The New Noah

by Gerald Durrell

  We set off early one morning; I in a small cart with a camera and other photographic apparatus, the gauchos riding on their magnificent horses. We made our way out across the pampas for some miles, weaving in and out of the thickets of the giant thistle. Presently, we disturbed a pair of spur-winged plovers who leapt into the air and flew around us, giving their alarm call, and, to our annoyance, warning every living creature for miles around of our approach. They accompanied us as we made our way forward, keeping an eye on us and keeping the pampas informed of our progress.

  We had reached a large thicket of thistle plants when we were suddenly warned by ear-splitting cries from one of the gauchos that our quarry was at hand. Standing up in the cart, I could see a greyish shape dodging quickly among the thistles, and then, quite suddenly, the first rhea leapt out on to the open grass. He came bounding like a ballet dancer out of the thistles, stopped for one brief moment to look at us and then streaked off, his head and neck stretched out, his large feet almost touching his chin with each step. Quickly, one of the gauchos galloped out of the thistles and endeavoured to cut him off. The rhea seemed to stop in mid-stride, twirled round like a top and dashed off in the opposite direction, taking huge bounding strides, which made it look as though he were on springs.

  He was very soon lost to sight, with the gauchos in hot pursuit. Before we had time to follow, another bird made its appearance out of the thistles. I could see this was a female, because she was much smaller than the previous one and a much lighter grey. To my surprise, she did not rush off in pursuit of her mate, but stood on the grass, dithering anxiously from one foot to the other. There was a crackling among the thistles and I saw the reason for her delayed flight. Out of the thistles scrambled her babies, ten of them, each standing about eighteen inches high and with round fat bodies, half the size of a football, balancing on thin stumpy legs and great splayed feet. They were covered with fluffy down and neatly striped with fawn and cream. They all clustered round their mother’s feet, and she glanced at them lovingly. Then she trotted off across the pampas, running almost in slow motion, so that her babies strung out in a line behind her could keep up with her. As we had no wish to chase and frighten her, we turned the cart round and made our way in the opposite direction.

  It was not long before one of the gauchos came galloping up to the cart, his eyes shining, to tell us that not far ahead he could see quite a large flock of rheas crouching in the thistles. He explained that if we went in the cart in a certain direction and I set up the camera, he and the other gauchos would surround the birds and drive them towards me, so that I could film them.

  We set off, the cart bouncing and swaying over the tussocks of grass and eventually came to the edge of the huge batch of thistles in which the rheas were hiding. Here I could get a clear and uninterrupted view of the grassland, and it was a suitable place to set up the camera. While I took light readings and got everything ready for the filming, my Argentinian friend had to stand holding a Japanese paper parasol over me and the camera, as the sun was so fierce that a few minutes’ exposure to it would make the camera terribly hot, which would ruin the colour film.

  When all was ready I gave the signal, and in the distance we could hear the loud whoops of the gauchos as they urged their horses into the prickly thistles, and the scrunch and crackle of the horses’ hooves treading the brittle plants underfoot. Suddenly an extra loud chorus of yells warned us that the rheas had jumped up and had started to bolt for it, and within a few seconds five of them crashed out of the thistles and started to run across the grass. They ran as the first one had, with their chins almost touching their shins and seemed to be travelling as fast as they were able, but I was soon to learn differently. No sooner had the gauchos thundered out on to the turf in pursuit, whirling their boleadoras round their heads with a shrill whistling sound, than all the rheas suddenly seemed to tuck in their bottoms and shoot forward as though they were jet-propelled, nearly doubling their speed within two or three paces. They very soon vanished across the pampas, and the cries of the huntsmen and the beating of the horses’ hooves faded into the distance.

  I knew that the gauchos would finally catch up with them, surrounding the birds and driving them back towards me again, and within a quarter of an hour I was once again treated to the sight of the flying rheas speeding across the turf, their feet thumping on the hard ground, while the hunters galloped close behind, uttering shrill cries which mingled with the swishing of the boleadoras. The birds were still running in a bunch, spread out roughly in V-formation.

  When they were about a hundred yards away, however, one of them swerved and started running straight towards the cart where I was standing with the camera. One of the gauchos galloped in pursuit to try to round him up and get him back to the flock. He urged his horse closer and closer to the flying bird, and the closer he got the more worried the rhea became. In fact, he was so concerned with his pursuer that he failed to notice the cart, myself, and the cine-camera. I was looking through the viewfinder and beginning to get a little worried, for he still had not appeared to notice me. It was such a wonderful scene that I did not dare stop filming, but at the same time I had no particular desire to be hit amidships by several hundreds of pounds of rhea, travelling at about twenty miles an hour. At the very last moment, when I felt sure the bird, camera, tripod, and myself were going to go down in a tangled heap in the grass, the rhea caught sight of me. He gave a horrified look at me and twirled round skilfully and dashed off at right angles.

  When I measured the distance later, I found that the hunted bird had been within six feet of the camera, but this swerving that he had been forced to do lost him the short lead that he had on the gaucho. The boleadoras whistled and swooped through the air, twined themselves round the rhea’s powerful legs and he collapsed in a heap in the grass, flapping and kicking. The gaucho was off his horse in an instant, and rushing forward grabbed the threshing legs. He had to do this very skilfully, and, once having obtained a grip on them, had to hold on tight, for one well aimed kick of those large feet could quite easily have disembowelled him.

  After having examined and obtained close-ups of our catch, we unwound the boleadoras from his neck and legs, and for a few seconds he lay limply in the grass, but then bounded to his feet and trotted off into the thistles in an unhurried manner, joining his companions.

  On our way back from the ranch, well pleased with our filming, we came across a rhea’s nest: it was just a slight depression in the earth, with ten large bluish-white eggs in it. They were still warm, so the male, who does the work of hatching them out, could only just have left, maybe on hearing our approach, although they are usually very fierce and dangerous during the nesting period.

  The gauchos told me that two or three females may use one of these nests in which to lay their eggs, so that you may find anything up to twenty or twenty-five eggs in a nest belonging to several mothers. The father rhea does all the incubating, so all the mothers have to do is to deposit their eggs in the nest and from then onwards father takes over and sits on them until they hatch out, whereupon the mother takes charge of the babies to give them their schooling.

  In which I have trouble with toads, snakes, and Paraguayans

  The Paraguayan Chaco is a vast, flat plain that stretches from the River Paraguay to the base of the Andes. It is as flat and almost as smooth as a billiard table, and for half the year it is baked dry as a bone by the hot sun, and for the other half it is flooded three or four feet deep in water by the winter rains. As it lies between the tropical forests of Brazil and the grassy pampas lands of Argentina it is an odd country, being a mixture of the two. Here are great grassy fields in which grow palm trees or thorn scrub hung with strange tropical flowers; mixed with the palm trees there are other types of trees not unlike those out of an English wood, except that their branches are covered with long streamers of grey Spanish moss that wave gently in the wind.

  We made our base camp in a small township on the banks of th
e River Paraguay. From here, deep into the interior, ran the Chaco railway; the buckled rails were only some two feet apart and on this rickety and dangerous track ran Ford Eights. By this uncomfortable mode of travel we journeyed quite far inland in search of specimens. The railway line was built on a raised embankment, which was probably one of the only bits of high ground in the territory, and all the animal life would make use of this as a roadway. Travelling along in one of the little cars I could see hundreds of extraordinary birds in the undergrowth along the sides of the track: toucans, with their great clownish bags, jumping and scuttling among the branches of the trees, seriemas, looking like big grey turkeys, strutting across the grass fields; and every where beautiful black and white fly-catchers and humming-birds. Sometimes in rounding a comer we would come across some animal on the track. It might be an armadillo, or perhaps an agouti, which looks like a gigantic reddish-coloured guinea pig; or it might, if you are lucky, be a maned wolf, a huge animal with long slender legs clad in untidy, loose, red-coloured fur.

  It was not long after our arrival that we obtained our first specimens. The local people, when they learnt that we were willing to buy animals, used to go out hunting for us, and one of the creatures they were very successful in capturing was the three-banded armadillo, or, as it is known in Spanish, the orange armadillo, from its habit of rolling up into a complete ball roughly orange-shaped. It is in fact the only armadillo which can roll itself up like this and is, moreover, the only one of this family that regularly comes out during the daytime. Trotting about in search of food, which consists of roots and insects, the little creature will curl itself up tightly into a ball and remain quite still if it suspects anything dangerous is approaching, in the hope that its enemy will mistake it for a stone, which, as a matter of fact, it very much resembles. These armadillos, once you catch sight of them, are very easy to capture. The men would ride through the undergrowth until they saw one of these animals and then they would just simply dismount from their horses, pick it up and pop it into a bag.

  Now normally members of the armadillo family are very easy to keep in captivity. They are fed on fruit and vegetables and carrion, but these little three banded armadillos were a very different proposition. They refused, a first, to take any of the food which must have been their natural diet and seemed positively afraid when offered insects. After a lot of experimenting, I got them on to a diet of raw meat mixed with egg and milk, to which vitamins were added. On this they seemed to thrive, but another difficulty soon made itself apparent. The wooden floor of the cage affected their hind feet and very soon the soles became worn so that they were all red and raw. Therefore, everyday the little creatures had to be taken out of the cage and have the soles of their feet treated with penicillin ointment; but the real problem was to find a suitable flooring for them. I tried them on mud, but they just simply plastered this into a sort of cement by slopping their milk on to it and treading it down, and this had much the same effect on their paws as the wooden boards. After a time, I found the ideal bottom surface for them was a thick layer of sawdust. On this they could trot about quite happily without damaging their feet in any way,

  Like the Argentinian gauchos, the Paraguayans eat these little animals when they catch them, but unlike the Argentinian armadillo, the hard horny carapace of the three-banded armadillo can be used for a variety of things. Sometimes the shell is rolled up into a ball, fastened with wire and made into a little round work-basket, and at other times skin is stretched across the hollow inside of the carapace, a handle fixed, and some strings fixed to it, and it is thus made into a small guitar. So the three-banded armadillo is much sought after by the inhabitants of the Chaco, because he is not only good to eat but is useful for other reasons.

  Being so flat, large areas of the Chaco are, of course, permanently flooded, and in these swampy districts the most extraordinary forms of reptile and amphibian life are to be found. One of the commonest creatures, and one which all the natives fear, is the horned toad. These weird-looking beasts grow to a very large size. The biggest one we caught would have covered a fair-sized saucer. They are beautifully coloured with bright emerald-green, silver, and black on a cream background. They have what must be one of the largest mouths in the toad world: it is so wide that it looks as though, like Humpty Dumpty, if they grinned they would split themselves in half. Over each eye the skin is hitched up into a little pyramid, like two sharply pointed horns.

  Now, this toad is probably the most bad-tempered and ferocious amphibian not only in the Chaco but in the world. It spends most of the day buried in soft mud with just its horns and its eyes sticking above the surface. If you find one and dig him out, he will become terribly indignant and will not hesitate to attack. Standing on his fat, stumpy legs, he will give little jumps towards you, blowing himself up and opening his mouth wide to show the bright primrose yellow interior; at the same time he will utter loud screaming yaps, rather like an angry pekinese.

  The inhabitants of the Chaco are quite convinced that the horned toad is deadly poisonous. Well, of course, there are no poisonous toads in the world, and so, when I caught my first homed toad, I decided to show the people that they were really quite harmless. I lifted him out of his box and he immediately started struggling in my hand, uttering his loud piercing yaps and opening his mouth wide. As soon as his mouth was open, I pushed one of my fingers into it, in order to show that his bite was harmless. A second or two later, I bitterly regretted my demonstration, for his jaws closed on it, like a vice, and the tiny, but sharp, little teeth in his jaws dug into the flesh. It felt exactly as if my finger had been jammed in a door, and it took me a minute or so before I could prise open his jaws and hurriedly withdraw it, by which time I had a deep red groove right round the finger, which took a day to disappear, and I also had a black mark on my thumb near where his jaws had snapped close. After this I treated the horned toad with more respect when I picked up one.

  Another extraordinary amphibian that I caught was called the Budgetts Frog. Now these are very similar to the horned toad to look at, and in fact are related to him. They have the same wide mouth and short, stocky legs, but the bulge over their eyes is round instead of being pointed into horns. They are a dark chocolate-brown on top with whitish-coloured tummies tinged with yellow. Unlike the horned toad, they spend their whole lives in the water, floating spread-eagled on the surface, with their eyes protruding above it. Like their cousins, they are bad-tempered beasts, and when angry will give a yapping shrill cry, very like that of a horned toad only higher and more prolonged. The skin of their bodies is very fine, so that when they blow themselves up in anger it swells like a balloon. The local people say that sometimes these frogs will inflate themselves to such an extent that they will burst, and though I never saw this happen, I believe that it might well be possible.

  Of course, where frogs and toads are found in any quantity, snakes, who feed on them, will automatically be found, and the Chaco is no exception to this rule, for here you find very lovely forms of snake life. There is the rattlesnake, for example; the handsome grey and black fer-de-lance, perhaps the most deadly snake in South America; also there are many extraordinary kinds of water and tree snakes, some brightly coloured and others dull.

  The poisonous snakes in the world are divided into three groups: the really deadly ones are called the front-fanged snakes, which have their fangs in the front of their mouth, and which are generally large and can inject a considerable quantity of poison; and then there is the group known as the rear-fanged snakes: these have the poison fangs situated to the back of the mouth, and are generally not very long. In the rear-fanged group, the poison is not used so much for defence as for the capturing of their prey, so usually their poison is mild, and sometimes on even such a small animal as a lizard it has only a slightly paralysing effect. However, even if you were bitten by a rearfanged snake there is a chance that blood-poisoning might set in, so it is an experience which should be avoided.

  One o
f the loveliest snakes we caught was the hooded snake. This reptile looks as though it has been cast in a mould of deep bronze with blackish markings round the edge of the body. It has the curious habit, when angry, of being able to extend the skin of the neck, so that it appears extraordinarily like a hooded cobra in a rage. It is only a mildly poisonous kind of reptile and is one of the rear-fanged group, living on frogs and small rodents, with possibly an occasional bird. The hooded snake does not require a great deal of poison to subdue his prey, and so, though he looks very deadly, his bite, which can be extremely painful, is not fatal.

  Perhaps the most beautiful snakes found in the Chaco are the coral snakes. These are very deadly little reptiles, but by their coloration they warn you in advance of what they can do. They measure perhaps eighteen inches or two feet in length and are banded from head to tail with rings of cream, coal-black, and pink or pillar-box red.

  Then, of course, there is the giant anaconda, the huge water-snake that is a relative of the python of Africa, and who catches and crushes his prey in the same way. Now, there have been a great many stories written about them, most of which are entirely untrue. The largest specimen on record is twenty-five feet long, which is not really long as these snakes go, for a Malayan python may grow to thirty feet or over. Like all these giant snakes, the anaconda is not vicious and he will not go out of his way to attack you if you leave him alone. If cornered, however, this reptile might manage to sink his teeth into you and throw a couple of coils around you, and a large specimen could prove a very nasty customer.

  In the flooded areas of the Chaco there were quite a number of these anacondas, and one day a local farmer came and told me that the previous night one of them had raided his chicken-run and stolen two chickens. He had followed the trail of crushed grass and weed made by the snake into the swamp behind his farm, and said that he knew the place where the creature was lying up to digest his meal. He went on to say that he would lead me to the spot if I would like to try to catch the reptile. We set off on horseback and circled through the swamp towards the place where he said the snake was resting. In spite of our cautious approach, however, the anaconda caught sight of us before we arrived at the spot and all that could be seen were the ripples as he swam away rapidly through the water. It was impossible to follow fast enough on horseback in that depth of water, so the only thing to do was to follow him on foot. I jumped off the horse, grabbed a sack that we had brought with us, and ran as quickly as I could in the direction that the snake had taken. I found that he was wriggling towards the edge of the swamp, in order to try to escape into the dense undergrowth there and thus evade us, but he was so bloated with his chicken dinner that he could not travel at any speed, and I caught him up in the short grass at the edge of the bank long before he reached the bushes.