The New Noah

by Gerald Durrell

  I had just given him a bowl of milk, so he was not expecting me back at his cage for at least an hour. Refreshed by his drink, he set to work on his hole. I allowed him enough time to get well started and then I crept down the line of cages. There was Weekes, squatting on the floor, with a grim, determined expression on his face, tugging with both hands at quite a large splinter of wood. It was a very tough piece, and although he pulled at it with all his might, it would not part company with the side of the cage, and so he became angrier and angrier, muttering to himself and screwing up his face in the most frightening grimaces. Just as he was bending forwards to see if he could bite through the annoying splinter, I asked him in a stern voice what he thought he was doing.

  He jumped as though I had jabbed him with a pin, and then glanced over his shoulder with a horrified and guilty expression on his face. I asked him again what he thought he was up to, and, giving me a feeble grin, he made a half-hearted attempt to show me his eyelids. Seeing that I was not to be distracted, he sheepishly let go of the splinter and seizing his empty milk pot, leapt on to his perch, where he was overcome with embarrassment and put the pot over his face and fell backwards off the perch on to the bottom of the cage.

  He looked so ridiculous that I had to laugh, and so he decided that I must have forgiven him. He climbed back on to his perch, wearing the pot like a tin helmet on his head, and then fell off the perch again. This time he fell on his head and hurt himself, so he had to come to the bars and have his paws held until he felt better.

  Now he realized I knew all about his hole, he gave up being so secretive about it and used to work away in full view of me. If I scolded him, he would repeat his trick of putting the pot over his face and falling backwards off the perch; and if I laughed he would assume that he had been forgiven and go back to work. Just as a precaution, however, I nailed a bit of wire over the outside of his hole, which he was extremely annoyed about when he discovered it. When he found he could not shift the wire, he rather reluctantly gave up his tunnelling, but never forgot his trick of falling off his perch backwards, and would always do it when he knew I was angry with him, in order to try to pacify me.

  The story of Cholmondely the chimpanzee

  When Cholmondely, the chimpanzee, joined the collection, he immediately became the uncrowned king of it, not only because of his size, but also because he was so remarkably intelligent. Cholmondely had been the pet of a district officer who, wanting to send the ape to the London Zoo, and hearing that I was collecting wild animals in that region and would shortly be returning to England, wrote and asked me if I would mind taking Cholmondely with me and handing him over to the Zoo authorities. I wrote back to say that, as I already had a large collection of monkeys, another chimpanzee would not make any difference, so I would gladly escort Cholmondely back to England. I imagined that he would be quite a young chimp, perhaps two years old, and standing about two feet high. When he arrived I got a considerable shock.

  A small van drew up outside the camp one morning and in the back of it was an enormous wooden crate. It was big enough, I thought, to house an elephant. I wondered what on earth could be inside, and when the driver told me that it contained Cholmondely I remember thinking how silly his owner was to send such a small chimpanzee in such a huge crate. I opened the door and looked inside and there sat Cholmondely.

  One glance at him and I realized that this was no baby chimpanzee but a fully-grown one about eight or nine years old. Sitting hunched up in the dark crate, he looked as though he were about twice as big as I, and from the expression on his face I gathered that the trip had not been to his liking. Before I could shut the door of the box, however, Cholmondely had extended a long, hairy arm, clasped my hand in his and shaken it warmly. Then he turned round and gathered up a great length of chain (one end of which was fastened to a collar round his neck), draped it carefully over his arm, and stepped down, out of the box. He stood there for a moment and, after surveying me carefully, examined the camp with great interest, whereupon he held out his hand, looking at me inquiringly. I took it in mine and we walked into the marquee together.

  Cholmondely immediately went and seated himself on one of the chairs by the camp table, dropped his chain on the floor and sat back and crossed his legs. He gazed round the tent for a few minutes with a rather supercilious expression on his face, and evidently deciding that it would do he turned and looked at me inquiringly again. Obviously, he wanted me to offer him something after his tiring journey. I had been warned before he arrived that he was a hardened tea drinker, and so I called out to the cook and told him to make a pot of tea. Then I went out and had a look in Cholmondely’s crate, and in the bottom I found an enormous and very battered tin mug. When I returned to the tent with this, Cholmondely was quite overjoyed and even praised me for my cleverness in finding it, by uttering a few cheerful ‘hoo hoo’ noises.

  While we were waiting for the tea to arrive, I sat down opposite Cholmondely and lit a cigarette. To my surprise, he became very excited and held out his hand across the table to me. Wondering what he would do, I handed him the cigarette packet. He opened it, took out a cigarette, and put it between his lips. He then reached out his hand again and I gave him the matches; to my astonishment, he took one out of the box, struck it, lit his cigarette, and threw the box down on the table. Lying back in his chair he blew out clouds of smoke in the most professional manner.

  No one had told me that Cholmondely smoked. I wondered rather anxiously what other bad habits he might have which his master had not warned me about.

  Just at that moment, the tea was brought in and Cholmondely greeted its appearance with loud and expressive hoots of joy. He watched me carefully while I half-filled his mug with milk and then added the tea. I had been told that he had a very sweet tooth, so I put in six large spoons of sugar, an action which he greeted with grunts of satisfaction. He placed his cigarette on the table and seized the mug with both hands; then he stuck out his lower lip very carefully and dipped it into the tea to make sure it was not too hot.

  As it was a trifle warm, he sat there blowing on it vigorously until it was cool enough, and then he drank it all down without stopping once. When he had drained the last drops, he peered into the mug and scooped out all the sugar he could with his forefinger. After that, he tipped the mug up on his nose and sat with it like that for about five minutes until the very last of the sugar had trickled down into his mouth.

  I had Cholmondely’s big-box placed some distance away from the marquee, and fixed the end of his chain to a large tree stump. He was too far away, I thought, to make a nuisance of himself but near enough to be able to watch everything that went on and to conduct long conversations with me in his ‘hoo hoo’ language.

  But on the day of his arrival he caused trouble almost as soon as I had fixed him to his tree stump. Outside the marquee were a lot of small, tame monkeys tied on long strings attached to stakes driven into the ground. They were about ten in number, and over them I had constructed a palm leaf roof as a shelter from the sun. As Cholmondely was examining his surroundings, he noticed these monkeys, some eating fruit and others lying asleep in the sun, and decided he would have a little under-arm bowling practice.

  I was working inside the marquee when all at once I heard the most terrific uproar going on outside. The monkeys were screaming and chattering with rage, and I rushed out to see what had happened. Cholmondely, apparently, had picked up a rock the size of a cabbage and hurled it at the smaller monkeys, luckily missing them all, but frightening them out of their wits. If one of them had been hit by such a big rock, it would have been killed instantly.

  Just as I arrived on the scene, Cholmondely had picked up another stone and was swinging it backwards and forwards like a professional cricketer, taking better aim. He was annoyed at having missed all the monkeys with his first shot. I grabbed a stick and hurried towards him, shouting and, to my surprise, Cholmondely dropped the rock and put his arms over his head, and started to roll
on the ground and scream. In my haste, I had picked up a very small twig and this made no impression on him at all, for his back was as broad and as hard as a table.

  I gave him two sharp cuts with this silly little twig and followed it up with a serious scolding. He sat there picking bits of leaf off his fur and looking very guilty. With the aid of the Africans, I set to work and cleared away all the rocks and stones near his box, and, giving him another scolding went back to my work. I hoped that this telling-off might have some effect on him, but when I looked out of the marquee some time later, I saw him digging in the earth, presumably in search of more ammunition.

  Not long after his arrival at the camp, Cholmondely, to my alarm, fell ill. For nearly two weeks he went off his food, refusing even the most tempting fruit and other delicacies, and even rejecting his daily ration of tea, a most unheard-of occurrence. All he had was a few sips of water every day, and gradually he grew thinner and thinner, his eyes sank into their sockets, and I really thought he was going to die. He lost all interest in life and sat hunched up in his box all day, with his eyes closed. It was very bad for him to spend all day moping in this fashion, so in the evenings, just before the sun went down, when it was cool, I used to make him come out for walks with me. These walks were only short, and we had to rest every few yards, for Cholmondely was weak with lack of food.

  One evening, just before I took him out for a walk, I filled my pockets with a special kind of biscuit that he had been very fond of. We went slowly up to the top of a small hill just beyond the camp and then sat there to admire the view. As we rested, I took a biscuit out of my pocket and ate it, smacking my lips with enjoyment, but not offering any to Cholmondely. He looked very surprised, for he knew that I always shared my food with him when we were out together. I ate a second biscuit and he watched me closely to see if I enjoyed it as much as the first. When he saw that I did, he dipped his hand into my pocket, pulled out a biscuit, smelled it suspiciously, and then, to my delight, ate it up and started looking for another. I knew then that he was going to get better.

  The next morning he drank a mugful of sweet tea and ate seventeen biscuits, and for three days lived entirely on this diet. After this his appetite returned with a rush, and for the next fortnight he ate twice as much as he had ever done before, and cost me a small fortune in bananas.

  There were only two things that Cholmondely disliked. One of them was the Africans and the other, snakes. I think that when he was a baby some Africans must have teased him. Whatever the reason, however, he certainly got his own back on more than one occasion. He would hide inside the box and wait until an African passed close by and then he would rush out with all his hair standing on end, swinging his long arms and screaming in the most terrifying manner. Many a fat African woman carrying a basket of fruit on her head would chance to pass too closely to Cholmondely’s box, and would have to drop her basket, pick up her skirts, and run for dear life, while Cholmondely danced victoriously at the end of his chain, hooting and showing all his teeth in a grin of delight.

  With snakes, of course, he was not nearly so brave. If he saw me handling one, he would get very agitated, wringing his hands and moaning with fear, and if I put the reptile on the ground and it started to crawl towards him, he would run to the very end of his chain and scream loudly for help, throwing bits of stick and grass at the snake to try and stop it coming any closer.

  One night, I went to shut him up in his box, as usual, and, to my surprise, he flatly refused to go into it. His bed of banana leaves was nicely made, and so I thought he was simply being naughty, but when I started to scold him, he took me by the hand, led me up to his box and left me there while he retreated to the safety of the end of his chain, and stood watching me anxiously. I realized there must be something inside, of which he was frightened, and when I cautiously investigated I found a very small snake coiled up in the centre of his bed. After I had captured it, I found that it was a harmless type; Cholmondely, of course, could not tell the differ­ence, and he was taking no chances.

  Cholmondely was so quick at learning tricks and so willing to show off that when he returned to England he became quite famous and even made several appearances on television, delighting the audiences by sitting on a chair, with a hat on, taking a cigarette and lighting it for himself, pouring out and drinking a glass of beer, and many other things.

  I think he must have become rather swollen-headed with his success, for not long after this he managed to escape from the zoo and went wandering off by himself through Regent’s Park, much to the horror of everyone he met. On reaching the main road, he found a bus standing there and promptly climbed aboard, for he loved being taken for a ride. The passengers, however, decided they would rather not travel by that particular bus if Cholmondely was going to use it as well, and they were all struggling to get out when some keepers arrived from the zoo and took Cholmondely in charge.

  He was marched back to his cage in disgrace, but if I know Cholmondely, he must have thought it worth any amount of scoldings just for the sight of all those people trying to get off the bus together, and getting stuck in the door. Cholmondely had a great sense of humour.

  Problems of hairy frogs, tortoises, and other beasts

  Catching your animals is generally, but not always, the easiest part of a collecting trip. Once you have caught them, your job is to keep them alive and well in captivity, and this is not always so easy. Animals react in various ways to captivity, and you will even get individuals of the same species that seem to have totally different outlooks. Sometimes they will differ in quite small things and at other times their reactions will be so dissimilar that you would think they might be two separate species.

  I once bought two baby drills from a hunter. Drills are those large, grey-coloured baboons with pink behinds that you can see in most zoological gardens. These two babies settled down very well but they differed in a lot of small habits. For example, when they were given bananas, one of them would carefully peel the fruit and eat it, throwing away the skin, while the other would peel his banana just as carefully, eat the skin, and throw away the fruit.

  With the monkey collection one of the most important items of their diet was the milk that they got every night. This was dried milk that I would mix up in a big kerosene tin full of hot water; then I would stir in several calcium tablets and a number of spoonfuls of malt and cod-liver oil mixture, so the resulting drink looked not unlike weak coffee. Most of the babies I had took this drink immediately and would go absolutely mad when they saw the pots arriving at feeding time. They would shake the bars and scream and shout, and stamp on the floor of their cages with excitement as they saw me pouring out the milk. The adult monkeys, however, took quite a long time to become used to this curious pale brown liquid. They seemed to be extremely suspicious of it, for some reason.

  Sometimes I managed to get a newly-arrived monkey to drink this mixture by turning its cage round so that it could see all the other monkeys busily guzzling and hiccupping over their milk pots. The new arrival would then become curious and decide that perhaps the stuff in his pot was worth investigating. Once he had tasted it, he would very soon grow just as enthusiastic over it as the rest of the monkeys.

  Occasionally, however, I would get an extremely stubborn animal that would refuse even to taste his milk, in spite of watching all the others drinking theirs. I found the only thing to do in this case was to take a cupful of milk and throw it over the monkey’s hands and feet. As they are extremely clean creatures, he would get to work to remove the sticky liquid from his fur by licking it, and once he had got the taste and smell of the milk he would then drink it readily out of a pot.

  With most animals, feeding is fairly straightforward if you know what they eat in the wild state. The meat-eating animals, for example, such as the mongooses or the wild cats, can be fed on goat or cow meat, raw egg and a certain amount of milk. The important thing with these animals is to make sure that they have plenty of roughage. When they
kill their prey in the wild state, they will eat the skin, bones, and all; so if they are used to having this roughage, they soon sicken and die should it be withheld from them in captivity. I used to keep a big basketful of feathers and fur, and I would drop pieces of goat or cow meat into it and get them all covered with feathers and bits of fur before giving them to the mongooses.

  I came across this same problem of supplying roughage to birds of prey. Owls, for example, will eat a mouse, and then some time later sick up the bones and the skin, in the form of an oval pellet. When you keep owls in captivity, you always have to make sure they are regularly producing these pellets, which are called castings, as this is a sure sign the bird is in good health.

  Once, when I was hand-rearing some baby owls, I could get no roughage that I thought was suitable for them, and so I was forced to wrap small pieces of meat in cotton-wool and push them down their ever-open beaks. This worked very well, somewhat to my surprise, and the little owls produced pellets composed entirely of cotton-wool, for a number of weeks. Their cage looked rather as though they had been having a snowball fight, with all these little white castings lying about on the floor.

  The animals which cause the collector most trouble are those species which have a restricted diet in the wild state. For example, in West Africa live the pangolins or scaly ant-eaters, great creatures that have long pointed noses and long tails, with which they can hang from the branches of trees. They are covered with large, strong-overlapping scales so that they look like strangely-shaped fir cones. In the wilds these animals feed solely on the ants’ nests which are built among the branches.