Island Zoo

by Gerald Malcolm Durrell

  Tamandua

  tamandua so far on the ground they did not expect him suddenly to take to the trees. I pointed the animal out to my hunters, and one of them quickly shinned up the tree, hoping to catch the tamandua unawares. However, he made too much noise, and the tamandua looked over his shoulder and saw the Indian climbing up towards him. He uttered a hiss of annoyance and started to climb higher into the tree. The Indian swarmed up rapidly after him, and the tamandua, finding himself being overtaken, got in a panic, and instead of continuing up the tree he rushed out to the end of a long thin branch. This was the stupidest thing he could have done, for when the Indian reached the branch, he squatted in the fork of the tree and drew out his machete—the long broad-bladed knife which all the Indians always carry with them in the forests. A few quick slashes with the sharp blade and he had cut off the branch, with the tamandua hanging on the end of it, hissing indignantly at having been fooled like this. Then we held out a net beneath the tree, and the Indian dropped the tamandua, branch and all, into it. In a minute or so we had the furious creature safely in a bag, and we set off jubilantly for camp.

  Other animals that belong to the same group as the anteaters are the armadillos, of which there are many different kinds. The one we have is called Henrietta, and she is a hairy armadillo which 1 caught down in Patagonia, at the southern end of South America. The countryside is very flat in Patagonia, and is covered with prickly thorn scrub and giant thistles, which can grow to a height of nine feet. The armadillos live in burrows that they dig in this prickly undergrowth, and only come out at night to hunt around for their food. So, the best way of catching armadillos is to hunt them at night, with the aid of a dog. You also carry with you a powerful flashlight and a spade, for if you do not catch up with the armadillo in time, and he bolts into his burrow, the only way of getting him is to dig him out.

  We set off this particular moonlit evening, and we had walked a considerable distance across the plain, when we came to a great patch of giant thistles. Here our dog got very excited and started to run to and fro, sniffing at the ground and growling to himself. We waited to see what would happen. Presently the dog picked up the scent and rushed off' into the thick tangle of thistles, and we followed as fast as we could, pushing our way through the thick stems, and getting well pricked in the process. The thistles were so tall we could not see where we were going, and all we could do was to follow the

  Hairy Armadillo

  crackling noise of the dog and his faint barks ahead of us. Suddenly we came out in a clearing in the center of the thistle patch, a big area of grass surrounded by a thick hedge of thistles. We were just in time to see our dog racing across the grass, hotly pursuing an armadillo, which was scuttling along at full speed, looking like some strange clockwork toy in the moonlight. We could see that the armadillo was heading for a hole, and we rushed forward to try to catch it before it disappeared into the earth, but we were just too late, for as we arrived at the hole the armadillo disappeared down it.

  But then, to our surprise, it suddenly shot out again, and it was closely followed by a very indignant skunk. The skunk put up his tail and squirted his evil-smelling scent at us—and all of us, includ­ing the armadillo and the dog, ran away as fast as we could. The only one who did not escape without getting sprayed was the dog, and in a minute he was rolling and whining in the grass as he tried to rub the foul smell from his body. Luckily, the armadillo, out of breath by this time, did not run far but took refuge in a clump of thistles, where we managed to surround and catch her. But then we had to call off the hunt, for the poor dog, reeking to high heaven, had decided that getting mixed up with skunks was not his idea of a good hunt, and had gone off home. And we ail (still smelling a bit) followed him back to the ranch, carrying in triumph Henrietta the hairy armadillo.

  Quokka

  Australia is a country that probably has more peculiar animals living in it than any other part of the world. One of the curious things about most Australian animals is that they carry their young in a sort of pocket or pouch, as, for example, the kangaroo does. The creatures we have in the zoo to represent the great group of these pouched animals are the tiny and charming quokkas, or short­tailed paddymelons. They are really like a pigmy kangaroo, about the size of a large rabbit. The babies are born very tiny and help­less, but nevertheless manage to find their way up into the mother's pouch, in which they live for about four months. By this time they are almost half the size of their mother, and her pouch bulges with the fat baby inside, and frequently you can see his little head poking out as the mother hops about. Quokkas are found in Western Australia, but, unfortunately, are getting very rare in the wild state and the Australian Government, very wisely, has allowed a certain number to be caught and sent to zoos in different parts of the world so that they can be bred in captivity. In this way, even if the quokka disappeared in the wild state, it would not be lost forever. We are very proud of our quokkas, and even prouder of the fact that they have had two babies since they have been with us.

  Crested Porcupine

  The rodents or gnawing animals are a huge family whose mem­bers are found in nearly every type of climate and country in the world. Some of them, like the house mouse and the brown rat, are among man’s worst enemies, for not only do they destroy vast amounts of food each year, but they can also carry diseases. One of the largest of the rodents, and one that is quite harmless to man, is the crested porcupine. They are large and rather handsome beasts, with their long black and white quills that—when they are alarmed or excited—stand out like the war bonnet of an Indian. The one we have we call Delilah, and she is a great character. When you go into the cage with her, she gets very indignant, and rushes round and round in circles, snorting loudly, growling like a lion, rattling her quills like castanets, and generally tries to persuade you that she is a very fearsome creature. Actually, she is not nearly as bad as she likes to make out, but we have to be careful, because her two-foot long quills could do you a lot of damage if you got a legful of them. Porcupines do not throw their quills, as a lot of people believe.

  What they do, when attacked by an enemy is turn their back to him, wait until he comes close enough, and then, with lightning speed, they back into him. The quills are only very loosely planted in the porcupine’s skin, and having jabbed them well into the enemy, the porcupine walks off and leaves her quills sticking into him, like a pincushion. Sometimes it has been known that quite large animals, even leopards, have been killed in a fight with a porcupine by its quills, and the quills can be responsible for turning lions into man-eaters, for if they try to kill a porcupine and get the quills in their paws, the points generally break off in the pad. This causes a nasty poisoned wound, and the lion then finds it impossible to hunt fast-moving creatures like antelope and zebra, and he takes to hunt­ing man, who is a much easier victim to catch.

  Among the most delightful of the smaller rodents are the squirrels, and one of the most attractive is the little North American flying squirrel. They do not, of course, actually fly like a bird, but float through the air like a glider. Running from wrist to ankle on each side of their body is a wide flap of skin. When the squirrel wants to get from one tree to another, he runs up the trunk as high as he can, and then jumps into the air. As he jumps, he stretches out his arms and legs, which pulls the two flaps of skin tight, like a pair of wings, and then he glides down to the next tree. We have a small colony of flying squirrels, and among them is one called Christo­pher. I gave him to my wife as a Christmas present one year, and

  Flying

  Squirrel

  he arrived three days before Christmas, sitting in a small box full of cotton wool and looking at us with large, black, frightened eyes. As flying squirrels only come out at night, we thought we would keep Christopher's cage in the bedroom to begin with, so that we could watch him when we lay in bed, and so that he would get tame more quickly. Well, on the second day Christopher had gnawed a large hole in the back of his cage and ha
d escaped. After a long hunt I found that he had taken up residence behind the wardrobe. As he seemed quite happy there, we left him, and each evening we would put his food on the dressing table, and as soon as we were in bed we would see his little face poking out from behind the wardrobe, to make sure that we really were in bed. Then he would scuttle up to the top of the wardrobe, launch himself into the air and glide down to the dressing table as gracefully as a paper dart. He would sit there, squeaking excitedly to himself, while he examined his food, and then, taking a tidbit, he would climb up on top of the cupboard again to eat it. We really gave him too much food, and we knew he was storing some of it, because in the morning there was never any­thing left on the dressing-table. But we could not discover where he was storing it. Then came New Year’s Eve, and I was invited to a party for which I had to wear my dinner jacket. I went to the drawer of the dressing-table in which I kept my dress shirts, and then discovered where Christopher had been storing his food. My brand- new cummerbund (which I had never worn) had been carefully chewed into bits, and these had been used to construct several little nests, one on the front of each of my clean dress shirts. In these nests had been stored seventy-two hazel nuts, five walnuts, fourteen pieces of bread, six dead mealworms, fifty-two bits of apple and twenty grapes. The apple and the grapes had, of course, gone all squishy and had left complicated patterns of brown juice stains across the fronts of each shirt. This was really too much, and so (in spite of Christopher's indignant squeaks) I caught him and put him in a strong cage which he could not gnaw through. In future he would have to store his food in his own bedroom.

  Our local Jersey red squirrel, Jinny, is very much the same as the red squirrels found in England, except that she is slightly smaller and darker. Some people were felling some trees one day, and when one of the trees came crashing down they found to their dismay that there was a squirrel's nest, or drey, in the upper branches. Investigating it, they found Jinny inside. She was very young then, with her eyes only just open. They brought her to us, and we set to work, feeding her with a fountain-pen filler. She soon grew very tame, and if her meal was a bit late in arriving she would sit in her cage and “chuck, chuck, chuck” at us until she got her milk. As she grew older, of course, she started to eat fruit and nuts, and it was then that we discovered what a greedy squirrel she was. She would always accept food, even if she was full, and she would take it to the back of the cage, put it on the ground, and then cover it over with sawdust. About this time we acquired Zoot, the thirteen-lined ground squirrel. As he was quite a baby, we thought that he would like to live in the same cage with Jinny. They settled down very well, and seemed to get very fond of one another. But Zoot had a habit that Jinny did not appreciate. He would sit and watch her when she buried her little stores of food under the sawdust, and as soon as she had moved away Zoot would go and dig everything up and carry it to a different part of the cage and bury it himself. Then when Jinny was feeling peckish, she would come down to her food store and find it gone. She would have to search all over the cage to find it and re-bury it again. Zoot would watch her, and as soon as she left he would dig it up and take it somewhere else for re­burial. Poor Jinny, although she was very fond of Zoot, this habit of his nearly drove her mad.

  Jersey Red Squirrel

  Thirteen-line Ground Squirrel

  Among the birds I think the owl family is probably my favorite.

  I love their great eyes, their solemn expressions, and the beautiful, noiseless way they drift through the night, as quietly as snowflakes. One of the most handsome of the owls is the barn owl. which is found quite commonly in the United States and England. Their large dark eyes are framed by a heart-shaped ruff of short, crisp, lacy feathers, and when they are asleep or meditating they draw themselves up so that they become very tall and slim, and then they half close their eyes, and the whole effect is very extraordinary, for they look like some strange Chinese ivory carving. 1 have been particularly fond of barn owls ever since 1 had one as a pet. some years ago. I called him Og. for reasons which I cannot remember, and he soon grew very tame. He lived in the attic of our house, where I also kept a tame kestrel and a sea gull with a broken wing. Whenever I went into the room and called Og's name, he would answer by clattering his beak like a castanet. bob up and down once or twice, as if bowing to me. and then fly silently onto my shoulder and sit there nibbling my ear gently. In the evenings I would go for walks through the fields and woods nearby, and Og would accompany

  Barn Owl

  me, flying from tree to tree on great, pale wings, and occasionally floating down to land on my shoulder.

  Then one evening I lost Og. I walked for miles, calling to him, but he had completely disappeared. After several weeks I had given him up completely; I thought that he must have been shot, or killed by a cat. One evening 1 was passing an old tumbled-down barn, and from inside it I heard a weird shriek, rather like the noise of someone tearing a sheet in half. I went into the bam and climbed up a rickety ladder to the loft. As I stuck my head through the trapdoor there was another shriek, and peering in the gloom I saw Og, sitting there looking very pleased with himself. Next to him sat a female barn owl, and just near them were two babies, fat and fluffy. They all stared at me with great eyes, and I called to Og softly. He bobbed up and down and clicked his beak, but he would not come and talk to me, so, not wanting to disturb his family, I left them. But, not long after, I saw Og and his wife, followed by their two youngsters, hawking over the moonlit fields, like a troupe of huge moths. They circled round me for half an hour or so, and then flew off into the dark wood, and I never saw them again.

  Woody, the Woodford’s owl, comes from West Africa, and I got him out there when I was collecting animals. He was not more than a few days old, and seemed to consist of nothing but a great bundle of white fluff with two staring dark eyes. Now, there is a curious thing about the feeding of both baby and adult owls. Whatever they catch, if it is a rat or a mouse or a bird, they eat the whole thing, bones, fur, feathers and everything. Then, in a little while, they bring up what is called a casting, an egg-shaped pellet, the out­side of which is all the fur or feathers of their food, and packed neatly inside the casting are all the bones and other indigestible bits of their prey. In order to keep owls healthy you have to give them plenty of this roughage with their food so that they can produce cast­ings, otherwise they soon become sick and die. When I got Woody,

  I was staying in a place where I could not obtain any roughage for him, just plain meat, and I worried a great deal about this, for I was afraid that he might die. One day I had an idea: I would use cotton wool. Every mealtime, I perched Woody on my knee and fed him scraps of meat, each one wrapped in a coating of cotton wool. Woody did not seem to mind a bit, and he gobbled down the meat and the cotton wool, uttering faint excited squeaking noises to himself, closing his eyes tightly when he swallowed. Then I would

  Woodford's Owl

  put him back in his cage. and. after a time when I looked in. there he would be. standing very upright in his white Huffy coat, sur­rounded by nice white cotton wool castings, looking for all the world like a little snowman who had been thoroughly snowballed.

  I think that most people like parrots, because they are amused that birds can imitate the human voice so accurately. Probably the best talking parrot is the african gray, a handsome ashy-gray bird with a wonderful scarlet tail. We have quite a number of these birds in the zoo, but my favorite one is Charles, because I got him myself, when he was quite young, out in West Africa. At first Charles could not talk, but only made the usual baby parrot's noises, strange wheezings and bubblings and shrill squawks. As he grew older, of course, he soon learnt a few simple words, like “hello" and “Pretty Charles." Before his wing feathers grew he used to use his beak and his feet to get about, and at mealtimes he would waddle across the ground, and then try to climb up the table leg so that he could help himself 10 tidbits from my plate. As the table leg was shiny, he sometimes had difficulty in
doing this, and I taught him to say. "Help Charles, help Charles,” until I put my finger down and lifted him up on it. After a few months Charles had developed into a lovely parrot, and his vocabulary had increased.

  Then, one day, we were staying in a small bungalow on the out­skirts of an African village, and when night fell Charles chose for himself a nice spot on the veranda rail to roost, and went to sleep.

  As he seemed quite happy there. I left him and went to bed. In the middle of the night I was awakened by Charles’s voice, shouting from the veranda outside: “Hello, hello, hello, pretty Charles, pretty Charles, help Charles, help Charles, help Charles, pretty Charles.” he was crying, over and over again. I was very puzzled, for Charles had never talked during the night before. I left my bed and looked out of the window to see what he was up to. There, in the bright moonlight, I saw that Charles had got down from the veranda rail, and was shuffling along towards the door into the house as fast as his tiny legs would carry him, shouting all the time: “Help Charles, pretty Charles, hello, hello, pretty Charles, help Charles.” Then I saw the reason, for at the end of the veranda, stalking him carefully, was a large mangy village cat. The cat was gathering itself to spring, when I grabbed one of my shoes and flung it. The shoe missed, of course, but the cat gave a startled leap and then fled