The Aye-Aye and I

by Gerald Durrell

  As usual, we nearly came to blows over what the princeling should be christened and we only united in our condemnation when Q suggested calling it Sir Bloxam.

  We now had four of our quota of six animals. We could not count Verity as he was Roland’s animal, which he wanted for his island. All of them were feeding well and the babies behaved as if they had been born in captivity. Now that we had so many individuals, their behaviour was fascinating to watch, especially the incredibly dextrous use of the slender third and magic finger. As the animal moved about, this sensitive organ was constantly in use, tapping its surroundings.

  As early as 1859, Sandwith meticulously described this behaviour:

  … bending forward his ears, and applying his nose close to the bark, he rapidly tapped the surface with the curious second [sic] digit, as a Woodpecker taps a tree, though with much less noise, from time to time inserting the slender finger into the worm-holes as a surgeon would a probe … I watched these proceedings with intense interest, and was much struck with the marvellous adaptation of the creature to its habits, shown by his acute hearing, which enables him aptly to distinguish the different tones emitted from the wood by his gentle tapping; his evidently acute sense of smell, aiding him in his search; … the curious slender finger, unlike that of any other animal, and which he used alternately as a pleximeter, a probe, and a scoop.

  Our friend Renée Winn, who first introduced us to aye-aye at Vincennes in Paris, told us that she had noticed the animals tapping the coconuts they were given and thought this was to discover the level of the ‘milk’, so that they could determine at what point to pierce the nut. She also showed us another very curious thing. The aye-aye were fed, among other things, a thick, rather stodgy custard in ordinary flat plastic plates. What the animals would do was to turn the plate over, chew a hole in the bottom and then extract the custard through the hole with their fingers. They did not seem able to eat the custard straight off the plate – it had be eaten through a hole for the true fulfilment of their gastronomic urges.

  Just recently, the small colony at Duke University in America, which I mentioned before, has taken part in some fascinating experiments devised by Professor Erickson to try to discover how the aye-aye finds its insect prey. Erickson’s tests, to put it simply, consisted of presenting the aye-ayes with a series of holes drilled into a log, some of which were empty, some filled with minced mealworms and others with live worms. The holes varied in design. Some were constructed in such a way that the animals were prevented from using their senses of sight and smell to detect which holes contained mealworms. The holes were also drilled at different depths beneath the surface of the log. From these experiments, Erickson concludes:

  Although visual and olfactory cues may contribute to the location and extraction of insect larvae from woody sources, these studies suggest that the Aye-aye depends heavily on tapping to locate the galleries of these larvae … The pinnae of the Aye-aye are proportionately larger than in any of the other lemuroid prosimians, and it is highly likely that this species has exceptional auditory sensitivity to the movement sounds of insect larvae and to the various tones emitted in response to tapping … The studies presented here strongly suggest that, like some bat species, this primate uses echolocation in capturing prey. None the less, tapping behaviour may serve the foraging process by providing more than auditory cues. As Sandwith indicates, the tapping behaviour is surprisingly gentle. Possibly, an exceptional cutaneous sense of the third digit provides unusual detection of and discriminability among surface vibrations. The low mass of the middle digit may allow it to resonate with the surface vibration without serious dampening. Tapping may also stimulate prey to make audible movements.

  Erickson has given the aye-aye’s tapping behaviour the charming name of ‘percussive foraging’.

  We have so much to learn about this astonishing animal that who knows what extraordinary secrets we shall unravel in the future about the aye-aye’s magic finger. It may, indeed, prove to be more magical than even the sorcerers thought it was, and if it does prove to be echolocation or an extraordinarily developed sense of touch, it shows that once more nature is far in advance of man.

  The next day, Q, John and Julian went out to look for hopeful nests and returned in an astonishingly short space of time, carrying a large male aye-aye of pugilistic mien. Not surprisingly, he was extremely piqued at having his siesta disturbed and entered the cage with many a mighty sniff of irritation and contempt for the human race. We christened him Patrice after our second hunter, but his behaviour soon earned him the sobriquet ‘the Basher’.

  That evening, even before he had been fed, with great sniffs and snorts, he proceeded to examine his cage minutely and tested everything for longevity. Each wire bar on his cage was twanged for flavour, the quality of the wood of his nest box was investigated with great thoroughness and much scrunching. After he was fed, he examined his bowls minutely and hurled them about the cage to test their durability. The noise he made eating, especially his sugar cane and coconut, would have had him banished for good from Claridges or the Ritz. We decided that it was not because he necessarily wanted to escape that he was so rowdy, it was just that he was made like those humans who don’t believe they are communicating properly unless they bang the table and shout. However, his boisterousness so alarmed his brethren that we had to move him to the far limits of the animal house, where his turbulent nature had a less distressing effect. I wondered if he had been born like that, or if it had come with age. So noisy was he in attracting attention to himself that I wondered why he had not attracted a well-aimed coup-coup long before now. Where silence is necessary for survival, he was attracting attention to himself with a positively suicidal raucousness.

  We now had five of the six animals we were allowed to collect; we needed one more adult male, and our task was done. I simply could not believe that we had almost achieved our goal, and, moreover, within the time-limit we had set ourselves. Having got this far, it was time to have a council of war.

  When we had arrived in Mananara after the bone-shattering ride from Tana, we had unanimously agreed that, if we caught any aye-aye, it would be asking for trouble to try to transport them back to Tana over such a fiendish road. The only alternative was by air. Mananara has a tiny airstrip, with a plane to and from Tana three times a week, if you are lucky. I say ‘plane’ but this really is a euphemism for they all looked like relics from World War One, and the miracle was that they were still flying and not piloted by the Red Baron.

  Those of you who visit zoos and watch all sorts of exotic animals bouncing about their cages, spare a thought for the complexities that brought them there. When we left Jersey, for example, we had absolutely no idea whether we would obtain the creatures we wanted or return empty-handed. On the off-chance that we would get aye-aye, cages in our quarantine area had to be refurbished to take an animal who, it appeared, was quite capable of chewing its way out of Sing Sing. This had to be done, for if we were successful in getting aye-aye we wanted them back in Jersey as soon as possible, not waiting around until cages were ready for them.

  The first thing, though, was to get the animals we had out of Mananara to Tana and to alert Jersey that we had been successful. Our travelling cages for our charges would not fit into the ordinary Red Baron-type aeroplane, and we didn’t want to rely on the haphazard schedules of commercial flights. So, we decided that the best thing to do was for Lee and me to fly to Tana, alert Jersey and hire a plane.

  The time came for us to leave. Both Lee and I were sorry; I particularly so, for I had grown very fond of the camp, which was very beautiful, and the only thing that marred it for me was my immobility. We would both miss the daily life there: the scandalized or hysterical reception of the ferryman’s verbal newspaper delivery; the bucket girl and her songs; the other sedate ladies with their washing, who moved closer and closer to the team as they bathed naked, presumably to reassure themselves that their menfolk were just as anatomically good as a
ny vazaha; the coucals’ liquid calls, sliding in the day; the solemn-faced children bringing in grubs for our precious animals and being paid in small coin or sweets. We would remember the little boy who, together with his four-year-old sister, brought in a grub, carefully wrapped in a leaf, a grub almost microscopically tiny. We gave him a large, malevolently coloured sweet, and watched him as he carefully bit it and gave half to his sister; the little group of children who, on being given half a bottle of lemonade, carefully passed it from one to another, each taking a sip, not a gulp, until the bottle was empty. All these had become part of our lives, and even the cockerel and his hens and the thrice-cursed ducky-wuckies had become our friends and illuminated our lives, however briefly.

  Our faithful Marc wept, as did our two sweet, gentle ladies. Their grief was not assuaged by the ever-growing pile of tins, bottles and boxes which it would be their happy task, ultimately, to distribute among their nearest and dearest. We drove through the village exchanging waves, filling our lungs for the last time with the rich melange of exotic scents, the musk of cloves, the sweetness of vanilla, the welcoming smell of cooking fires and that subtle, indefinable smell of sunlight on green leaves. Under a lychee tree blushing with fruit, three zebu lay taking the shade, as Captain Bob used to put it, and against the silky warm flank of one of them their six-year-old herder lay asleep, his twig, his Excalibur, lying in his limp hand.

  We got to town and made our way to the hotely to have a drink and say farewell to Madame. There was the steady ‘trink, trink, trink’ of the crystal hammers and, as we left for the airport, I scooped up a small handful. Earlier that morning, like a lovesick Victorian maiden (which I in no way resemble), I had plucked some of the curiously shaped leaves from the plants that grew around our tent and pressed them in my somewhat haphazard diary. The fact that they all fell out and were lost on the way back to Jersey is neither here nor there.

  We arrived at the grass airstrip just as the plane landed. We boarded and I got the immediate impression that our transport seemed to have been designed – in a moment of mental aberration – by Snow White for her dwarfs. We sat in minute seats that were so close together that our knees were rammed tightly against the back of the seat in front, an uncomfortable position, to say the least. The plane was built to carry 16 passengers and to say that we closely resembled a well-packed sardine can is no exaggeration.

  I whiled away the time before take-off by reading a flight pamphlet with the fascinating title Fepetra Rahatra Doza (For Your Safety). It had a picture of the plane, showing all the emergency exits, none of which, it seemed to me, we could get to, compressed together as we were. Next came a riveting picture of what you should do in an emergency, which was to lean forward and place your head between your knees. This also seemed to me to be an impossibility, even if one was a professional contortionist.

  Worse was to follow. The pamphlet informed me that there was a life jacket under every seat. I made a careful inspection of all the seats I could see, including my own, and there were no life jackets. On further inspection, I found the life jacket on the back of the seat in front encased in a plastic packet that would require a pickaxe to make the jacket emerge. The slim, jolly and romantic lady in the pamphlet appeared, from the illustration, not only to have extracted it but to have put it on in record time, so as to do an elegant swallow dive into the Indian Ocean when the plane hit the sea.

  I examined the whole scenario with care and came to the reluctant conclusion that it was not sound. In an emergency, we would all dutifully try to wedge our heads between our knees, which would then be held firmly in place by the back of the seat in front. The dimensions of your skull would be crucial to this procedure and from the cries of pain you would easily be able to detect the passengers with the greater brain capacity (the more Neanderthal ones achieving success with mere groans of anguish).

  Having got your head into the correct position, supposing you were informed by the pilot that you were going to hit the sea and not the land? Immediate panic would undoubtedly ensue. You would have to wrench yourself up from your foetus-like position and put on your life jacket. The less observant passengers would, of course, not be able to find theirs under their seats, thus increasing a certain sense of doom and despondency. Supposing, then, that they ascertained the true position of their life jackets and borrowed each other’s Swiss Army knives to dissect the plastic to get them out – there would not be room for us all to put them on simultaneously. We would have to do it one at a time, the women and children first, naturally.

  By the time we had achieved this, I feared, the plane would be full fathom five among the sharks before you could say Fepetra Rahatra Doza. I closed my eyes and tried not to think of mechanical faults as the plane took off, uncertain as a butterfly.

  Chapter Ten

  The Flight of the Magic Finger

  We returned to Tana without mishap and, as a compensation for the quantity of sardines and corned beef we had been forced to consume, we treated ourselves to a magnificent dinner at the Hotel Colbert, starting with two dozen oysters each and ending via a cream meringue with a very good local cheese. Full as pythons that had eaten an entire pygmy village, we went to our bedroom and Lee started on the tortuous round of telephone calls and faxes that were necessary to get our act together. When you see an animal in a zoo, spare a thought for the person who got it there. The burden of this fell on Lee since she spoke such good French, whereas my command of that language has been described by my French friends as closely approaching something spoken by a Spanish cow, the most insulting thing one can say about an Englishman speaking what he fondly believes is français.

  Let me enumerate the things that had to be done. Firstly, a long fax had to be sent to our zoological director, Jeremy Mallinson, boasting of our success and giving minute details of each aye-aye’s likes and dislikes, together with the likes and dislikes of the entire collection, from gentle lemurs to jumping rats. Secondly, what appeared to be ten thousand telephone calls had to be made to find out if there was a small freight plane we could hire. Naturally, we did not want to spend money on something the size of Concorde, even supposing that such a plane could land on an airfield which was about as big as a child’s handkerchief.

  To our surprise, we ran a plane to earth without too much trouble. Mathematics now entered our discussions: we had to negotiate the price in Malagasy francs while remembering simultaneously how many pounds sterling we had left and had to provide the weights and dimensions of the travelling cages (which we had carefully written down in pounds and inches) to the Malagasy in metric figures. I have considered myself to be an unrecognized mathematical genius ever since, at the age of eight, I managed to add five and four together and get the rather surprising total of 28. Brushing aside my protestations that I was, in reality, an unsung Einstein, Lee told me to go out and enjoy myself in the zoma while she, with her more agile, slippery eel-like feminine mind, dealt with these problems.

  Our troubles now centred on the scheduling of the plane. As it was the height of the lychee season and people were flying lychees in all directions, this was difficult. But it was vital that the plane carrying Q and our valuable creatures should arrive in Tana to coincide with the international flight. In addition to this somewhat complex arrangement, we had to find a driver, for even John, with his manifold talents, could not ferry two Toyotas back to Tana over those unspeakable roads. Once more, the dreaded lychees (a fruit I loved but learned to hate) entered our lives. All the best drivers were busy rushing to and fro with lorry-loads of the delectable and delicate fruit. Finally however, we managed to track down one driver who had the time to undertake our mission.

  Now another problem reared its ugly head. We had to let John and Q know of our success in hiring a plane and the exact timing of its arrival in Mananara so that the aye-aye (until now occupying spacious holding cages) would be ready to go in their travelling crates for the flight to Tana. To accomplish this would take some time, so the sooner John an
d Q knew the better. There were three ways of getting the news to them: through the local postal service, the radio in Roland’s office, or someone flying up to Mananara, to whom we could entrust a cleft stick. As all telephonic communications had been installed by the benevolent Mao Tse-tung, they worked about as well as the locks on hotely bedrooms. We took no risks, and sent messages by all the routes.

  That evening, I attempted to revive my exhausted wife (who had been on the telephone since eight o’clock in the morning) by giving her another sumptuous oyster feast. She found what she thought was a pearl in one of them and thought it was a good omen, until she disgorged it and we found that it was a battered and furtive-looking clove. When I attracted the waiter’s attention to this rather surprising symbiosis he nodded, gave me a splendid, congratulatory smile, said ‘Oui, monsieur,’ filled my glass and departed. Apparently in his philosophy you did not question good luck.

  In the midst of all this, it was an unexpected and unpleasant blow to learn of my elder brother’s death. He had always been my mentor and, indeed, it was he who encouraged me to take up writing. At that range there was nothing very positive I could do to comfort his widow, his numerous ex-wives and his one surviving daughter, except to send them news of our probable date of arrival in Jersey. However, this bit of gloomy news was tempered slightly by the information that Mickey, after a terrible time in Tana with what was finally diagnosed as cerebral malaria, had finally flown back to Jersey and was well on the road to recovery.

  Apparently when the team had got Mickey back to Tana, he was delirious and had to be given a blood transfusion and kept on a drip for a time. The Malagasy nurses found that he was too strong for them and he kept tearing his drip out. So Captain Bob and Tim had to take over the nursing, holding him down when he got obstreperous and preventing him from pulling out all the life-saving equipment with which he was festooned. It was wonderful to hear that our amiable and lovable friend was going to get better. Apart from anything else, it gave us the excuse to open a bottle of champagne to drink to both my brother – a gesture he would have appreciated – and to Mick’s recovery.