, but I think deep down that is definitely the case. Of course, he achieved a huge amount in his life as a businessman, but he always felt that there was somebody else underneath trying to break free. Your grandfather ran his own businesses too. He was a publican and a butcher. I can't help thinking about your penchant for taxidermy here, Carl. Did you spend time in the shop growing up? Well, I come from, on my mother's side, five generations of butchers. And so I grew up with a lot of butchery around me.

11:03And when it comes to my condos, I sometimes get fallen sheep and cattle from local farms. And I can cut those up without any problem at all. It's as if it's a neat. I think we'd better have some more music, Professor Carl Jones. Your second disc, if you wouldn't mind. What are we going to hear? I'd like an extract from Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. It's because my grandfather was a friend of Dylan Thomas. And being a butcher, Dylan Thomas used to get his meat from my grandfather. And my grandfather used to tell me that Dylan very rarely used to pay for it. He used to come and he used to scrounge, wanting bits and pieces.

11:43And my grandfather used to tease Dylan and used to take him down a narrow lane to where he used to keep his cold room and used to give him bits of meat. And he always used to say, these are man chops or dog steak. This was years before health and safety and my grandad had a pet dog, a sausage dog that used to follow him everywhere. And Dylan used to tease him that he had this dog because one day he was going to butcher it to provide meat for his shop. The manchops made it into Under Milk Wood and your grandad, I mean, butcher by none, that can't be a coincidence. Well, it's based on my grandfather, and actually, although he comes across in Under Milk Wood as quite an extreme character, you can actually see my grandad's mischievous sense of humour there.

12:32So yes, I'm very proud that Butcher Bynon is based on my grandad. In the dark breakfast room behind the shop, Mr and Mrs Bynon, waited upon by their treasure, enjoy between bites their every morning hullabaloo. And Mrs. Bynon slips the gristly bits under the tasseled tablecloth to her fat cat. She likes the liver, Ben. She ought to do best. It's her brother's. Oh, do you hear that, Lily? Yes, ma 'am. We're eating puss-cat. Yes, ma 'am. Oh, you cat butcher. It was doctored. An extract from Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, narrated by Richard Burton and featuring Gwently-Anne Owen, Gwyneth Pessey and Meredith Edwards.

13:16Professor Carl Jones, it's not just Butcher Bynon. You said Lily mentioned there was your grandmother's name too. A lot of the imagery came from the family. Rose Cottage is mentioned, and that's where my mum grew up, was in Rose Cottage. And Lily was the name of my grandma. I want to ask more about your mum. So, Patricia, she was a psychiatric nurse. She used to have to pick snails out of your pockets when you were a little boy, apparently. And you said, you know, she let you get away with having all the animals at home. Tell me a bit more about her. What kind of person was she? My mum was very tolerant and she supported everything I did.

13:50When I was very young, I wanted to be a taxidermist. That was my career, but my father was dead against it and he thought that it wasn't the sort of career that his son should be doing. I should be aspiring for something else. But my mum was always very supportive. Whatever I wanted to do, she actually helped. And of course, she used to help me look after the animals as well. It sounds like that would have brought the two of you pretty close together. You must have had a lovely relationship. Oh, we had a wonderful relationship, yes. So tell me about your school days, Carl. What kind of pupil were you?

14:23Although I think I have an academic brain, I just couldn't cope with all the different subjects. Yes, I can focus when I want to, but to be able to go into school and learn geography in the morning and maths in the afternoon, my brain just couldn't cope with it. And my brain was always somewhere else. I was always thinking about being out in the countryside and being with my birds. and some of my teachers were actually very, very supportive. And it was an all-boys grammar school and it was a very old stone building. And one day I was between lessons and I was in the headmaster's front garden clambering around in the rhododendron bushes looking for baby jackdaws that had fallen out from underneath the roof to rescue them.

15:09And he caught me. And he came up and he said, Jones what do you think you're doing? And I said oh sir I'm looking for baby jackdaws. He said you're doing what? What do you want to do that for? He said and I said well one day I'd like to travel around the world and save endangered birds so I want to know how to rear birds in captivity. And he looked at me and he said Jones to be a biologist and to travel around the world you've either got to be intelligent or wealthy and you're neither. So not all of your teachers were supportive? Well, I think he found it quite amusing and I think he would rather that I went to my lessons rather than clambering around in his garden looking for jackdaws.

15:58But how did you feel about that? Did it put you off? No, of course it didn't put me off, no. So I'm picturing you, Carl, clambering around in the rhododendrons looking for baby jackdaws and going home to your animals. That sounds quite solitary. Is that the kind of kid that you were? Did you find it easy to make friends? Oh, I did have friends, but I did spend a lot of time alone. I was very much a country lad. I enjoyed fishing and ferreting. I used to go and catch rabbits and I used to take some of my animals to school. I had a pet falcon in those days and I used to take that one to school and I used to fly it on the rugby field.

16:30Oh, I bet the other kids loved that. Yeah, they all thought it was quite amusing. so yes I think I was quite an eccentric young lad I was supported by the biology teacher and also by the artist Terry Johns who was a very good friend of mine I was very good at drawing when I was a young lad but I had a problem and that was that my father didn't think that art was a proper subject so whenever I was drawing at home he used to discourage me and to this day whenever I do any drawing I can hear him sitting on my shoulder telling me to go and do something else. Academic type studies like maths and English.

17:09And of course, artists and scientists are both trying to understand the world and how it actually functions. And when you get a crossover from both, it can be hugely creative. And sometimes science can be highly creative, but it can also be very limiting. So I've always enjoyed being around artists and the way of seeing the world. Well, I think that brings us back to the music, Carl, if you wouldn't mind. Disc number three. What are we going to hear next? Disc number three is by Ian Dreary, Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. And this takes me to my time when I was in college. I went to a polytechnic in north-east London and it was a huge culture shock for me, going from rural West Wales to multicultural East London.

17:57But looking back, I gained a huge amount from it. and Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll captures the hedonism of my student days, although perhaps not quite the reality. Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll Is all my brain and body need Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll

18:26Very good indeed Keep your silly ways or throw them out the window The wisdom of your ways I've been there and I know lots of other ways Sex and drugs and rock and roll, Ian Durie. Professor Carl Jones, you studied biology in London. You mentioned the culture shock you experienced there. How difficult was the adjustment for you? During the first term there, I became quite depressed. I was missing rural West Wales. It must have felt very far from home as well in those days. You know, you wouldn't have had the kind of communication we can have now, obviously. And of course, I was far away from the wildlife that I really liked.

19:10And so what I did was after the first term, I went home and I came back with some of my birds and I kept them in my flat in London. And I had... What did you have? What kind of thing? I had a lana falcon called Jane, who I had for many, many years. and I used to take her out and fly her on some waste ground in East London. It was really quite nice because I had all sorts of animals that I kept in my room in college, including I had field mice. I kept field mice. And again, I wasn't a very good student. I did very poorly. But what I really loved was the library. So I spent a huge amount of time just studying on my own about the European ethologists, the people who studied animal behaviour, people like Conrad Lorenz.

19:58And he had this philosophy, this approach, where he claimed that to really understand animals, you had to live with them. And he started doing that. So that really, really resonated with me. And, you know, you mentioned your dad not quite understanding the path you wanted to forge. Did he come to understand where you were trying to get to? Yes, he was very pleased that I was pursuing my dream because I think that's something that he would have liked to have done. Carl, you had a life-changing moment while you were studying for your biology degree. It was at a conference at Oxford University. What happened?

20:33There was an American professor there called Tom Cade and he was talking about the work they were doing on the conservation of falcons and he said on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean there is a kestrel and he showed a picture of this bird and he said, there's only four known individuals left and it's going to become extinct, not because it can't be saved, but because we can't find the right people to go out and work with it and work with the politics of the country. And I thought to myself, my gosh, I can do that. And why had this happened? Why were they so under threat? Because in the late 1950s, when Mauritius was part of Britain, it was a colony of Great Britain, it had had a problem with malaria.

21:26And they'd sprayed much of the island with DDT to kill the malaria-carrying mosquitoes. And this had poisoned the kestrels. And they declined to just four birds. and the great conservationist in the 1970s was Sir Peter Scott who was then the president of the World Wildlife Fund and I met Sir Peter and he thought that I'd be very good to go out to Mauritius. He actually said, well, I think that a Welshman will be really a good fit and we'll get on well with the Mauritians. And so he recommended me. Why did he think that would be a good fit? What was the cultural kind of mix? Well, what had happened was that there'd been a whole series of high-flying conservation biologists that had gone out to work with the Mauritians, and they'd failed miserably.

22:13And they tended to be a bit too aggressive. They tended to think that the Mauritians could achieve a lot more than they actually were because they just didn't have the resources or the knowledge to do this work. And in the 1970s, there was very much a feeling towards the end of the 1970s that we should give up on all these highly endangered species because they were unsavable. But of course, I didn't believe that. So this was a new role, managing a project to save the kestrel. It was being run by the International Council for Bird Preservation, the ICBP. What did the role involve? My bosses in the International Council for Bird Preservation said, well, you know, we can't be supporting all these projects all over the world.

22:56They said, you'll be out there for one or two years and we want you to hand it over to the Mauritians. And I went out there and I discovered very quickly that the Mauritius kestrel needed a long-term investment and a lot of specialist care. And there was no way I was going to pull out after one or two years. And what were the problems? What were the challenges you were facing? Ecologically, it's been devastated over the years. It was once covered with tropical forest and now there's about 2 % left. So no wonder the dodo became extinct. The dodo was found on Mauritius until 1662 and it became extinct.

23:33But a whole host of other species have become extinct. Carl, we've got to make some time for the music. I'd love to hear your next piece. What's it going to be? The next piece is going to be by John Kenneth Nelson and it's called La Riviere Noire. And we used to have Sega parties on the beach, which is local music and local dancing. And they'd make a bonfire on the beach and there'd be a lot of dancing, a lot of drinking of local rum. And I met John Kenneth Nelson a number of times and he became a friend of mine for a number of years. And so, of course, this is very fitting. La Rive Noire is about the village I lived in for 20 years.

24:42La Riviere Noire, John Kenneth Nelson. Carl Jones, can you describe the Mauritian kestrel for me? It's a forest-dwelling falcon, so there's short rounded wings and a long tail. And it has a beautiful ivory white front with lovely black heart-shaped spots. and because on Mauritius there were no predators, there was no persecution. So the native species are really very tame. And I remember when I first went to Mauritius, I felt that I had to get to know the kestrels. There were one or two in captivity that we had, but I wanted to get to know the wild birds. Very difficult to find because they were deep in these gorges in very inaccessible parts.

25:27and I remember one day I was in the Black River Gorges and it was during the wet season and there was a tremendous thunderstorm and I went and sheltered in a cave in the side of a cliff and I was all alone and a Mauritius kestrel came and it perched just a metre away on the side of the cliff next to me in this cave and that was one of the most moving experiences of my life where I had this bird that just came and sat there. You were sheltering together. Sheltering together. And what was quite interesting was that they did eventually become habituated to me, so they knew me. I gave them all names, by the way.

26:08And I trained them. So I went into the forest and I used to take white mice with me, dead white mice used to keep in my pocket. And initially I'd put a dead mouse on the cliff where they were sitting and they'd come and they'd eat it. and then eventually I'd be able to go and hold the mouse in my hand and they'd come and take it from me. And I also taught them to come to a whistle. So I used to be able to go into the Black River Gorges and whistle and the last Mauritius kestrels in the world used to fly down and take a mouse at me. A lot of my conservation colleagues didn't quite know what to make of this because I was messing around too much.

26:46But what's interesting is that if you feed birds, coming up to the breeding season, they lay more eggs. Did that happen? Yeah, they laid more eggs. And I was then able to harvest the eggs from these wild Mauritius kestrels to hatch in captivity. Now, the reason you did that is interesting, because it's not a question of taking the one clutch of eggs that they're going to produce off them. It was, again, to try and get them to lay more. Yes, there had been some birds in captivity, but unfortunately, these had died. And the international organisations were saying, well, we should give up on captive breeding.

27:18and I said no, I know why the birds died in captivity I think they were probably poisoned by DDT and what we should do is have another go but this time let's rear them from eggs And how had you worked out that the first breeding season that the DDT poisoning had been the cause of those chicks dying? We'd been rearing mice to feed the kestrels in an office an old office that had been sprayed regularly with DDT So we'd inadvertently poisoned those very early Mauritius kestrels. So the very last two pairs of Mauritius kestrels in the world, I took their eggs. And they subsequently relayed and produced young in the wild.