Encounters With Animals

by Gerald Durrell

  Immediately after the appearance of the giant millipedes all the other top-floor tenants of the tree break cover together, some making for the top of the tree, others for the bottom. Perhaps there are squirrels with black ears, green bodies and tails of the most beautiful flame colour; giant grey dormice who gallop out of the tree, trailing their bushy tails behind them like puffs of smoke; perhaps a pair of bush-babies, with their great innocent eyes and their slender attenuated and trembly hands, like those of very old men. And then, of course, there are the bats: great fat brown bats with curious flower-like decorations on the skin of their noses and large transparent ears; others bright ginger, with black ears twisted down over their heads and pig-like snouts. And as this pageant of wild life appears the whip-scorpions are all over the place, skimming up and down the tree with a speed and silence that is unnerving and uncanny, squeezing their revolting bodies into the thinnest crack as you make a swipe at them with the net, only to reappear suddenly ten feet lower down the tree, skimming towards you apparently with the intention of disappearing into your shirt. You step back hurriedly and the creature vanishes: only the tips of a pair of antennae, wiggling from the depths of a crevice in the bark that would hardly accommodate a visiting-card, tell you of its whereabouts. Of the many creatures in the West African forest the whip-scorpion has been responsible for more shocks to my system than any other. The day a particularly large and leggy specimen ran over my bare arm, as I leant against a tree, will always be one of my most vivid memories. It took at least a year off my life.

  But to return to Wilhelmina. She was a well-brought-up little whip-scorpion, one of a family of ten, and I started my intimate acquaintance with her when I captured her mother. All this happened quite by chance.

  I had for many days been smoking out trees in the forest in search of an elusive and rare little animal known as the pigmy scaly-tail. These little mammals, which look like mice with long feathery tails, have a curious membrane of skin stretched from ankle to wrist, with the aid of which they glide around the forest with the ease of swallows. The scaly-tails live in colonies in hollow trees, but the difficulty lay in finding a tree that contained a colony. When, after much fruitless hunting, I did discover a group of these prizes, and moreover actually managed to capture some, I felt considerably elated. I even started to take a benign interest in the numerous whip-scorpions that were scuttling about the tree. Then suddenly I noticed one which looked so extraordinary, and was behaving in such a peculiar manner, that my attention was at once arrested. To begin with, this whip-scorpion seemed to be wearing a green fur-coat that almost completely covered her chocolate body. Secondly, it was working its way slowly and carefully down the tree with none of the sudden fits and starts common to the normal whip-scorpion.

  Wondering if the green fur-coat and the slow walk were symptoms of extreme age in the whip-scorpion world I moved closer to examine the creature. To my astonishment I found that the fur-coat was composed of baby whip-scorpions, each not much larger than my thumbnail, which were obviously fairly recent additions to the family. They were, in extraordinary contrast to their dark-coloured mother, a bright and bilious green, the sort of green that confectioners are fond of using in cake decorations. The mother’s slow and stately progress was due to her concern lest one of her babies lose its grip and drop off. I realized, rather ruefully, that I had never given the private life of the whip-scorpion much thought, and it had certainly never occurred to me that the female would be sufficiently maternal to carry her babies on her back. Overcome with remorse at my thoughtlessness, I decided that here was an ideal chance for me to catch up on my studies of these creatures. So I captured the female very carefully – to avoid dropping any of her progeny – and carried her back to camp.

  I placed the mother and children in a large roomy box with plenty of cover in the way of bark and leaves. Every morning I had to look under these, rather gingerly I admit, to see if she was all right. At first, the moment I lifted the bark under which she was hiding, she would rush out and scuttle up the side of the box, a distressing habit which always made me jump and slam the lid down. I was very much afraid that one day I might do this and trap her legs or antennae, but fortunately after the first three days or so she settled down, and would even let me renew the leaves and bark in her box without taking any notice.

  I had the female whip-scorpion and her babies for two months, and during that time the babies ceased to ride on their mother’s back. They scattered and took up residence in various parts of the box, grew steadily and lost their green colouring in favour of brown. Whenever they grew too big for their skins they would split them down the back and step out of them, like spiders. Each time they did so they would emerge a little larger and a little browner. I discovered that while the mother would tackle anything from a small grasshopper to a large beetle, the babies were fussy and demanded small spiders, slugs and other easily digestible fare. They all appeared to be thriving, and I began to feel rather proud of them. Then one day I returned to camp after a few hours hunting in the forest to find that tragedy had struck.

  A tame Patas monkey I kept tied up outside the tent had eaten through his rope and been on a tour of investigation. Before anyone had noticed it he had eaten a bunch of bananas, three mangos and four hard-boiled eggs, he had broken two bottles of disinfectant, and rounded the whole thing off by knocking my whip-scorpion box on to the floor. It promptly broke open and scattered the family on the ground, and the Patas monkey, a creature of depraved habits, had set to work and eaten them. When I got back he was safely tied up again, and suffering from an acute attack of hiccups.

  I picked up my whip-scorpion nursery and peered mournfully into it, cursing myself for having left it in such an accessible place, and cursing the monkey for having such an appetite. But then, to my surprise and delight, I found, squatting in solitary state on a piece of bark, one of the baby whip-scorpions, the sole survivor of the massacre. Tenderly I moved it to a smaller and more burglar-proof cage, showered it with slugs and other delicacies and christened it, for no reason at all, Wilhelmina.

  During the time I had Wilhelmina’s mother, and Wilhelmina herself, I learnt quite a lot about whip-scorpions. I discovered that though quite willing to hunt by day if hungry, they were at their most lively during the night. During the day Wilhelmina was always a little dull-witted, but in the evening she woke up and, if I may use the expression, blossomed. She would stalk to and fro in her box, her pincers at the ready, her long antennae-like legs lashing out like whips ahead of her, seeking the best route. Although these tremendously elongated legs are supposed to be merely feelers, I got the impression that they could do more than this. I have seen them wave in the direction of an insect, pause and twitch, whereupon Wilhelmina would brace herself, almost as if she had smelt or heard her prey with the aid of her long legs. Sometimes she would stalk her food like this; at other times she would simply lie in wait until the unfortunate insect walked almost into her arms, and the powerful pincers would gather it lovingly into her mouth.

  As she grew older I gave her bigger and bigger things to eat, and I found her courage extraordinary. She was rather like a pugnacious terrier who, the larger the opponent, the better he likes the fight. I was so fascinated by her skill and bravery in tackling insects as big or bigger than herself that one day, rather unwisely, I put a very large locust in with her. Without a moment’s hesitation, she flew at him and grasped his bulky body in her pincers. To my alarm, however, the locust gave a hearty kick with his powerful hind legs and both he and Wilhelmina soared upwards and hit the wire-gauze roof of the cage with a resounding thump, then crashed back to the floor again. This rough treatment did not deter Wilhelmina at all, and she continued to hug the locust while he leapt wildly around the cage, thumping against the roof, until eventually he was exhausted. Then she settled down and made short work of him. But after this I was always careful to give her the smaller insects, for I had visions of a leg or one of her whips being broken off in su
ch a rough contest.

  By now I had become very fond and not a little proud of Wilhelmina. She was, as far as I knew, the only whip-scorpion to have been kept in captivity. What is more, she had become very tame. I had only to rap on the side of her box with my fingers and she would appear from under her piece of bark and wave her whips at me. Then, if I put my hand inside, she would climb on to my palm and sit there quietly while I fed her with slugs, creatures for which she still retained a passion.

  When the time drew near for me to transport my large collection of animals back to England, I began to grow rather worried over Wilhelmina. It was a two-week voyage, and I could not take enough insect food for that length of time. I decided therefore to try making her eat raw meat. It took me a long time to achieve it, but once I had learnt the art of waggling the bit of meat seductively enough I found that Wilhelmina would grab it, and on this unlikely diet she seemed to thrive. On the journey down to the coast by lorry Wilhelmina behaved like a veteran traveller, sitting in her box and sucking a large chunk of raw meat almost throughout the trip. For the first day on board ship the strange surroundings made her a little sulky, but after that the sea air seemed to do her good and she became positively skittish. This was her undoing.

  One evening when I went to feed her, she scuttled up as far as my elbow before I knew what was happening, dropped on to a hatch-cover and was just about to squeeze her way through a crack on a tour of investigation when I recovered from my astonishment and managed to grab her. For the next few days I fed her very cautiously, and she seemed to have quietened down and regained her former self-possession.

  Then one evening she waggled her whips at me so plaintively that I lifted her out of her cage on the palm of my hand and started to feed her on the few remaining slugs I had brought for her in a tin. She ate two slugs, sitting quietly and decorously on my hand, and then suddenly she jumped. She could not have chosen a worse time, for as she was in mid-air a puff of wind swept round the bulkhead and whisked her away. I had a brief glimpse of her whips waving wildly, and then she was over the rail and gone, into the vast heaving landscape of the sea. I rushed to the rail and peered over, but it was impossible to spot so small a creature in the waves and froth below. Hurriedly I threw her box over, in the vain hope that she might find it and use it as a raft. A ridiculous hope, I know, but I did not like to think of her drowning without making some attempt to save her. I could have kicked myself for my stupidity in lifting her out of her box; I never thought I would have been so affected by the loss of such a creature. I had grown very fond of her; she in her turn had seemed to trust me. It was a tragic way for the relationship to end. But there was one slight consolation: after my association with Wilhelmina I shall never again look at a whip-scorpion with quite the same distaste.

  Adopting an Anteater

  Making a collection of two hundred birds, mammals and reptiles is rather like having two hundred delicate babies to look after. It needs a lot of hard work and patience. You have to make sure their diet suits them, that their cages are big enough, that they get neither too hot in the tropics nor too cold when you get near England. You have to de-worm, de-tick and de-flea them; you have to keep their cages and feeding-pots spotlessly clean.

  But, above all, you have to make sure that your animals are happy. However well looked after, a wild animal will not live in captivity unless it is happy. I am talking, of course, of the adult, wild-caught creature. But occasionally you get a baby wild animal whose mother has perhaps met with an accident, and who has been found wandering in the forest. When you capture one of these, you must be prepared for a good deal of hard work and worry, and above all you must be ready to give the animal the affection and confidence it requires; for after a day or two you will have become the parent, and the baby will trust you and depend on you completely.

  This can sometimes make life rather difficult. There have been periods when I have played the adopted parent to as many as six baby animals at once, and this is no joke. Quite apart from anything else, imagine rising at three o’clock in the morning, stumbling about, half-asleep, in an effort to prepare six different bottles of milk, trying to keep your eyes open enough to put the right amount of vitamin drops and sugar in, knowing all the time that you will have to be up again in three hours to repeat the performance.

  Some time ago my wife and I were on a collecting trip in Paraguay, that country shaped like a boot-box which lies almost in the exact centre of South America. Here, in a remote part of Chaco, we assembled a lovely collection of animals. Many things quite unconnected with animals happen on a collecting trip, things that frustrate your plans or irritate you in other ways. But politics, mercifully, had never before been among them. On this occasion, however, the Paraguayans decided to have a revolution, and as a direct result we had to release nearly the whole of our collection and escape to Argentina in a tiny four-seater plane.

  Just before our retreat, an Indian had wandered into our camp carrying a sack from which had come the most extraordinary noises. It sounded like a cross between a cello in pain and a donkey with laryngitis. Opening the sack, the Indian tipped out one of the most delightful baby animals I had ever seen. She was a young giant anteater, and she could not have been more than a week old. She was about the size of a corgi, with black, ash-grey and white fur, a long slender snout and a pair of tiny, rather bleary eyes. The Indian said he had found her wandering about in the forest, honking forlornly. He thought her mother might have been killed by a jaguar.

  The arrival of this baby put me in a predicament. I knew that we would be leaving soon and that the plane was so tiny that most of our equipment would have to be left behind to make room for the five or six creatures we were determined to take with us. To accept, at that stage, a baby anteater who weighed a considerable amount and who would have to be fussed over and bottle-fed, would be lunatic. Quite apart from anything else, no one, as far as I knew, had ever tried to rear a baby anteater on a bottle. The whole thing was obviously out of the question. Just as I had made up my mind the baby, still blaring pathetically, suddenly discovered my leg, and with a honk of joy shinned up it, settled herself in my lap and went to sleep. Silently I paid the Indian the price he demanded, and thus became a father to one of the most charming children I have ever met.

  The first difficulty cropped up almost at once. We had a baby’s feeding-bottle, but we had exhausted our supply of teats. Luckily a frantic house-to-house search of the little village where we were living resulted in the discovery of one teat, of extreme age and unhygienic appearance. After one or two false starts the baby took to the bottle far better than I had dared hope, though feeding her was a painful performance.

  Young anteaters, at that age, cling to their mother’s back, and, since we had, so to speak, become her parents, she insisted on climbing on to one or the other of us nearly the whole time. Her claws were about three inches long, and she had a prodigious grip with them. During meals she clasped your leg affectionately with three paws, while with her remaining paw held your finger and squeezed it hard at intervals, for she was convinced that this would increase the flow of milk from the bottle. At the end of each feed you felt as though you had been mauled by a grizzly bear, while your fingers had been jammed in a door.

  For the first days I carried her about with me to give her confidence. She liked to lie across the back of my neck, her long nose hanging down one side of me and her long tail down the other, like a fur collar. Every time I moved she would tighten her grip in a panic, and this was painful. After the fourth shirt had been ruined I decided that she would have to cling to something else, so I filled a sack full of straw and introduced her to that. She accepted it without any fuss, and so between meals she would lie in her cage, clutching this substitute happily. We had already christened her ‘Sarah’, and now that she developed this habit of sack-clutching we gave her a surname, and so she became known as ‘Sarah Huggersack’.

  Sarah was a model baby. Between feeds she lay quietly on h
er sack, occasionally yawning and showing a sticky, pinky-grey tongue about twelve inches long. When feeding-time came round she would suck the teat on her bottle so vigorously that it had soon changed from red to pale pink, the hole at the end of it had become about the size of a matchstick, and the whole thing drooped dismally from the neck of the bottle.

  When we had to leave Paraguay in our extremely unsafe-looking four-seater plane, Sarah slept peacefully throughout the flight, lying on my wife’s lap and snoring gently, occasionally blowing a few bubbles of sticky saliva out of her nose.

  On arriving in Buenos Aires our first thought was to give Sarah a treat. We would buy her a nice new shiny teat. We went to endless trouble selecting one exactly the right size, shape and colour, put it on the bottle and presented it to Sarah. She was scandalized. She honked wildly at the mere thought of a new teat, and sent the bottle flying with a well-directed clout from her paw. Nor did she calm down and start to feed until we had replaced the old withered teat on the bottle. She clung to it ever after; months after her arrival in England she still refused to be parted from it.

  In Buenos Aires we housed our animals in an empty house on the outskirts of the city. From the centre, where we stayed, it took us half an hour in a taxi to reach it, and this journey we had to do twice and sometimes three times a day. We soon found that having a baby anteater made our social life difficult in the extreme. Have you ever tried to explain to a hostess that you must suddenly leave in the middle of dinner because you have to give a bottle to an anteater? In the end our friends gave up in despair. They used to telephone and ascertain the times of Sarah’s feeds before inviting us.