Professor Carl Jones, conservation biologist
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BBC 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. MUSIC PLAYS

My 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. When 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. You 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 incubator in Hanriot. 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 condors. So 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 psychoses, 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 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? You 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 their 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 or conservationist you have to empathise with your animals. You have to

be intuitive about them as well as being objective. And 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 condors 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 hadriated, the name Baby stuck. But they're the names we call them. I'm quite embarrassed to admit to having an Andean condor called Baby, but that's it, I'm afraid. And you've eaten their eggs, I think, your condors. I 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, actually.

But it was all right. I did eat it. You also have experimented with taxidermy.

I'm interested in biological specimens. Yeah, 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 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. What 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 Desmond 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. MUSIC PLAYS

Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, performed by 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. And then as I got a bit older, I did some really serious rehabilitation activities.

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. At the most, I would have had up to about 40 different animals there. And your parents sound like they were supportive, I mean, presumably giving over the back garden to your menagerie. My father despaired. 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...

and Ada, that I'd caught a snake and of course Ada's 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. So your dad despaired, you said. Tell me a little bit more about him. Your father, Daniel, he ran a tyre company in Carmarthen, and 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 choice.

So he started off by being a teacher, which he didn't like. And then he became a businessman and a very successful businessman. I 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. And 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 better have some more music, Professor Cole-Jones. Your second disc, if you wouldn't mind. What are we going to hear? I'd like an extract from Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas. It's because my grandfather was a friend of Dylan Thomas's.

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.

And my grandfather used to tease Dylan and he used to take him down a narrow lane to where he used to keep his cold room and he 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 grandfather

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 man chops made it into Undermilk 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. So, yes, I'm very proud that Butcher Bynum is based on my grandad. In the dark breakfast room behind the shop, Mr and Mrs Bynum, waited upon by their treasure, enjoy between bites their every morning hullabaloo.

and Mrs. Bynum 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.

Do you hear that, Lily? Yes, ma'am. We're eating busket. 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 Gwen Lian Owen, Gwyneth Pethy and Meredith Edwards. Professor Carl Jones, it's not just Butcher Bynum. 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, very...

And she supported everything I did. When I was very young, I wanted to be a taxidermist. That was my career goal.

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?

Although 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. And 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. Oh.

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 clobbering around in his garden looking for jackdaws. But 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, you know, clambering around in the rhododendrons looking for baby jackdaws and, you know, 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. Yeah.

and I used to take that one to school and I used to fly it on the rugby field. Oh, 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. And 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?

Dix 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 northeast London and it was a huge culture shock for me, going from rural West Wales to multicultural East London. But 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. Keep your silly ways or throw them out the way. The wisdom of your way. No, lots of other ways.

Sex and drugs and rock and roll in Drury. 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. Very far from home, yes. 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. And 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 lanna 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. And he had this philosophy, this approach that

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? There 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 and 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

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 to Mauritius. He actually said, well, I think that a Welshman will be really a good fit and will 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. And 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.

They 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 involved.

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 in Mauritius until 1662 and it became extinct. But 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 a 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

Of course, this is very fitting. La Rivière Noire is about the village I lived in for 20 years. MUSIC PLAYS

La Riviere Noire, John Kenneth Nelson. Carl Jones, can you describe the Mauritian kestrel for me? It's a forest-dwelling falcon, so it has 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. And 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. And I trained them.

So I went into the forest and I used to take white mice with me, dead white mice just 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 Kestrel in the world used to fly down and take a mouse off me.

A lot of my conservation colleagues didn't quite know what to make of this because I was messing around too much. But 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. And 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, you know, 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 out.

and they subsequently relayed and produced young in the wild. But I was able to take those eggs and hatch them in incubators and hand-rear the babies, and those babies were the start of my captive breeding programme for the Mauritius kestrel.

So you were spending your time hiking, being close to these animals, learning how they saw the world. And I think you brushed away a lot of received wisdom. You discovered a lot of things that people didn't know about their behaviour and how they lived. People said that the Mauritius kestrel, they assumed it was going to be very much like a European kestrel and feed on small mammals and insects and so on and birds and so on.

But I soon found out that they weren't feeding on birds at all. And I saw them flying into the canopy of ebony trees. They were feeding on green geckos. These are endemic geckos found only in Mauritius and they live in the canopy of trees. So a highly specialised little falcon that was feeding on

these beautiful endemic geckos. So you knew you had to encourage the geckos and look after the ebony trees? Absolutely. And of course, you know, when you're doing conservation, it's not just about saving individual species, but understanding how those species fit into the ecology and then rebuilding that ecology.

It's time for your next disc, Professor Cole-Jones. What are we going to hear and why are you taking this to your island? This is going to be Asimbunanga by Johnny Clegg and Savuka. This is an anti-apartheid song and Johnny Clegg was an activist who was opposing apartheid with his music. And because Mauritius is a multicultural country,

And because I have lots of friends in South Africa and I went across there many times to talk to various conservationists, I felt very strongly that we should be a lot more tolerant of different cultures and be working a lot more closely.

So Asim Bonanga is a very special track to me and it's about Nelson Mandela and it was talking about Nelson Mandela with the hope that one day he would be freed. Asim Bonanga Asim Bonanga

Asim Bonanga, Johnny Clegg and Savuka.

Professor Carl Jones, the first birds were released into the wild in 1987, I think. You'd raised these chicks, watched them hatch in an incubator and you'd been supplementing their diets, feeding them those white mice you were talking about. Were you ever worried that they'd become too tame and you wouldn't be able to let them fend for themselves in the wild? No, I never worried about that at all because I knew that

Essentially what we're doing is supporting them and if the resources are there in the wild they will actually become independent. They were very magical days for me actually because certainly when we were breeding the birds in captivity, the first ones I was sleeping on the floor of the incubator room because in Black River the electricity supply wasn't very reliable and we had to have emergency generators and so on.

I remember the first ones hatching. They hatched at five o'clock in the morning and I was there with them and I was talking to them as they were coming out. And then we put them out into the wild and I'd cycle up into the gorges in the afternoon with pockets full of white mice. And as I'd cycle along, I'd stop and a whistle and kestrels used to come down. What was your whistle? And they used to call to me, eep, eep, eep, eep, eep.

We were releasing up to 50 birds a year at one stage. And what do you say, Carl, to people who take that more traditional, hands-off conservation approach to these critically endangered species? In the 60s and 70s, the main approach to conservation had always been protection and legislation. And people thought that

Catching animals, putting them in cages to try and breed them, reintroducing them to the wild, looking after them in the wild. They didn't think that this was a legitimate approach. But I always use the analogy of treating somebody who's critically sick differently.

They turn up in hospital and what do you do? You ensure the blood pressure's okay, the airways are clear. You start treating them and seeing how they respond. And it's exactly the same with critically endangered species. The species are declining, they're doing very poorly. So you do what you can to improve their breeding and their survival by looking after them. And then you see just how they respond.

And it may take several years before you get to the bottom of why they're really rare. But in the meantime, you're nurturing those populations and making sure they don't become extinct. How did you deal with the sceptics who said you wouldn't manage it? There were some very difficult times.

I was at odds with a number of conservation organisations and also at odds with some funders as well. Yeah, what does that look like? Are they saying we're going to pull out if you... Yeah, they were saying they were going to pull out. There were some times when I wasn't paid because they said I was in breach of contract. So I went through some very difficult times where I was essentially supporting myself. How did that affect you emotionally?

It affected me very deeply, actually. It was something that took me a long time to come to terms with. I used to come back to Britain about once a year and I used to stay with my mum.

And I remember I'd come back and I'd be totally exhausted, mentally and physically drained, and would just essentially have to spend a few months recuperating. You were supposed to stay for a year or two on Mauritius, ended up staying for 20. What kept you there all that time? There was no way I was ever going to leave Mauritius. I just loved the island. I still love the island and the birds and the work I was doing.

And it was really important, you know, that I really had to see these projects through. And in terms of the Mauritius kestrel itself and the numbers, the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List indicates how close a species is to going extinct. Where is the Mauritius kestrel on that scale? Well, it was critical and then it actually went down to vulnerable. But in recent years, it's gone back up to extinct.

endangered again and that was because in the early 1990s I was so exhausted we stepped back from the kestrel work and the numbers have dropped down a little bit. We've got hundreds in the wild but we don't have the numbers that we once had. So it's a species that is going to need long-term care and economic investment.

I don't look at it like that at all. I see it as just caring for the world in which we live. Yes, it is long-term investment. But you just think what we've done in Mauritius. We've used the birds that we've worked with to do all sorts of scientific studies. We're now working with international scientists looking at genomics and de-extinction. So I see it as investment.

And to be able to walk in the forests of Mauritius and see a Mauritius kestrel or a pink pigeon is such a magical, magical experience beyond money, beyond price. It's time for your sixth disc today, Carl. What are we going to hear next? C'est que la Codillon, La Troupe de l'Union. Rodrigues belongs to Mauritius.

And it's a small island that I used to visit two or three times every year. And I used to go there. It was my sort of bolt hole. And I was interested in the Rodrigan Saga. The Scottish missionaries that went to Rodrigues in the 19th century thought that the local saga was just too erotic. And so they tamed it.

And so they produced this Rodrigo Sego, which is charming, but it isn't quite as explicit as the Mauritian Sego. And of course, they also introduced the Lacordian. So it has this, I think it's quite charming, but very different style of both music and dance.

The smile on your face during that track, Professor Carl Jones, absolutely loving it.

Carl, you met the naturalist and writer Gerald Durrell in 1980. Five years later, you started working for the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, which supported your work in Mauritius. You and Gerald became very, very close friends and you still work with the trust today. What did you learn from him? He came to Mauritius many times and we went out in the field together. And he'd come home in the evening and we'd be sitting around having lunch

drinking wine or having dinner, and he'd be describing the day, and he'd describe it and see things that you'd missed, or he'd see it, he'd describe it in a way that was just so powerful. And he was very good at helping me think through really difficult political issues.

and coming up with really simple answers. Do you feel like he's on your shoulder when you're making big decisions? He most certainly is on my shoulder. Not only when I'm making big decisions, because he was somebody who saw the absurdity of a lot of the things that happened, and he also enjoyed life to the full. So yes, he sits on my shoulder quite a lot.

Carl, you had so much success with the Mauritius kestrel and then other endangered birds followed that on the island, the pink pigeon, the aquaparakeet. But then you started to kind of expand your view. Rather than looking at these individual species, you began looking at entire ecosystems. And that led you to bringing back giant tortoises to a couple of smaller neighbouring islands. Why did you do that?

The islands had become degraded because there were rabbits and goats on them. We got rid of those. They'd been brought over by sailors in the colonizers. Yeah, the rabbits and goats had been introduced by sailors very early on. And they caused huge destruction by eating all the vegetation. And after we got rid of the rabbits, all the vegetation started to come back. And then we found out that although some species were coming back, like the...

palm trees, a lot of plants were disappearing. Endemic plants were becoming rarer. And it seemed that when the rabbits were on the island, they were keeping open areas. And there were some plants that lived in these grazed areas, growing very close to the ground, and they needed grazing. So we looked back at the history of the islands and found out that historically it had giant tortoises, but the giant tortoises were extinct.

And so I went to my colleagues and I said, you know, we need to put grazers back on Round Island so we can have a patchwork of different types of vegetation. Let's put back some giant tortoises. Let's put some giant tortoises that we get from somewhere else.

They said, you can't do that. The problems on islands have arisen because people have messed around too much and put on exotic species, invasive species like rabbits. That's a good point. How did you counter that? And so I said, well, we've got to look at the tortoises and see how they fitted in. And I spoke to lots of tortoise people and I said, I'm looking for a species of similar ecology to the extinct species.

And we did some experiments on a small offshore island called Isla Zagret, which is the nature reserve I work on. And we found that on Isla Zagret, they were feeding on the seeds of an ebony tree. And this ebony tree was not regenerating on the island or regenerating very, very poorly. But when the tortoises started to feed on the fruits, they passed the seeds through the body. And then a few months later, all these young ebonies started to grow. And we said, wow, look at this, all this regeneration.

And so we then released tortoises on Round Island. I make it sound easy, but it took me 20 years to convince the powers that be that we should put tortoises on Round Island. And then I said to them, I said, well, if it doesn't work, we can always take tortoises off. But what they didn't realise was, I'd like to see you try and lift a giant tortoise. Anyway, we took some tortoises across, which were half grown.

And we released them on the island. And we now have 800 giant tortoises there. It's going to take us 100 years to restore that island, but fine. We've started on that journey. It'll be worth it. So you introduced what you call an analogue species, Carl. Which species did you actually import? Well, when Charles Darwin was travelling around the world on the Beagle, he arrived in Mauritius and he was appalled by...

at how tortoises in the Indian Ocean had become so depleted and how the Mauritian ones had disappeared. And he advocated that Aldabra tortoises should be brought from Aldabra and that they should set up captive breeding programmes on Mauritius.

So what we did was we went round and we obtained some of these tortoises, put them on Ela's Egret and started to breed them. And the young we've been putting on Round Island. So they live quite a long time. How close to Darwin's tortoises would they be? I think some of the original ones. Certainly when we put them on Ela's Egret, we had some very old tortoises. And yes, there were some of the original ones that date back to Darwin's days. That's amazing.

I think it's time for some more music, Professor Carl Jones. Disc number seven, please. What are you taking to the island next? A piece by Beatrice Harrison, the cello and the nightingale. It's very symbolic on many different levels. There's the whole notion of us being close to wildlife, but there's also the whole story of the nightingale. The nightingale, which was really once widespread and common, is now exceedingly rare in Britain because of all the habitat change.

And we've seen that when you do rewild areas, one of the species that comes back is the nightingale. So this piece was recorded in Beatrice Harrison's garden in 1924. It's her accompanied by nightingales. And it's quite controversial because many people thought it was a fake. But today it's believed to be genuine, I think. It's definitely genuine. And of course, she repeated it on many occasions. You've only got to listen to it and it's definitely a wild nightingale.

London Derry Air, played by Beatrice Harrison, accompanied by Nightingales in her Surrey garden. Professor Carl Jones, you returned to Wales in 1999 after handing over your work to Marish and colleagues who still run it there. You go back twice a year to see how they're getting on. Was it a wrench to leave? I'd been there for 20 years and I was actually mentally and physically exhausted. And the project had grown so much that I was able to do it again.

that I found that I was spending my time involved with the politics of conservation rather than at the sharp end. I was no longer having those magical experiences in the field with my birds. And I was getting lots of flashbacks to my childhood in Wales. And although Mauritius is my second home, and I love it and I'll always go back, I am a Welsh boy at heart.

And I needed to go back home. It sounds like you were in a very low place emotionally. I mean, you know, if you were depleted and getting flashbacks too. I mean, that sounds quite serious. I used to go to Round Island at the end of the year after a busy season of running the programme. And the first day there, I used to go and sit on my own and look out over the sea. And I found that I'd be dreaming while I was awake. And I'd be getting all these images and flashbacks.

They were all about my childhood and they were all about Wales. So it was calling to you. And I knew I had to come back to Wales. How quickly did that abate once you came home? It lasted on and off for a long while, perhaps as much as a decade to completely, you know, reboot my brain.

After you came home to Wales, you started a family. You have two children. What message do you want to give them about the role of nature in the world today? We brought them up to basically embrace biodiversity and diversity in life. And my daughter, more than my son, is following in my footsteps in that she really loves animals. But there is quite a problem because she's got strong animal rights views.

And she's always having a go at me about my captive animals. And she goes, Dad, you shouldn't have these animals in cages. They should be flying free. The condos should be flying over the Andes. And how do you argue with that? Well, I can't argue with it. And I say I agree with her, but we're not keeping animals in captivity forever. We're just learning how to save them.

As we've heard, you've given so much of yourself to your work over the years, both physically and mentally, and it was tough decompressing from that. Do you sometimes wonder whether it was worth it? Of course it's worth it, yes, and I enjoy that. I look back on my life and there's nothing I really regret. Some things I would have maybe done a bit differently, but we're not going to achieve huge things unless we actually do put up with some discomfort of some form or another. And, you know...

We've saved a few species and it's a starting point. And of course it's been worth it. And whenever I go to Mauritius and I see Mauritius kestrels in the Black River gorges or pink pigeons flying over the forest...

I feel quite emotional. It's been a wonderful journey and we've achieved a great deal. Carl, you mentioned putting up with a bit of discomfort, which reminds me that we're about to cast you away. Life on the island beckons. You are perhaps uniquely qualified to thrive on our desert island. What's the first thing that you imagine yourself doing when you get there? To be cast away on an island would be a great joy for me. For a short while, I know I will miss people. So a lot of scouting to start with.

and basically thinking through a survival strategy. And of course, there'd be plenty of food on the island. If it's a tropical island, I'm sure there'd be all sorts of wonderful things there, such as fruits and shellfish and crabs and fish. So yes, it would be getting to know the island in the same way that, you know, in my career, I've been getting to know animals. You have to get to know the system as well. One more track before we cast you away then, Carl Jones. Your last choice today, what's it going to be?

It's going to be Clear Sky by Catherine Finch, which is a lovely piece played on the harp. Why have you chosen it? My daughter is very musical and she plays the harp and she's played with Catherine Finch and she plays Clear Sky and it's one of my favourite pieces. Catherine Finch and Clear Sky.

So, Carl Jones, it's time. I'm going to send you away to the island. I will, of course, give you the books to take with you, the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare and another book of your choice. What have you gone for? I'd really like the collected works of Dylan Thomas because I used to read his works regularly.

And he was really influenced by wildlife, over Sir John Hill, the hawk and fire hang still. And that reminds me of, you know, the buzzards I used to see flying over the hills when I was a young lad. And of course, I know Sir John Hill. And certainly on the island, I can sit there in the evening as the sun is going down and read Dylan Thomas and think about another phase of my life when I was living in Wales.

It's a perfect choice. You can also have a luxury item. What will that be? The luxury item is actually a necessity. I want a good pair of binoculars because I could enjoy looking at the wildlife and the birds, but also help me find food, looking for where the fish are in the sea. And also perhaps one day...

looking out on the horizon for a ship that can come and rescue me. So I need a pair of good binoculars. Well, I'm not supposed to let you have anything practical, but as binoculars have been taken as a luxury item in the past, and as you're a lifelong ornithologist and will be appreciating the wildlife around you, I'm hardly going to deny you them. Thank you very much. They're yours, Carl. And finally, which one of the eight tracks that you've shared with us today would you rush to save from the waves first? It has to be Asim Bunanga.

because it represents a period in my life when there was so much optimism about what could happen, and it was actually embracing tolerance between cultures, which I think is really important. Professor Carl Jones, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much.

Hello, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Carl. I love that he's taken a piece of Wales with him to the island in the form of Dylan Thomas. We've cast away many conservationists and scientists, including Dame Miriam Rothschild and Max Nicholson, and the conservationist and writer Isabella Tree.

The studio manager for today's programme was Jackie Marjoram. The assistant producer was Christine Pawlowski. The production coordinator was Susie Roylands and the producer was Paula McGinley. Next time, my guest will be the midwife, Donna Ockenden. I do hope you'll join us. MUSIC PLAYS

Nothing is a better bonder of a group of people than one collective enemy.

From BBC Radio 4, the new series of Why Do We Do That? With me, Ella Alshamahi. Available now on BBC Sounds.