by Ted Dewan
By 1939, there were only a hundred donkeys left in England. There are now about 10,000 – 800 are licensed to work on beaches and 75 per cent of them live in donkey sanctuaries.
Every donkey has a dark cross on its back that is supposed to date from Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. Before it became associated with Christ, the donkey was identified with the Egyptian sun god Ra, and Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and theatre. Until the mid-nineteenth century, Santa Claus always rode a donkey.
Dead donkeys are lucky. You should jump over them three times. Or make a sandwich out of their hair to cure a cough. Or sprinkle their toenail clippings over your enemies. Or pop their heads in the oven: cephaleonomancy is divination using a roast donkey’s head. In 1869 a donkey was served for dinner at high table in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. One of the dons remarked that it tasted ‘rather like swan’.
Eagle
Omnipotent omnivore
Eagles belong to the family Accipitridae, from the Latin accipiter, a ‘bird of prey’. In English, an accipiter is a ‘nose-bandage’ from its resemblance to the beak or claw of a hawk. Not everyone agrees what an eagle is; no one knows how eagle species are related to one another and the evolution of eagles is poorly understood. Eagles are defined by what they are not. According to one professional definition, an eagle is ‘a large or very large diurnal raptor which is not a kite, vulture, hawk, buzzard or falcon’. In all eagle species, females are larger than males: the more aggressive the species, the larger the discrepancy.
Eagles lay clutches of two eggs, but the first chick to hatch usually kills its sibling, even when food is abundant. No one knows why.
An eagle’s eye can be up to twenty times larger in proportion to its body than a human eye. They are so big in their sockets that there is little room for them to move: like owls, an eagle has to move its whole head to look round. Nonetheless, the visual acuity of an eagle is up to eight times better than a human’s. An eagle can spot a rabbit from 2 miles away. As an eagle swoops down on its prey, the muscles in its eyes continually adjust the curvature of the lens to maintain sharp focus and accurate depth perception throughout the attack. Eagles of the soaring variety must wait until the air is warm enough to create thermals. The heavier the eagle, the later in the day it begins to hunt. Eagles, however, can hardly be described as heavy. A golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) is 7½ feet wide but weighs less than 9 pounds. A bald eagle’s (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) feathers weigh more than twice as much as its bones. An eagle’s dive reaches speeds of 200 mph, but only about one in four such attacks are successful.
TIPTOE TERMINATOR
Some eagles have given up on the exhausting business of roaming the azure yonder, falling like a stone and missing. They prefer to sit about biding their time. Many reptile-eating (and some fish-eating) eagles perch in trees in a lordly manner, waiting for their prey to scuttle by. They then drop straight onto them from a sitting position. The lesser-spotted eagle (Aquila pomarina) neither falls like a thunderbolt nor watches imperiously. It walks around looking for frogs to eat. Eagles will eat anything, dead or alive. Not just rodents, reptiles, birds and fish but ants, termites, dead elephants and whales, locusts, baby seals, crabs, snails, sloths, snakes and monkeys. Martial eagles (Polemaetus bellicosus) eat baboons. Golden eagles enjoy caribou calves. Steller’s sea eagle (Haliaeetus pelagicus) is partial to seal pups. Crowned hawk eagles (Stephanoaetus coronatus) eat mandrill monkeys and can kill a bushbuck four times their own size. Both serpent eagles and snake eagles catch snakes. Serpent eagles fly off with the snake dangling from their legs, whereas snake eagles swallow them whole, head first. They then fly back to the nest, where the snake eaglet grasps the tail of the snake and hauls it out of its parent’s mouth like a string of handkerchiefs. On a less grisly note (and despite its unnerving name), the favourite food of the Vulturine fish eagle (Gypohierax angolensis) is fruit from the oil-palm tree.
The two-headed eagle featured on many European flags was a symbol of the Byzantine empire: one head represented ancient Rome, the other, ‘new Rome’, or Constantinople.
Echidna
Spiny not-anteater
What has a bird-like beak, spines like a hedgehog, the eggs of a reptile, the pouch of a marsupial, the life span of an elephant and a penis like a four-staved club? Enter the echidna, Australia’s almost-anteater. Like anteaters the echidna has a long sticky tongue, powerful front legs and a huge appetite for social insects. But there the similarities end. The echidnas aren’t even marsupials, they’re monotremes (‘one-holed’ creatures), so named because, like birds and reptiles, they have a single hole or cloaca for excretion and reproduction. Along with the platypus, the four species of echidnas are thought to be the only descendants of the southern mammals that split from their northern counterparts before the super-continent known as Pangaea began to break apart, 180 million years ago in the Jurassic. This makes them the oldest surviving mammal group.
An echidna’s neocortex, associated with reasoning and personality in humans, accounts for half the volume of its brain, compared to only a third in the ‘higher’ mammals. No one knows what echidnas use it for.
The Short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus – ‘thorny fast-tongue’) is the most widely distributed mammal in Australia. They are shy, solitary creatures that live in large undefended territories (no one has observed an echidna fight). They have two predator-escape strategies: the spiky ball and the sinking ship (echidnas can dig straight down until only their spines are showing). They have the coldest blood temperature of any mammals, and can conserve energy by dropping their body temperature to 4? C and taking only one breath every three minutes. To warm up, they can lie flat like a spiny rug in the sunshine. To cool down, it is thought that their spines dissipate heat like an elephant’s ears. They can live for fifty years.
THE EGG & POUCH TRICK
Mating takes place in the winter when a group of males form a slow-moving ‘love train’ behind a pheromone-emitting female. This shuffling procession can last for more than a month. As soon as she’s ready, the female clings to a tree trunk with her forelimbs while the males dig a 10-inch deep, doughnut-shaped trench around the tree. They then compete for mating honours, gently pushing each other around with their heads. The winner lies on his side in the trench partly underneath the female and, unsheathing his curiously configured member, mates, pressing his belly against hers. A single grape-sized egg follows three weeks later, hatching a wriggling, bean-like ‘puggle’. After eight weeks of rapid growth, the puggle is transferred to a burrow, just as the spines start to show.
As for the other species, there can be few animals more mysterious than the Long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus bruijni – ‘de Bruijn’s long-tongue’) of New Guinea. Here’s all we know: its body and nose are twice the size of its cousin’s; it’s furrier; it mainly eats earthworms speared with special spines on its tongue and then sucked up like spaghetti; it’s nocturnal; it snuffles a lot. That’s it: everything else is conjecture. We think there are three subspecies: one (rather sweetly named after Sir David Attenborough) is restricted to a single (dead) specimen, found in 1961. The other two are endearing, inquisitive creatures that look like four-legged kiwis and tame easily. This has made them easy to hunt, and since the arrival of Europeans, the taboo against killing a once sacred animal has disintegrated. Papuan tribesmen track them with dogs and serve them roasted as a delicacy. How many are left? We have no idea …
Eel
Freudian slippery
Nobody knows where the word eel comes from. Until the 1920s, nobody knew where eels themselves came from. Aristotle insisted they arose spontaneously from rotting seaweed. Pliny the Elder thought they rubbed against rocks and that the shreds of their skin came to life. Other imaginative suggestions included the dew of May mornings, the gills of fish, and horsehairs falling into the water. The astonishing life-cycle of the eel was first revealed to the world by the Danish oceanographer Johannes Schmidt (1877– 1933) who, in 1905, was
commissioned by his government to locate their spawning grounds. Given one small ship, he set off to trawl the oceans of the world. It took him sixteen years.
Eels are one of very few species of fish that can swim backwards. Their thick coating of mucus means they can also travel on land as well as in water. They make their way into fields and gardens to snack on young peas and beans.
THE EEL REEL
It seems all European and American freshwater eels (Anguilla anguilla) are born as saltwater fish in the Sargasso Sea, a strangely calm area of the North Atlantic around Bermuda, two million square miles in extent and clogged with Sargassum weed. This is kept afloat by berry-like bladders: hence the name from sargaço, an old Portuguese word for ‘grape’. From here, the eel larvae are carried by the Gulf Stream 3,000 miles across the Atlantic to Europe, where, on entering the mouths of rivers, they miraculously transform into freshwater creatures. They don’t aim at a particular river: they hit the coast in a broad band and swim up whichever one they encounter – so rivers with wide west-facing estuaries like the Severn get lots of them. They will go to any lengths to reach their goal, piling up their bodies by the tens of thousands to climb over obstacles. Once there, the eels live contentedly in rivers until they reach maturity. When this happens (between the ages of six and forty) they prepare to swim back to the Sargasso Sea again. They change dramatically. Backs turn darker; bellies turn silver. They toughen up, storing fat, which they’ll need for the journey. Eyes enlarge, heads become pointed, nostrils dilate, the salt content in their bodies reduces and their sex organs swell. Their gas bladder also changes to allow them to withstand pressures of a ton per square inch.
Once back in the Sargasso, the females spawn and the males fertilise the eggs, after which they all die of exhaustion. Or so it is believed. Nowadays, ‘everybody knows’ that eels are born in the Sargasso Sea but this has never been proved. No one has ever seen an eel spawn or seen one die there. Careful scientists prefer to call the Sargasso Sea the eel’s ‘presumed’ breeding ground. Young eels have been found there, but neither live adults nor their eggs. Not one eel has ever been bred in captivity. When you catch an eel, its reproductive system shuts down completely, as if deliberately keeping the secret. Sigmund Freud was determined to find the answer. He worked in Trieste cutting up hundreds of eels to see how their sexual organs worked. When he had finished, he published a thesis in which he concluded that all of his research was a waste of time. He was no nearer to understanding eels than when he first started.
Elephant
A giant hamster on tiptoe
Elephants are the largest living land animals and size is both the secret of their success and the reason they look the way they do. Elephants grew big to compete with the waves of antelopes and other ruminants munching their way across the grassy plains. To eat the coarse, woody vegetation the ruminants couldn’t manage required a big digestive tract and long legs. So they got bigger and by about two million years ago had spread all over the planet except Australasia and Antarctica.
Size brought its challenges. Overheating is a problem for large mammals: the elephant’s ears evolved to stop it boiling to death. Unlike the thick skin that covers most of their bodies, the skin on their ears is paper-thin. Each ear is the size of a single-bed sheet and when it flaps, the airflow reduces blood temperature by up to 5°C. The skein of blood vessels acts like the grill in a car’s radiator. The pattern they make is unique to each elephant and can be used to identify them, like human fingerprints.
The other challenge is drinking, as kneeling down makes even a large animal vulnerable to attack. Elephants evolved the perfect solution, a 7-foot, 28-stone nose that contains a hundred times more muscles than we have in our entire bodies. Not only can a trunk suck up 8 pints of water, it also functions as an arm, hand, snorkel and weapon. It is powerful enough to kill a lion with a single blow, yet the finger-like lobes at the end can pick up a grain of rice.
Despite weighing over 3 tons, elephants still walk on tiptoe, like most mammals, but they are the only mammals with four forward-facing knees, needed to give them extra leverage when standing up. They can’t run or jump (to ‘run’ all feet must be off the ground at once) but they can walk silently, reaching a top speed of 15 mph. They also use their feet to hear, picking up the very low frequency calls (inaudible to humans) of other elephants from as far away as 6 miles. Males and females can’t understand each other’s calls, and the female vocabulary is much larger.
Elephants are large-brained and clever: along with dolphins and some primates, they are the only animals that can recognise themselves in a mirror. They spend twelve years as calves and their development involves a lot of learnt behaviour – a young elephant has to be shown how to use its trunk. They have elaborate mourning practices and often visit and fondle the bones and tusks of the dead. The oldest elephant ever recorded was eighty years old, but most live for about fifty years. With few predators (other than man), the default elephant death is starvation caused by their teeth wearing out.
The closest living relatives of the elephants are the sea cows, and then the hyraxes, furry creatures that look like large hamsters. The common ancestor of all three was a giant hyrax, Africa’s primary herbivore until the ruminants arrived and set one branch of the family on the way to sprouting trunks.
An elephant’s gait is a bit like Groucho Marx’s: crouching slightly seems to help them to move their bodies more smoothly.
Ferret
Dancing Prozac
Ferrets are the only member of the weasel family to have been domesticated and their popularity as pets is on the increase. On the face of it, this is surprising. Their scientific name, Mustela putorius furo, translates as ‘musk-bearing stinking, thief’, although most of this infamy is inherited. Ferrets are tame European polecats (from poule chat, ‘poultry cat’), a creature so despised by farmers and gamekeepers that it was hunted, trapped and gassed to near-extinction across most of Britain during the nineteenth century. Also known as the ‘foulmart’ or ‘stinkmarten’, the polecat was the scourge of hen-houses, but also helped keep the rabbit and mouse population in check. When they were originally domesticated, over 2,000 years ago, it was to exploit this natural aptitude.
Until the 1960s, ferrets were used to carry cable to inaccessible areas of Boeing aircraft as they were being built. They were replaced, as they often gave up and fell asleep halfway.
Polecats and ferrets continue to hybridise easily, and, ironically, it is the wild ‘polecat’ streak that makes the ferret a wonderful pet. Unlike dull, grass-chewing, social rodents, like hamsters and guinea pigs, the domestic ferret has remained a solitary hunter, as pure a carnivore as the domestic cat. But ferrets have none of the aloofness of cats: they are as curious, bold and responsive as puppies. You can teach a ferret to come to its name or take it for walks on a lead. The inquisitive streak that makes it lethal in a rabbit burrow is hugely diverting when it’s ‘ferreting’ around in the backyard. One particular manoeuvre, the ‘war dance’, involves the ferret leaping backwards and sideways, chirping with excitement. They are particularly valued as pets by single professionals, as they sleep for eighteen hours, make hardly any noise, butare always ready with a cheerful fuss when you do return home.
CANNY CUNICULUS CATCHER
There are downsides. Despite keeping their quarters very clean, they do smell and even a well-looked-after ferret is probably a little too feral for indoors. Also, their natural high spirits mean they have little in the way of common sense. In a house they will disappear in holes in walls, behind doors, into cupboards, down the back of sofas and appliances like dishwashers, where they can get squashed. Nor do they have a homing instinct if they escape. Female ferrets (jills) can get sick if they aren’t mated when in season. The simplest way is to keep a sterilised male (hoblet) to service them: an unfettered male (hob) might father fifteen kits a year. But be warned: ferret sex is nasty, brutish and long. The hob is much larger than the jill and has a penis shaped like
a hockey stick that locks inside her for several hours, while he indulges in some fairly rough dragging and neck-biting. Rather like female cats, jill ferrets seem to need a measure of unpleasant foreplay before they release their eggs.
Ferrets also suffer from some very human ailments. Cancer of the lymphatic system and pancreas is relatively common, and they are prone to stress-related illnesses and bouts of depression, particularly if separated from a companion. Often they will refuse food, and mope for weeks. This makes them rather easier to empathise with than, say, a gerbil, and has led to their successfully deployment in ‘pet therapy’. An hour spent with a ferret seems to act as positive tonic for the elderly, the depressed, and children recovering from severe illnesses.
Flea
Spring-loaded sex god
The malarial mosquito has claimed more human lives, but for Europeans at least, the horseman of the apocalypse rides a flea. None of the waves of bubonic plague that have swept Europe and Asia would have been possible without the odd personal habits of Xenopsylla cheopis, the Oriental rat flea. Like most of the 1,800 species included in the Siphonaptera order (‘wingless siphons’), the rat flea is always hungry and not very fussy about where it eats. Plague starts in rodents (usually marmots) but is spread by the fleas that feed on them. Plague bacteria reproduces so quickly they block the flea’s digestive passage. Very soon this produces a lot of hungry fleas, their mouthparts dripping with infected blood, ready to bite any mammal within striking distance, as more than a billion humans have found out to their cost.