The Aye-Aye and I

by Gerald Durrell

  The pace now hotted up. Having found the plane and the driver, Lee had to dive into the murky depths of bureaucracy because our all-important export permits had to be obtained from the correct ministry. The gentleman who was supposed to issue these always seemed to be out. When tracked to his lair, we observed a thick coating of dust on his telephone, which seemed to prove that he had solved this irritant of office by simply not answering it. (Of course, it may have been simply there to impress. I know that in Argentina and Paraguay no official can be treated as an official until he has reposing on his desk one of those jolly little merry-go-rounds from which hang at least twenty-five impressive stamps. This he never uses, but twists in a meditative way while thinking out new ways of obstruction.)

  Having got our export permits, next we had to get our vitally important CITES permit signed. Albeit filled with many loopholes, CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) is a splendid step towards stopping illegal trafficking in rare wild animals, plants and their products. The wildlife trade can be counted in billions of dollars a year; and wildlife means everything from orchids to elephants. Much of this trade is illegal because the animals and plants concerned are threatened with extinction. Those animal lovers who complain about zoos and try to put a stop to the important work in breeding rare species which they undertake should turn their attention to the real issues. Between 1980 and 1981, over 33,000 wild-caught parrots passed through Amsterdam airport. Most of these either die on their journey or shortly afterwards because to save costs they are squashed together as slaves used to be. If they survive, they are sold to ‘bird lovers’ in different parts of the world.

  Japan and Hong Kong are steadily whittling away at the last of the elephants, turning their tusks (so much more elegant left on the elephant) into artistic carvings. In much the same way, the beautiful furs from leopard, jaguar, snow leopard, clouded leopard and so on, are used to clad the inelegant bodies of thoughtless and, for the most part, ugly women. I wonder how many would buy these furs if they knew that on their bodies they wore the skin of an animal that, when captured, was killed by the medieval and agonising method of having a red-hot rod inserted up its rectum so as not to mark the skin.

  In a desperate attempt to preserve anything from cacti to crocodiles, 113 countries have signed CITES so far. At the moment, however, signing the convention is merely a gesture of intent and carries no legal weight if the country chooses to ignore it. Even so, CITES is a positive start. A bigger stumbling block to the effectiveness of the convention is the fact that the poor customs officers are not biologists and so cannot be expected to distinguish between a frog with yellow spots on a green background (in which trade is legal) and one with yellow spots on a purple background (in which trade is illegal). In spite of their somewhat shaky zoological and botanical knowledge the customs officers have pulled off some notable coups (including one that involved about seventy radiated tortoises that ended up in our reptile house until we could find homes for them). It is to be hoped that CITES, for all its faults, is the start of the control and eventual elimination of this cruel and disastrous trade in living organisms.

  At last the preliminary bureaucratic bookwork was done and we could only look forward to Qs arrival in Tana with our aye-ayes. As we waited at the airstrip, we visualised everything that could have gone wrong: John and Q had not received our message and were only now, at this very moment, trying to get indignant aye-ayes into their travelling boxes; the plane had never arrived, or, if it had, was now heading back to us empty or, worse still, full of our lovely beasts but crashing to its doom somewhere in central Madagascar. Even if all these dire prognostications were proved untrue, would the plane arrive in time to match up with the others’ departure? We had been shocked early that morning to be informed that the cargo-hold on Air Madagascar was not pressurized and the temperature would drop to 4°C. Panic-stricken, we rushed out to the zoma and bought dozens of cheap blankets to wrap the cages in, only to find out at the airport that our information was incorrect and we were the proud owners of the biggest stock of unnecessary blankets in Tana.

  Not unnaturally, our nerves were in something of a flutter as we watched our hire plane land and taxi towards us. When Q emerged, wearing his usual inscrutable expression, we were quite prepared to be told that all the aye-aye had escaped during the night. Instead of which, he informed us of the splendid news that after Lee and I had left two more aye-aye, a female and a male, had been captured. This meant that we had not only provided our saviour, Roland, with a mate for Verity, but had caught the full complement of the animals allowed us by the government. There was no time for backslapping and congratulatory drinks, however, for we had to get the animals over to the customs export shed.

  Things now became even more complex and we had some heart-stopping moments. We discovered, with horror, that Q had lost all his money and his traveller’s cheques. This was serious, for the Malagasy authorities take careful note of how much cash you bring into the country and check it again when you leave, to make sure you have not been using your pounds illegally to buy Malagasy francs at a reduced rate on the black market. By the grace of God, our old friend Benjamin Andriamaihaja was in Tana and not on holiday. A frantic phone call to the Ministry of Higher Education had him up at the airport in a trice. In our estimation, Benjamin is the Mr Fixit in Madagascar. Within an hour or so, Q’s name was cleared and he did not have to go to prison for life.

  Naturally, though all of our collection was immensely valuable, the aye-aye headed the list and we felt it was important that they should get to Jersey as quickly as possible. Tsimbazaza Zoo, where we had housed the rest of our collection, had no proper accommodation for aye-aye, so the plan was for Q to accompany them to Mauritius, feed them, keep them overnight and put them on the London flight the next day. In London, they would be met by Jeremy and staff and Q, having acted as nursemaid as far as Mauritius, was to return to Madagascar and join us to help pack up the rest of the animals. To do this, he needed a re-entry visa. Inspection of his much-battered passport revealed the fact that he had no page on which the re-entry visa could be stamped. Immediately, panic ensued and Q and Benjamin took a frantic taxi ride to the British Embassy in search of another page. The embassy, which up until now had been courteous and helpful, dealt us a body blow. They could not issue pages, only whole passports, and they didn’t have any. So we had to hope that Q could get a new passport from the High Commission in Mauritius and then get the re-entry visa from the Malagasy Consulate there.

  In the event, things worked out smoothly, but when you are ferrying such a precious cargo of wild creatures from one side of the world to the other, every hiccup in the bureaucratic system shortens your life expectancy.

  That evening, Q phoned to tell us that the first stage of the journey had gone off without a hitch. The aye-aye had been bedded down and fed and he was going to be allowed to stow them personally in the cargo hold of the plane for London. The next day, we received a fax from Jeremy to reassure us that he had chartered a plane to carry the animals from London to Jersey, where a huge supply of all the delicious foods we had asked him to acquire was awaiting them. Later, Q phoned to say that he had successfully loaded the animals onto the London flight, and they all looked very perky. All we could do now was pray.

  The next day, the British Ambassador, Dennis Amy, once again came to our rescue. So many friends of our friends had helped us that it was impossible to entertain them individually to thank them. What we needed was a party.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Dennis, ‘bring ’em all to my little place for a knees-up.’

  And a sumptuous knees-up it was. Nearly everyone we had met was there: dear Madame Berthe from Benjamin’s ministry, whom we had known for more than ten years; Benjamin himself; Messrs Raymond and Georges and Mme Celestine from the Eaux et Forêts Ministry who had given permission and encouragement for the expedition in the first place; Barthélémi and his lovely wife, Colette; Martin, Lucienne and Olivi
er from the World Wide Fund for Nature; Mihanta with his evermore grin. It was a splendid party and what put the gilt on the gingerbread was the fact that reposing in my pocket was a fax from Jeremy which read:

  Delighted to record that all six Aye-aye arrived safely at JWPT and are in their respective quarters. Mina and juvenile were taking banana and eating sugar cane on flight over from London, whereas Alain was studying the world from the security of his nest box, Juliet was curled up with infant and Patrice was curled up in similar fashion. Mina and juvenile already out of their box in spacious ‘bat quarantine’ area and eating already.

  We all could not be more impressed and delighted with the success of the Durrell Expedition. Congratulations to all concerned.

  It was a wrench to leave Madagascar – a place so full of extraordinary life forms, an island we loved dearly and one we hoped that we might help even more in the future. Lee and Q undertook the task of crating up our gentle lemurs and other animals for the journey and no mishaps occurred. (An escaped animal at the last minute can make your hair turn grey.) While they were doing this, John and I ferried our equipment to the airport for the flight to Mauritius.

  As the day was overcast and drizzly, I slipped on a lightweight French fishing jacket which I’d worn throughout our expedition and, as we were waiting for our flight to be called, I discovered two pieces of paper in my pocket. One was the form which you had to fill in to stay in the hotely in Morandava. This bureaucratic absurdity takes place all over the world, of course, and somewhere there must be a gigantic building (designed by Kafka, perhaps) in which all these useless bits of paper gently simmer and moulder away as an example of mankind’s folly to mankind. I had kept this one, however, because one of the questions it asked intrigued me. The form read like this:

  1. Préciser bien s’il agit de Mr, Mme ou Mlle

  (Precise of Mr, Mrs or Miss)

  2. Passeport, CNI, IE, Permis de conduire

  (Passport. Licence driver)

  3. Rayer les mentions inutiles

  (Keeps of the useless means)

  I fear I shall go to my grave baffled and uncertain as to whether or not I am a keeps of the useless means.

  The other piece of paper showed what purported to be a crashed plane with a chute out of the door, down which a smiling lady was shown sliding with all the sangfroid of someone to whom this happens with monotonous regularity. Underneath the French caption was written the mysterious translation:

  ‘Sit one the thrush and skid feet first.’

  I remembered I had kept it to show the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and ask them what they intended to do about it. These two bits of paper made a fitting souvenir as we boarded the plane and flew away from Madagascar towards Mauritius.

  Lee and I decided that we would stay on for a few days in Mauritius, inspecting one of our major conservation projects, now in its fifteenth successful year. Carl Jones, our man in Mauritius, was there to meet us with his gangling limbs, brown hair like some sort of uncontrollable seaweed, sparkling eyes, a wide, warm grin like one of the more lovable ventriloquists’ dummies and a voice that tried itself out from deep bass to the faint squeak made by a newly born bat.

  ‘So you’ve come to see a proper set-up at last, have you?’ he said. ‘Left all those mangy lemurs and come to see some decent birds. Be a real education for you to see some birds after all those lemurs … Ugh! … Saw those aye-ayes, horrible things, they were. What d’you want them for when you can have a real Mauritian kestrel? Daft, you are.’

  ‘If you go on besmirching lemurs in this way,’ said Lee, firmly, ‘I shall borrow Gerry’s stick and make you into a permanent falsetto, not a part-time one.’

  Carl spends a lot of his waking moments practising to be an eccentric. He is doing splendidly at it but has a long way to go before he reaches the heights of some of his zoological predecessors. Buckland, for example, made a pie out of a deceased rhinoceros at London Zoo and transported it with him to hand out on a lecture tour to the ‘working classes’ in the north of England. Waterton had a nasty and painful infestation of ‘jiggers’ in his feet while in Guyana, but left them in situ so that, on the long, slow voyage back to England, he could observe at what point the decreasing temperature killed them. True, when you open Carl’s fridge to get a beer, you can never be quite sure whether a baby dolphin or a concourse of dead mongoose is liable to fall out. But this is a long way from Buckland, who hauled a dead Bengal tiger up the front of his house in London by ropes and pulleys to get it into the attic where he could dissect it.

  Our fifteen-year association with the Mascarene Islands dates back to the time when I chose Mauritius for a holiday. After all, we had picked the fantastic Dodo as our symbol, since it was a bird discovered on Mauritius in 1599 and had vanished by 1693, thus summing up what man is doing to the world in general. However, on reaching the island, I found there were other things in peril of following the dodo to extinction. The Mauritian kestrel, for example, was endangered by the felling of its forest home and wholesale spraying with insecticides. There were only four known birds left in the world. The beautiful pink pigeon’s numbers had dwindled until there were just twenty birds. On nearby Rodrigues, the beautiful golden fruit bat which is native to the island now numbered only 120. On Round Island, a small islet off Mauritius, unique reptile and plant populations were threatened by the ecological havoc wrought by rabbits and goats foolishly introduced there in the early nineteenth century.

  It was clear that the Mascarene flora and fauna desperately needed a helping hand. The International Council for Bird Preservation had attempted to start a captive breeding unit for the kestrel and the pigeon which, unfortunately, had been unsuccessful and no one was doing anything about the Rodrigues fruit bat or the strange reptiles of Round Island. My holiday became work.

  With the agreement and help of the Mauritian Government, we caught a small colony of bats and three groups of Round Island reptiles to take to Jersey to found breeding colonies. Meanwhile, we and the government made the most strenuous efforts to rid the island of its malignant plague of rabbits and goats. We finally succeeded with the help of the New Zealand Wildlife Service, well versed in ways of ridding islands of unpleasant intruders, and (believe it or not) the Australian Navy, who lent us a helicopter to ferry our team and equipment to the island. Meanwhile, we agreed with the ICBP to take over the problem of the pigeon and the kestrel, in spite of the fact that there seemed little hope of saving either species.

  In conservation, the motto should always be ‘Never say die’. A small group of pigeons was caught up: half were left at the government breeding station at Black River in Mauritius and the rest sent to Jersey We had an uphill struggle with the pigeons but, finally, we learnt the trick of supplying what they wanted and, gradually, had success. Today, through captive breeding efforts in both Mauritius and Jersey, the pigeon population has risen from the original 20 wild birds that we found to 150 in captivity. Although the major breeding colonies are in Mauritius and Jersey, as a further safeguard we have founded small colonies in zoos in England and America. Our job is not yet complete, of course, for the original gene pool is small and this may cause problems in the future. But at least we can say that we have built up the numbers of birds so we have specimens with which to experiment. Trying to save a bird whose numbers had dropped to 20 individuals is a very precarious conservation tightrope walk.

  The kestrels’ situation was even worse, because only four birds were known to be left. Carl waited his chance and as soon as one pair nested he collected the eggs and took them to the aviaries at Black River. (If you take eggs in this way, it is almost certain that the parents will lay again, so the action is not quite as irresponsible as it sounds.) At Black River, European kestrels had been held in readiness to act as foster parents when the precious eggs hatched and Carl was also prepared for handrearing, should that prove necessary. This was the beginning of Carl’s brilliant work with the kestrel, aided greatly by the Peregrine F
und in the USA. If ever anyone can be said to have snatched a species back from the brink of oblivion, then it can be said of Carl and this diminutive hawk. Using old falconers’ techniques, Carl had returned 112 young kestrels to the wild by 1990 – a prodigious feat.

  When we arrived in Mauritius from Madagascar, we had successful breeding colonies of pink pigeon, kestrel and Rodrigues fruit bat in both Jersey and Mauritius. We had Round Island geckos, skinks and boas overflowing from our cages in the reptile house in Jersey and the problem of introduced pests to Round Island had been solved. It was time for me to update myself on the Mauritian side of the operation.

  Carl drove us up to the Macchabee/Brise Fer forest, which was the new release site for captive-bred pigeons, some of them from our aviaries in Jersey. Mauritius is a fascinating island, with strange, twisted mountains that look like the backdrop of a film set by Dalí. Everywhere you look there are a thousand different greens, lush and tropical. Look more closely, however, and you will see that ninety per cent of the vegetation has intruded from another part of the world and is slowly edging the indigenous plants to extinction. The view delights the untutored eye of the tourists, for out of this brilliant panoply of plants, saucer-sized hibiscus flowers, large and red as setting suns, bougainvillaea like pink and salmon cloaks of flowers thrown haphazardly, they expect Tarzan and Jane, fingers entwined, to emerge with a retinue of faithful chimpanzees. Fortunately, Mauritius has not, thus far, become quite as degraded as that.

  The Macchabe forest is one of the last pieces of indigenous forest left in Mauritius and it was chosen as a release site for the pigeons because here they have plenty of space and a natural food supply. We came to a small camp, a neat cluster of tents where the pigeon guardians and watchers lived. Each bird could be identified by the coloured ring on its ankle and some are radio-equipped so that they could be more easily tracked in the thick forest. The pigeons, of course, come under the closest scrutiny, so we would know who was mating with whom, who was eating what, and whereabouts in the forest all this was taking place.