Like the hare, the Aldabra White-Throated Rail, cannot fly. It has large wings, a characteristic contrary to expectations of flightless bird forms, but usually only fans them wide in a move to make itself look larger than life when defending its nest and chicks. Like the hare, the Rail can also leap - another use for its wings, but it is has long been considered the last flightless bird of the Western Indian Ocean Islands. Considering the fame attributed to the dodo, a flightless bird endemic to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, which man pushed to extinction in the 17th Century, the very much alive Rail deserves its share of the limelight.

Over the years humans and introduced predators such as cats, which have since been eradicated on some islands, have caused local extinctions and range reductions and today two subspecies survive, one on Madagascar and one on three of Aldabra’s islands. I met my first Rail shortly after arriving here on Picard Island, which thanks to a re-introduction of the species in 1999, is now running with rails, but I didn’t really get to know the Rail until we rode the rough seas to the northern side of the Atoll and camped in a place affectionately known as ‘middle camp’ a few days ago. Situated near the mouth of Pass Houareau in between the islands of Malabar and Grande Terre is a little wooden hut with a corrugated tin roof that crawls with coconut crabs scratching their claws across the tin, which screeches like nails down a chalkboard, all night, and clinks with dimorphic egrets catching insects in the guttering in the early hours of the morning. Sleep was not a priority anyhow as we were there to photograph the marine life of the mangrove forests and the frigatebirds and boobies nesting in foliage above.

A tropical down pour on our first morning at middle camp, forced us to shift gears slightly as the bad light rendered photography underwater in the dark mangrove forests impossible and I was left photographing this little bird, endemic to Aldabra on the coral rubble around the camp. Their breast musculature is simply too small for them to engage enough power for level flight, and they evolved on Aldabra in the absence of any predators as ground foragers without any apparent need to fly. Flightlessness does come with perks, as flight muscles are amongst the most energetically demanding organs in a bird, thus lacking them has energetic advantages, and one theory is that the original impetus for them becoming flightless may have stemmed from their need to store fat during periods of scarcity – making flight difficult.

Another character joined us on Malabar that has kept us company since our Save Our Seas Foundation expedition team first impressed footprints on this shore here. Slowly and steadily four elephantine legs covered in tough leather and etched with rough scales climbed over the crest of the beach slope from seemingly out of the blue and headed directly towards my toes. Aldabra’s very own giant tortoises are almost as old as the Atoll itself. They are the old men of the island, the equivalent of sharks in the marine world; they too survived millions of years prior to man’s arrival, and only thanks to the difficulty sailors had in penetrating this coral limestone fortress and the foresight of early conservationists do these herbivorous reptiles still dominate Aldabra’s living natural history museum today. Elsewhere they have gone the way of the dodo.

Like the fabled Tortoise this Aldabra fossil has so far won the race for survival and, in our camp at least, beat the Rail to eating most of our food leftovers. Despite the Rail’s beautiful rusty red and forest green feathers its attention span and dedication to eating paled in comparison to that of the tortoise’s, who sat wafting onion breath around our camp.

I hope that slow and steady will prove one day to win the global conservation race, but now we need to accelerate our pace in working together to help save our seas, especially the sharks who, although they have lived on our planet for millions of years, are struggling in this day and age to survive in the wake of their decimation by our species. We did eventually leave the tortoise and the rail and spent two magical afternoons on a high incoming tide photographing the mangrove forests, a shark and fish nursery ground that is crucial for the repopulation of our oceans.

…Stories from Aldabra’s mangroves next week, meanwhile, visit http://www.saveourseas.com to learn more about SOSF, the marine environment and to read my daily blog of the Aldabra Expedition

Our fresh fruit supply has dwindled to nothing, the last extremely over-ripe banana was cooked a few days ago, the Seychellois school kids who won a privileged visit to Aldabra have wiped out the chocolate supply from the island tuck shop (a sight I foresaw but was too slow to beat them to it), the bait is smelling extremely rotten, and someone forgot the energy bars… but we are all talking big fish, photography and watching new footage every evening – so we are still full steam ahead keeping our fins wet and on the look out for Aldabra’s large shark species.

Co-incidentally I am here in 2008, the International Year of the Reef, ten years after the record high sea temperatures and coral bleaching event, when the coral polyps lost their symbiotic zooxanthellae, that wiped out 40% of Aldabra’s corals. On our mission to film and photograph the marine life and shark species in particular we have been diving on fringing reefs along the rim and in coral gardens up the Atoll’s indigo channels almost to the azure heart of the lagoon. Coral reefs are the most diverse and productive ecosystem on our planet, far more so than tropical rainforests, and as such are critical indicators of the global marine ecosystem’s health. Despite slopes and valleys of coral rubble, the aftermath of coral bleaching, it is refreshing to see and photograph healthy coral reefs, teaming with a profusion of fish, boasting more than 200 coral species and bursting with new life. It is recovering well from the 1998 mortality.

Reading a recent study of coral reef organisms, that covered everything from microbes to sharks, I can understand why the Aldabra reefs are so healthy and why they are proving so resilient. The answer is simple; they are teaming with reef sharks. Predators accounted for 85% of the total fish weight in the study’s pristine reef site, a complete reversal of life on reefs across the world today where most of the sharks have ended up dead on rows of baited hooks and where the reefs are depleted of life.

Sharks are essential to coral reef health because they are the pinnacles of the food chain, and if they are removed from the ecosystem the whole ocean tilts off balance. Sharks have a very slow reproductive rate and do not recover well from exploitation. Over fishing sharks sets of a domino effect throughout the reef: fewer sharks leads to an increase in their prey, large carnivorous fish such as grouper, who in turn decrease the number of important plant-grazing herbivorous fish, such as parrotfish. Once this happens the reef is in danger of shifting from coral to algae domination and it is less able to withstand other human disturbances such as rises in water temperatures.

At the end of a long dive this morning photographing on the reefs I was greeted by a gigantic yet weary lemon shark. Perhaps one day this regal predator will be given the respect it deserves as guardian of the reefs, until then at least the inshore waters here are a welcome sanctuary.

Aldabra’s formation as a massive seamount rising from the dark depths of the ocean floor means there is a sharp gradient along its edge, allowing deep open water to lick the Atoll’s outer rim. With the deep open ocean comes the large pelagic (oceanic) species of sharks, and we only had to venture out to sea 2km on the other side of the rim to enter waters where we thought we had a good chance of finding such species. Despite gargantuan efforts to attract them, our cameras came back with empty memory cards and blank videos. Out there sharks such as oceanic white tip, tiger, and great hammerheads are beyond the protection of Aldabra’s reefs and vulnerable to fishing in almost every part of the ocean they travel. The big blue is looking very much like an empty ocean.

Visit http://www.saveourseas.com to learn more about SOSF, the marine environment and to read my daily blog of the Aldabra Expedition

Our life on Aldabra revolves around the turning of the tides. Each evening we sit with tide tables, scheming plans for the next day in between bouts of discussing how we can inspire the world to care about plummeting shark populations, and determining what time we need to leave in order to make it over the reef. At low tide the water is too shallow for the boat to pass over the reef so we must wait for the tide to turn or catch it before the level drops too low. This morning we were up before dawn with all our equipment lining the shoreline ready to carry aboard, but we had miss-calculated, underestimated the depth and our weathered boatman said it was too late, “we will not be leaving for another six hours.”

Since arriving on the Atoll we have done a series of recci dives to get a feel for the underwater topography of the Atoll and the marine life in general. Our first dive was a fast paced 2knot drift dive in Pass Dubois, one of the smaller channels situated in between Picard and Grande Terre, which swept us into the opening of the Atoll’s azure lagoon. Aldabra itself consists of four islands encircling a tidal lagoon, Picard, Polymnie, Malabar and Grande Terre. Picard is where the Aldabra research station is located and where we wake up, go to sleep and are fed like royalty by the resident Seychellois chef, Grand Terre, as the name suggests, is the largest island.

Yesterday, we explored the main channel for the first time and with approximately 60% of the lagoon’s tidal flow passing through it at a rate of 6knots it is not the channel to get caught diving in on an outgoing tide, else the current might see me joining the lemurs in the next Madagascar film sequel!

So far the only shark characters that have joined us have been our friendly black tip reef, sicklefin lemon, and tawny nurse sharks, though they are extremely difficult to photograph and film as they are too scared to come in close enough. These species are inshore reef sharks and, as expected, we have been seeing them on most dives. In our quest to find the large shark species we have attached two baiting stations that are creating an odor corridor of fish smells irresistible to any shark that catches a whiff. Once a shark picks up the scent of chummed mackerels and tuna oil it will follow the ripe-scented slick with its extraordinary sensory system all the way back to the source – us and our perforated drum stuffed to the brim with delicacies, anchored to a boulder and suspended in the water column by a red buoy. One baiting station sits in the Pass Dubois channel and the second in a productive section on the outer edge reef. No large sharks have thus far found us or visa-versa, though in the main channel SOSF’s HD video cameraman Dan spotted a great hammerhead, which turned tail in terror at the sight of us.

The large potato bass with expressions akin to dopey puppy dogs, throw their weight around at the bait stations, and although they do their best, unsuccessfully, to get to the fish inside the drum they normally resort to attacking the flash strobes on my camera’s underwater housing. When we are not in the water we have a remotely operated camera sending images to a laptop; at the moment it is serving its apprenticeship with the blacktips in the shallows outside, but we hope to move it to deeper waters soon. There is something fishy in the air and it’s more than the smell of chum slick in our hair, but the SOSF team is determined to find and film whatever sharks are out there.

Visit http://www.saveourseas.com to learn more about SOSF, the marine environment and to read my daily blog of the Aldabra Expedition

A cyclone hit the Mozambique Channel on Saturday night and on Sunday afternoon, after an equally turbulent night of last minute packing chaos and an early morning flight to Joburg, I was in a Air Seychelles plane heading straight for the Southern Mozambique coast. “Welcome aboard, it was a bumpy ride down…” greeted the flight attendant. The remark didn’t register, all that mattered was that I was on the plane with 130kg+ of SOSF-marked luggage fastened safely down below, I hoped.

Landing on Mahe, home of the capital Victoria, late at night you can’t see the ocean rolling in on your right or the tropical forest covered mountain on the left. Only the lights of houses suspended in the darkness give away the first slice of land on our route since the northern tip of Madagascar, some 930 km away.

Apart from the dramatic scenery, créole cuisine and the fact that it is one of the smallest nations on Earth, the Seychelles claim to fame is that it consists of the only isolated oceanic islands in the world built of continental rocks, rather than oceanic basalts or reef limestones. These are the granitic islands, and the mammoth-size granite boulders that outline the islands’ sandy edges are the physical evidence of this wondrous geology, not the breadcrumbs of rampant giants. The granitics consist of some forty islands and islets rising from the Seychelles Bank, an area of shallow water less than 60m surrounded by ocean 4-5 km deep.  Mahe is the largest island with the highest mountain peak, Morne Seychelloi, rising dramatically from the coastal plain to 914m. Even though I haven’t yet reached ‘the island that man forgot’, with a tropical down pour shrouding the lush green peak in a white mist, the cries of birds echoing loudly through the rain, and the waves crashing wildly with the wind I already feel like I am sitting in a true Jurassic Park.

The other two types of islands consist of small low islands on sea-level coral reefs and islands of reef limestone now slightly elevated above the sea. The latter includes all the islands of the Aldabra group (Aldabra, Cosmoledo, Astove, Assumption), which are approximately less than 8m above sea level, not including the sand dunes that rise as high as 32m. The volcano that became Aldabra emerged about 20 million years ago; rising from the sea floor it became the island’s foundation. As the volcano ceased to be active it gradually subsided and the coral growth on the limestone ring maintained contact with the ocean’s surface. Today the oldest surface rocks are only a few hundred thousand years old. This process is what made Aldabra an atoll rather than merely an island.

Before diving into the volcanic waters off Aldabra I have a day left on Mahe and can’t help but wish it was whale shark season, but the waters here don’t start teaming with the world’s largest fish until later in the year. The Save Our Seas Foundation supports a whale shark research project that, under the supervision of David Rowat from the Marine Conservation Society Seychelles, provides much needed information on this threatened species. It is increasingly important to have accurate information about migration routes for the effective conservation and management of migratory shark species such as the whale shark. The project studies the occurrence, behavior and conservation biology of whale shark in Seychelles waters, with a view to developing a management strategy for the species. To date research has revealed their seasonal occurrence around Mahe and has recorded distances traveled in excess of 3600km, proving that the sharks pass through the territorial waters of many countries in the Indian Ocean. Data from research tags has shown that whale sharks prefer swimming in relatively shallow water, spending up to 60% of the time in water less than 10m, but are capable of diving as deep as 1000m.  SOSF has been instrumental in assisting with the international conservation of this endangered species.

Bats are roosting in the tops of palm trees as the night draws in and luckily cyclones don’t hit this far north, as tomorrow I will be winging my way 800km southeast to the Aldabra Atoll.