Teranesia

‘Don’t tempt me.’ He had a better idea, though. ‘Have you got a camera on you?’

‘Yeah, of course.’

‘Can I borrow it?’

Grant hesitated, then handed it to him.

He examined it carefully. ‘How much did this cost?’

‘Five hundred euros. Which is well above my personal definition of “disposable”. Why? What are you planning to do with it?’

Prabir commanded her loftily, ‘Be patient.’ Five hundred euros meant that the lens would give a much sharper image than his notepad’s camera, and the stabiliser would be a laserring system, not a trashy micro-mechanical accelerometer.

Grant brushed the debris off a fallen trunk and sat down. Prabir set the camera to the widest possible angle, aimed it at a tree twenty metres away, and recorded sixty seconds of vision.Then he passed the data to his notepad through the infrared link.

The program he needed was three lines in Rembrandt, his favourite image-processing language. As he watched the result on the notepad’s screen, Grant saw the expression of delight on his face and came over to see what he’d found.

Outlined in fluorescent blue by the software, half a dozen small green-and-brown birds moved along the branches. Prabir glanced up from the screen to the tree, but even now that he knew exactly what to look for, he couldn’t see the birds for himself. The software was only identifying them in retrospect by comparing hundreds of consecutive frames, and even then it sometimes lost track of their edges against the pattern of leaves.

Grant complained indignantly, ‘You don’t know how galling this is. I grew up on smug biologists’ jokes about pathetic computerised attempts at vision.’

Prabir smiled. ‘Things change.’ Grant was probably only ten years old than he was, but the idea seemed as quaint to him as jokes about heavier-than-air flight.

‘Can you replay it?’

‘Sure.’

As she watched the scene again, she mused, ‘I’ve seen stick insects with that level of camouflage. And some predatory fish. But this is extraordinary.’ She laughed and swatted something on her neck. Prabir had expected her to be elated by their find, but the birds’ proficiency seemed to unnerve her.

He struggled to recall the images Madhusree had shown him back in Toronto. ‘You think this is the pigeon that turned up in Ambon nine months ago?’

Grant nodded. ‘We’ll need specimens to be sure, but it looks like it.’

‘But how did you know it would be here? I thought no one had traced it back from the bird dealer.’

‘They hadn’t, but this seemed the most likely spot. I can’t think why no one else looked here. Maybe it was just prejudice: the Bandas aren’t wild, they aren’t pristine, they aren’t havens of biodiversity. How could a new species possibly be born in a place that was so “barren”?’

‘You tell me.’

‘I will, when I know.’

Grant had brought a tranquilliser gun. Prabir improvised software to display the outlines with the minimum possible time lag, but it still took them three hours to hit their first target. As he picked the sleeping bird out of the undergrowth, he reflected uneasily on the possible source of its mutations. He still believed it was more than likely that he was looking at a recent descendant of a Teranesian migrant, but if it had brought along a mutagenic virus that could cross between species, tens of thousands of people were potentially at risk. The virus might have taken eighteen years to leap the biochemical gulf between butterflies and birds, but birds were notorious for harbouring potential human diseases. He wished he could get some straight answers out of Grant; it was one thing to avoid starting groundless rumours, but she owed him an informed opinion on whatever it was she thought they were dealing with.

They returned to the boat at dusk, grimy and exhausted, with blood from four pigeons. Prabir looked on as Grant prepared the samples for analysis; the preservative that had kept them stable in the heat had transformed them into blobs of puce jelly.

He said, ‘Do you know anything about the species that used to be here? I don’t mean prior to the Dutch; just ten or twenty years ago.’

‘There’s a 2018 report that mentions half a dozen sympatric species of Treron, Ptilinopus and Ducula.’

‘ “Ducula” You’re making that up.’

‘No, they’re the big ones. Imperial pigeons.’

‘So what does “sympatric” mean?’

‘Sorry. Co-existing, sharing territory.’

Prabir nodded, ashamed at his laziness; the child who’d named Teranesia wouldn’t have needed to ask. He’d never studied European classical languages, but everyday English had inherited all the clues: just hybridise ‘symmetry’ and ‘repatriate’.

Grant said, ‘Treron are green, but the others are usually brightly coloured, presumably for the sake of mate recognition. The theory is, that’s how they formed separate species in the first place: runaway sexual selection based on plumage, overriding any need for camouflage in the absence of predators.’

‘So where have they all gone?’