The New Noah

by Gerald Durrell

  While I was keeping these animals in Africa, I could quite easily have given them an endless supply of their natural food, but, unfortunately, you cannot do this when the animal is in England. So you have to teach the animal to eat a substitute food, something that will be easily obtainable in the zoo to which it is going. It is no use landing in England an ant-eater that will only eat ants, as there is no zoo that would be able to supply them.

  My scaly ant-eater had to be taught to eat a mixture of unsweetened condensed milk, finely shredded raw meat, and raw egg, mixed up together in a sloppy paste. They are extremely stupid animals and it generally took them several weeks to learn to feed on this mixture properly. For the first few days of their capture, they would generally overturn their pot of food, unless you tied it in place.

  One of the most difficult creatures I had to deal with was a very rare animal known as the giant water shrew. This is a long black beast with a mass of white whiskers and a curious leathery tail like a tadpole’s, that lives in the fast-running streams of the West African forest. Like ant-eaters, it had an extremely restricted diet in the wild state, feeding only upon the big brown fresh-water crabs which are so plentiful in its natural habitat. When I obtained my first giant water shrew, I fed him on crabs for two or three days until he had settled down and got used to his cage. Then I set about the task of trying to teach him to eat a substitute food on which he could live in England.

  From a local market, I obtained a large number of dried shrimps which the natives use in their food. These I crumbled up and mixed with a little raw egg and finely-chopped meat. Then I got the body of a large crab, cut it in half, scooped out the inside and stuffed it full of the mixture. I joined the two halves together again and, waiting until the giant water shrew was really hungry, threw this false crab into his cage. He jumped for it, gave two swift bites, which was his normal method of dispatching a crab, and stopped and sniffed suspiciously: obviously, this crab did not taste like the ones to which he was used. He sniffed again and thought about it for a bit, and must then have decided the taste was quite pleasant, so he set to work and had soon eaten it up. For several weeks after this he had a number of real crabs and a number of specially stuffed ones every day until he got quite used to the taste of the new food. Then I started to put my substitute food mixture in a pot, with the body of a crab on top. While he was biting the crab, he discovered the food underneath, and, after repeating this experiment for a couple of days, he was taking the mixture out of the pot without any trouble at all.

  When an animal was brought in, I could usually tell, more or less, what type of food it was going to require, but I always asked the native hunter, who made the capture, if he knew what the animal ate, in case it had been noticed eating some particular food in the forest, which would help me to vary its diet in captivity. As a rule, however, the hunters had not even the faintest idea what half their captives ate, and, if they did not know, they would just simply say the beast ate banga, the nut of the palm-oil tree. Sometimes this would be quite correct, as in the case of the rats, mice, and squirrels. But on more than one occasion I had been assured by the native hunter that such unlikely things as snakes or small birds lived on this diet. I became so used to this that whenever a hunter told me the animal he had brought in lived entirely on palm nuts, I disbelieved him automatically.

  One day I obtained four lovely forest tortoises which were in the best of health and which settled down very well in a little fenced yard that I built for them. Now, as a rule, tortoises are one of the simplest creatures to feed. They will eat almost any form of leaf or vegetable that you give them, together with fruit, and, in some cases, a small piece of raw meat occasionally. However, these tortoises proved to be the exception to the rule. They refused all the delicacies that I showered on them, turned up their noses at all the ripe fruit and tender leaves which I took such pains to get for them. I could not understand it and began to worry quite a bit about them.

  One day a native hunter came to the camp and, while I was showing him the collection and telling him which animals were wanted, I called his attention to these tortoises and to the fact that ever since I had got them, some two or three weeks previously, they had refused to eat anything. Whereupon he promptly turned round and told me I was giving the tortoises all the wrong things to eat and that they did not eat fruit or leaves. He insisted they lived on a species of tiny white forest mushrooms which grew on dead tree trunks in the forest. To be perfectly honest I did not believe him, although I did not say so. I thought this was just another way of saying that the creatures lived on palm nuts.

  However, another week passed and still my tortoises had eaten nothing, so in desperation I sent two small boys out into the forest with a basket and instructed them to bring me as many of these small white mushrooms as they could find. When they returned I emptied the basketful of mushrooms into the tortoises’ pen and stood by, to watch. I do not think that I have ever seen tortoises move so fast towards food. They scuttled across the compound and within a very few minutes were chewing happily away at the mushrooms with the juice running down their chins. Strangely enough, once they had been fed on mushrooms, they started eating the other food as well, and before many weeks had passed they had completely given up eating mushrooms altogether and much preferred a nice ripe mango.

  As my collection grew, it became quite a problem to maintain a good supply of food for so many animals with such varied likes and dislikes. Meat, fruit, eggs, and chickens I obtained from the local market but there were other things that I had to have.

  For example, all the birds, most of the monkeys, and such things as the galagos and some of the forest rats, adored grasshoppers and locusts, and in order to keep them in good health it was necessary to have a constant supply of these delicacies for them. As you cannot buy grasshoppers and locusts in even a West African market, my own special team of grasshopper capturers had to be organized. This consisted of ten small boys who had quick eyes and could run very fast.

  I supplied each of them with a large cigarette tin and a butterfly net, and twice a day they would go off and capture as many grasshoppers and locusts as they could with the nets, push them into the cigarette tin and bring them back to camp. They were paid not by the amount of time they spent on the job, but by the number of grasshoppers they procured. The average payment was five grass-hoppers to the penny, and some of these little boys, who were quicker than the others and more agile could earn as much as three or four shillings a day.

  The native name for grasshoppers is ‘pampalo’, and this team of little boys became known to me as the ‘pampalo catchers’, so if an animal was looking sick, or a newly-caught one arrived and was in need of some delicacy to soothe his ruffled feelings after capture, I would shout out for the pampalo catchers and they would all set off into the grass fields to bring in a fresh supply of insects.

  To supply all the birds I had with insects was even more of a problem, as the majority of them were too small to be able to cope with the big prickly grasshoppers. The thing they liked best was a sort of white baby termite, or white ant, and I had to employ another team of boys to get these for me. There are several different sorts of white ant found in West Africa, but the one that I found most useful was known as the ‘Mushroom’ termite. In cool glades among the big forest trees they built the most peculiar nests out of grey mud. These nests looked exactly like giant toadstools, standing about two feet high. The interior of such a nest is like a honeycomb, filled with tiny passages and little cells in which the worker termites and the baby termites live. My team of termite hunters would go off into the forest in the early morning and return in the evening with three or four nests each, perched on their woolly heads.

  These nests I stored in a cool, dark place, and when it was feeding time for the birds I would spread a big canvas sheet on the ground and carefully split open the nests with a chopper. Then I would shake them and from the inside would pour a stream of termites both large and small, which
I would shovel into pots and push hastily into the bird cages before the termites crawled out. All the birds realized the necessity for speed, and no sooner had the door closed behind my hands than they would be perched on the edge of the tin pecking away for dear life.

  Quite apart from this problem of feeding so many different kinds of animals when collected, there was the job of caging them correctly. Each kind of animal had to have its own special sort of cage, and it had to be designed and built with very great care. It had to be made so that it was cool while in the tropics and yet kept the animals warm when the ship drew nearer to England. As an added precaution, I used to make a curtain of sacking for each cage which I could lower over the bars in front so that if there was a cold wind blowing, or it was raining, the animal inside would be protected.

  Then there was the problem of size. Sometimes quite a small creature needs a very large cage, to keep it healthy. Sometimes quite a large animal has to be kept in quite a small cage for the same reason. For instance, the galagos had to have ample space to allow them to leap about and run round and round, as in the wild state they are constantly on the move, and keeping them in small cages would prevent them from getting the right amount of exercise.

  On the other hand, some beautiful, spotted antelopes which I collected, called water chevrotains, had to be kept in long narrow boxes which did not allow them to turn round. The sides of these boxes had to be padded with sacking stuffed with cotton-wool. The reason for this was the extreme nervousness of these animals, and when the cage was rattling and bumping long in the lorry, or being hoisted on or off a steamer, the antelopes were liable to get very frightened. If the cage had been square they would have run round and round inside it and eventually lost their balance and fallen and probably broken their very slender, fragile legs. In the long narrow cage, however, they could brace themselves against the padded sides when there was any movement, and so there was no chance of their falling down and breaking a limb. The padded sides, of course, were to prevent them from being rubbed sore against the woodwork.

  Strangely enough, another creature that had to have a padded box was a fantastic kind of frog I caught, called the hairy frog. These chocolate-coloured amphibians have the rear end of their bodies and their fat thighs covered with a thick growth of what looks exactly like hair. In reality, it is long, slender filaments of skin. All frogs to a certain extent breathe through their skins, as well as with the aid of their lungs. That is why it is necessary to keep a frog in a moist condition, otherwise his skin will dry up and he will suffocate.

  Hairy frogs live in very fast-running mountain streams and spend most of their time submerged below the water. Therefore, they do not use their lungs for breathing quite as much as the normal frog will do, and in consequence they need a considerably greater area of skin to enable them to breathe under water. So they have evolved the ‘hairs’.

  These strange frogs created quite a problem in housing. Most frogs you keep in a shallow box until such time as you are going to get on the ship, when you place each one of them inside a butter-muslin bag and hang it on the side of a big box. They sit in these bags quite happily till you reach England. They do not want much food on the voyage: as long as they are wet two or three times a day they are perfectly satisfied.

  The hairy frogs possess, as well as the strange decoration on their rears, another peculiar feature. In the fleshy toes of their hind feet they have long, sharp claws very like the claws of a cat, which, moreover, they can pull back into the sheath as a cat can. Now, if you put hairy frogs inside the usual butter-muslin bag they try to hop; their claws come out of the sheath and get stuck in the muslin, and within a very short time your frogs are twisted in the most dreadful knot in the bottom of the bag. I decided, therefore, that the frogs would have to travel in a box.

  Now another problem made itself apparent. The box had to be extremely shallow, otherwise the frogs, when frightened, would jump wildly into the air and hit their heads on the wire top. Consequently, I put all the hairy frogs in a shallow wooden box with holes bored in the bottom, so that when I watered them the liquid would run out. Since they could not jump, the hairy frogs developed a new habit: whenever they were frightened, they would rush into a corner and try to burrow into the woodwork. After a couple of days of this they had worn all the skin off their noses and upper lips.

  This is an extremely dangerous thing to happen to a frog, for these rubbed spots can quickly develop into a great sore which will, if it is not treated, eventually eat away the nose and upper lip. Treatment for any sort of wound on a frog is made doubly difficult by the fact that you are forced to keep the beast moist, and, of course, a cut or a sore that is moist will take three times as long to heal. So I not only had to design a new cage for the hairy frogs, but I also had to think of some way of healing their noses, without causing them any discomfort.

  I built them a large shallow box, and the whole of the inside was covered with thin sheet material stuffed with cotton-wool, so that the walls, floor, and ceiling of the box were quilted – as though they were covered with an eiderdown. I put the hairy frogs in this, and instead of watering them three times a day, as usual, I only watered them once a day. I found this was very successful, for the cotton-wool inside the padding soaked up the water which kept the interior of the box reasonably moist, without actually letting the frogs become too wet. Eventually, the sores on their noses healed up perfectly and they travelled safely to England inside their padded boxes where they could do no damage to themselves, for when they jumped or burrowed they met only the soft surface of the cotton-wool padding.

  In which the new Noah sets sail in his ark

  The time that the collector dreads most on a trip is when it is necessary to pack up his great array of animals and transport them down to the coast and on to the ship for the long voyage back to England. First of all, you have to make sure that every cage is in good repair and every door secure. Then, make arrangements for the food supply needed on the ship, for you cannot board even the most well-conducted boat and expect the cook to cater for a hundred-odd animals.

  Quite apart from such things as sacks of wheat, potatoes, cocoa yams, and other curious tropical vegetables, you have to have an enormous supply of fruit. It is quite useless to buy all this fruit when it is ripe, for after the first week of the voyage you would find that it had by then gone rotten and none would be left on which to feed your animals. So you have to divide your fruit into three sections – ripe, half ripe, and completely unripe. The unripe fruit, together with the meat and eggs, has to be stored in the ship’s refrigerator.

  This will keep meat and eggs from going bad and also prevent the fruit from becoming ripe; so when you have used up your ripe fruit you fetch a fresh supply out of the refrigerator and lay it on deck, in the sun, where it ripens very quickly and can be fed to the animals. You have to work out your quantities of food very carefully. If too much is taken, you will find that a lot of it will go bad and will have to be thrown overboard.

  On the other hand, should you take too little, you will run out just as you reach a place like the Bay of Biscay where good food and plenty of it is essential if you want the animals to survive the sudden change in climate So when you are sure that your caging is complete and food supplies adequate, you can then arrange for the lorries to transport you down country.

  When I left West Africa I took with me three sacks of wheat and potatoes, two sacks of cocoa yams, two sacks of corn, fifty pineapples, two hundred oranges, fifty mangoes, and a hundred and fifty great stems of bananas, apart from such things as dried milk, malt, and cod-liver oil, and so on. There were four hundred eggs, each of which had to be carefully tested in a bowl of water to make sure it was fresh before being thoroughly greased and packed in a boxful of straw. For the meat supply, there was a whole bullock and twenty live chickens. This, together with the hundred and fifty-odd cages and all the equipment, was quite a load and I had to hire three lorries and a small van to carry it all down to
the coast, two hundred miles away.

  I decided to travel by night for several reasons, most important of which was that it was coolest for the animals. If you travel by day, a choice has to be made between two things: putting a tarpaulin over the cages in the back of the lorry and having your animals almost suffocated to death, or else keeping the tarpaulins rolled back and having your animals almost scorched by the cloud of red dust that swirls up behind. So I travelled by night and found it by far the best method.

  But you can get very little sleep when being bounced and jolted about in the front of a lorry, and knowing that as soon as dawn comes you have to park by the side of the road and in the shade of the trees unload every single box and crate, and clean and feed all your creatures before you can get any proper sleep yourself. Then, immediately night falls and it grows cool, you load up the lorries and start off once again.

  The roads in the Cameroons are so bad that we could not travel at more than twenty-five miles an hour, and so a journey which could have been done in England in one day took us three days to complete.

  When I arrived at the coast, I found that the ship had not quite finished loading, which meant that we had to wait before we could take our animals on board, and as it was pouring with rain I decided to leave all the creatures in the lorry until we could do so. Just after I had made this decision, the storm clouds rolled away and the sun shone down on us fiercely, so I had to unload all the animals and carry their cages into the shade of some nearby trees. No sooner had I done this than the storm clouds descended once again and within a few minutes all the cages, the equipment, the food supplies, and myself were drenched with icy rain. After getting aboard, I found every cage filled with sodden shivering animals, and I had to set to work to clean out the lot, replacing the wet sawdust with dry and throwing handfuls of sawdust over the monkeys, hoping to dry some of the moisture out of their fur, so that they should not catch cold. I then made an extra large supply of hot milk and distributed it to every creature that could take it. Luckily, there were no ill effects from this ducking.