Encounters With Animals

by Gerald Durrell

  The hunting-wasp is the Harley Street specialist of the insect world, and he performs an operation which would give a skilled surgeon pause. There are many different species of hunting-wasp, but most of them have similar habits. For the reception of her young the female has to build a nursery out of clay. This is neatly divided into long cells about the circumference of a cigarette and about half its length. In these the wasp intends to lay her eggs. However, she has another duty to perform before she can seal them up, for her eggs will hatch into grubs, and they will then require food until such time as they are ready to undergo the last stage of their metamorphosis into the perfect wasp. The hunting-wasp could stock her nursery with dead food, but by the time the eggs had hatched this food would have gone bad, so she is forced to evolve another method. Her favourite prey is the spider. Flying like some fierce hawk, she descends upon her unsuspecting victim and proceeds to sting it deeply and skilfully. The effect of this sting is extraordinary, for the spider is completely paralyzed. The hunting-wasp then seizes it and carries it off to her nursery where it is carefully tucked away in one of the cells and an egg laid on it. If the spiders are small, there may be anything up to seven or eight in a cell. Having satisfied herself that the food supply is adequate for her youngsters, the wasp then seals up the cells and flies off. Inside this grisly nursery the spiders lie in an unmoving row, in some cases for as much as seven weeks. To all intents and purposes the spiders are dead, even when you handle them, and not even under a magnifying glass can you detect the faintest sign of life. Thus they wait, so to speak, in cold storage until the eggs hatch out and the tiny grubs of the hunting-wasp start browsing on their paralyzed bodies.

  I think even the captain was a little shaken by the idea of being completely paralyzed while something consumed you bit by bit, so I hastily switched to something a shade more pleasant. It was, in fact, the most delightful little creature, and a most ingenious one – the water-spider. Only recently in his history has man been able to live under water for any length of time, and one of his first steps in this direction was the diving-bell. Thousands of years before this the water-spider had evolved his own method of penetrating this new world beneath the surface of the water. To begin with, he can quite happily swim below the surface of the water, wearing his equivalent of the aqualung in the shape of an air bubble which he traps beneath his stomach and between his legs, so that he may breathe under water. This alone is extraordinary, but the water-spider goes even further: he builds his home beneath the surface of the water, a web shaped like an inverted cup, firmly anchored to the water-weeds. He then proceeds to make several journeys to the surface, bringing with him air bubbles which he pushes into this dome-shaped web until it is full of them, and in this he can live and breathe as easily as if he were on land. In the breeding season he picks out the house of a likely looking female and builds himself a cottage next door, and then, presumably being of a romantic turn of mind, he builds a sort of secret passage linking his house with that of his lady-love. Then he breaks down her wall, so that the air bubbles in each house intermix, and here in this strange underwater dwelling he courts the female, mates with her, and lives with her until the eggs are laid and hatched, and until their children, each carrying their little globule of air from their parents’ home, swim out to start life on their own.

  Even the captain seemed amused and intrigued by my story of the water-spider, and he was bound to admit, albeit reluctantly, that I had won my bet.

  I suppose it must have been about a year later I was talking to a lady who had travelled on the same ship with the same captain.

  ‘Wasn’t he a delightful man?’ she asked me. I agreed politely.

  ‘He must have enjoyed having you on board,’ she went on, ‘because he was so keen on animals, you know. One night he kept us all spellbound for at least an hour, telling us about all these scientific discoveries – you know, things like radar – and how animals have been employing them for years and years before man discovered them. Really it was fascinating. I told him he ought to write it up into a talk and broadcast it on the B.B.C.’

  Vanishing Animals

  Some time ago I was watching what must be the strangest group of refugees in this country, strange because they did not come here for the usual reasons, driven by either religious or political persecution from their own country. They came here quite by chance, and in doing so they were saved from extermination. They are the last of their kind, for in their country of origin their relatives were long ago hunted down, killed and eaten. They were, in fact, a herd of Père David deer.

  Their existence was first discovered by a French missionary, one Father David, during the course of his work in China in the eighteen hundreds. In those days China was as little known, zoologically speaking, as the great forests of Africa, and so Father David, who was a keen naturalist, spent his spare time collecting specimens of the flora and fauna to send back to the museum in Paris. In 1865 his work took him to Peking, and while he was there he heard a rumour that there was a strange herd of deer in the Imperial Hunting Park, just south of the city. This park had been for centuries a sort of combined hunting- and pleasure-ground for the Emperors of China, a great tract of land completely surrounded by a high wall forty-five miles long. It was strictly guarded by Tartar soldiers, and no one was allowed to enter or approach it. The French missionary was intrigued by the stories he heard about these peculiar deer, and he was determined that, guards or no guards, he was going to look inside the walled park and try to see the animals for himself. One day he got his opportunity and was soon lying up on top of the wall, looking down into the forbidden park and watching the various game animals feeding among the trees below him. Among them was a large herd of deer, and Father David realized that he was looking at an animal he had never seen before, and one which was, very probably, new to science.

  Father David soon found out that the deer were strictly protected, and for anyone caught harming or killing them the sentence was death. He knew that any official request he might put forward for a specimen would be politely refused by the Chinese authorities, so he had to use other, less legal methods to get what he wanted. He discovered that the Tartar guards occasionally improved their rather sparse rations by the addition of a little venison; they were well aware what the penalty for their poaching would be if they were caught, and so, in spite of the missionary’s pleadings, they refused to sell him the skins and antlers of the deer they killed, or indeed anything that might be evidence of their crime. However, Father David did not give up hope, and after a considerable time he was successful. He met some guards who were either braver or perhaps poorer than the rest, and they obtained for him two deer skins, which he triumphantly shipped off to Paris. As he had expected, the deer turned out to be an entirely new species, and so it was named, in honour of its discoverer, the Père David deer – Father David’s deer.

  Naturally, when zoos in Europe heard about this new kind of deer they wanted specimens for exhibition, and after protracted negotiations the Chinese authorities rather reluctantly allowed a few of the animals to be sent to the Continent. Although no one realized it at the time, it was this action that was to save the animals. In 1895, thirty years after the Père David deer first became known to the world, there were great floods around Peking; the Hun-Ho river overflowed its banks and caused havoc in the countryside, destroying the crops and bringing the population to near starvation. The waters also undermined the great wall round the Imperial Hunting Park. Parts of it collapsed, and through these gaps the herd of Père David deer escaped into the surrounding countryside, where they were quickly killed and eaten by the hungry peasants. So the deer perished in China, and the only ones left were the handful of live specimens in the various zoos in Europe.

  Shortly before this disaster overtook the deer in China, a small herd of them had arrived in England. The present Duke of Bedford’s father had, on his estate at Woburn in Bedfordshire, a wonderful collection of rare animals, and he had been
most anxious to try to establish a herd of this new Chinese deer there. He bought as many specimens as he could from the Continental zoos, eighteen in all, and released them in his park. To the deer this must have seemed like home from home, for they settled down wonderfully, and soon started to breed. Today, the herd that started with eighteen now numbers over a hundred and fifty animals, the only herd of Père David deer in the world.

  When I was working at Whipsnade Zoo four newly born Père David deer were sent over from Woburn for us to hand-rear. They were delightful little things, with long gangling limbs over which they had no control and strange slanted eyes that gave them a distinctly Oriental appearance. To begin with, of course, they did not know what a feeding-bottle was for, and we had to hold them firmly between our knees and force them to drink. But they very soon got the hang of it, and within a few days we had to open the stable door with extreme caution if we did not want to be knocked flying by an avalanche of deer, pushing and shoving in an effort to get at the bottle first.

  They had to be fed once during the night, at midnight, and again at dawn, and so we worked out a system of night duties, one week on, one week off, between four keepers. I must say that I rather enjoyed the night duties. To pick one’s way through the moonlit park towards the stable where the baby deer were kept, you had to pass several of the cages and paddocks, and the occupants were always on the move. The bears, looking twice as big in the half-light, would be snorting to each other as they shambled heavily through the riot of brambles in their cage, and they could be persuaded to leave their quest for snails and other delicacies if one had a bribe of sugar-lumps. They would come and squat upright in the moonlight, like a row of shaggy, heavy-breathing Buddhas, their great paws resting on their knees. They would throw back their heads and catch the flying lumps of sugar and eat them with much scrunching and smacking of lips. Then, seeing that you had no more in your pockets, they would sigh in a long-suffering manner and shamble off into the brambles again.

  At one point the path led past the wolf wood, two acres or so of pines, dark and mysterious, with the moonlight silvering the trunks and laying dark shadows along the ground through which the wolf pack danced on swift, silent feet, like a strange black tide, swirling and twisting among the trunks. As a rule they made no sound, but occasionally you would hear them panting gently, or the sudden snap of jaws and a snarl when one wolf barged against another.

  Then you would reach the stable and light the lantern. The baby deer would hear you and start moving restlessly in their straw beds, bleating tremulously. As you opened the door they rushed forward, wobbling on their unsteady legs, sucking frantically at your fingers, the edge of your coat, and butting you suddenly in the legs with their heads, so that you were almost knocked down. Then came the exquisite moment when the teat was pushed into their mouths and they sucked frantically at the warm milk, their eyes staring, bubbles gathering like a moustache at the corners of their mouths. There is always a certain pleasure to be gained from bottle-feeding a baby animal, if only from its wholehearted enthusiasm and concentration on the job. But in the case of these deer there was something else as well. In the flickering light of the lantern, while the deer sucked and slobbered over the bottles, occasionally ducking their heads and butting at an imaginary udder with their heads, I was very conscious of the fact that they were the last of their kind.

  At Whipsnade I had to look after another group of animals which belonged to a species now extinct in the wild state, and they were some of the most charming and comic animals I have ever had anything to do with. They were a small herd of white-tailed gnus.

  The white-tailed gnu is a weird creature to look at: if you can imagine an animal with the body and legs of a finely built pony, a squat blunt face with very wide-spaced nostrils, a heavy mane of white hair on its thick neck, and a long white sweeping plume of a tail. The buffalo horns curve outwards and upwards over the eyes, and the animal peers at you from under them with a perpetually indignant and suspicious expression. If the gnu behaved normally, this appearance would not be so noticeable, but the animal does not behave normally. Anything but, in fact. Its actions can only be described, very inadequately, as a cross between bebop and ballet, with a bit of yoga thrown in.

  In the mornings, when I went to feed them, it always took me twice as long as it should have done because the gnus would start performing for me, and the sight was so ludicrous that I would lose all sense of time. They would prance and twist and buck, gallop, rear and pirouette, and while they did so they would throw their slim legs out at extraordinary and completely un-anatomical angles, and swish and curve their long tails as a circus ringmaster uses his whip. In the middle of the wild dance they would suddenly stop dead and glare at me, uttering loud, indignant belching snorts at my laughter. I watched them dancing their swift, wild dance across the paddock and they reminded me, in their antics and attitudes, of some strange heraldic creature from an ancient coat-of-arms, miraculously brought to life, prancing and posturing on a field of green turf.

  It is difficult to imagine how anyone had the heart to kill these agile and amusing antelopes. However, the fact remains that the early settlers in South Africa found in the white-tailed gnu a valuable source of food, and so the great herds of high-spirited creatures were slaughtered unmercifully. The antelope contributed to its own downfall in an unusual way. They are incorrigibly curious creatures, and so when they saw the ox-drawn waggons of the early settlers moving across the veldt they simply had to go and investigate. They would dance and gallop round the waggons in circles, snorting and kicking their heels, and then suddenly stopping to stare. Naturally, with these habits of running away and then stopping to stare before they were out of range, they were used by enterprising ‘sportsmen’ for rifle practice. So they were killed, and their numbers decreased so rapidly that it is amazing that they did not become extinct. Today there are under a thousand of these charming animals left alive, and these are split up into small herds on various estates in South Africa. If they were to become extinct, South Africa would have lost one of the most amusing and talented of her native fauna, an antelope whose actions could enliven any landscape, however dull.

  Unfortunately, the Père David deer and the white-tailed gnu are not the only creatures in the world that are nearly extinct. The list of creatures that have vanished altogether, and others that have almost vanished, is a long and melancholy one. As man has spread across the earth he has wrought the most terrible havoc among the wild life by shooting, trapping, cutting and burning the forest, and by the callous and stupid introduction of enemies where there were no enemies before.

  Take the dodo, for example, the great ponderous waddling pigeon, the size of a goose, that inhabited the island of Mauritius. Secure in its island home, this bird had lost the power of flight since there were no enemies to fly from, and, since there were no enemies, it nested on the ground in complete safety. But, as well as losing the power of flight, it seems to have lost the power of recognizing an enemy when it saw one, for it was apparently an extremely tame and confiding creature. Then man discovered the dodos’ paradise in about 1507, and with him came his evil familiars: dogs, cats, pigs, rats and goats. The dodo surveyed these new arrivals with an air of innocent interest. Then the slaughter began. The goats ate the undergrowth which provided the dodo with cover; dogs and cats hunted and harried the old birds; while pigs grunted their way round the island, eating the eggs and young, and the rats followed behind to finish the feast. By 1681 the fat, ungainly and harmless pigeon was extinct – as dead as the dodo.

  All over the world the wild fauna has been whittled down steadily and remorselessly, and many lovely and interesting animals have been so reduced in numbers that, without protection and help, they can never re-establish themselves. If they cannot find sanctuary where they can live and breed undisturbed, their numbers will dwindle until they join the dodo, the quagga and the great auk on the long list of extinct creatures.

  Of course, in the last
decade or so much has been done for the protection of wild life: sanctuaries and reserves have been started, and the reintroduction of a species into areas where it had become extinct is taking place. In Canada, for instance, beavers are now reintroduced into certain areas by means of aeroplane. The animal is put in a special box attached to a parachute, and when the plane flies over the area it drops the cage and its beaver passenger out. The cage floats down on the end of the parachute, and when it hits the ground it opens automatically and the beaver then makes its way to the nearest stream or lake.

  But although much is being done, there is still a very great deal to do. Unfortunately, the majority of useful work in animal preservation has been done mainly for animals which are of some economic importance to man, and there are many obscure species of no economic importance which, although they are protected on paper, as it were, are in actual fact being allowed to die out because nobody, except a few interested zoologists, considers them important enough to spend money on.

  As mankind increases year by year, and as he spreads farther over the globe burning and destroying, it is some small comfort to know that there are certain private individuals and some institutions who consider that the work of trying to save and give sanctuary to these harried animals is of some importance. It is important work for many reasons, but perhaps the best of them is this: man, for all his genius, cannot create a species, nor can he recreate one he has destroyed. There would be a dreadful outcry if anyone suggested obliterating, say, the Tower of London, and quite rightly so; yet a unique and wonderful species of animal which has taken hundreds of thousands of years to develop to the stage we see today, can be snuffed out like a candle without more than a handful of people raising a finger or a voice in protest. So, until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.