by Ted Dewan
Rather we should marvel at their gifts. To stay alive in the wild a pigeon needs to keep its eyes open for predators. Their position on either side of its head gives it a field of view approaching 340? and in order to fly at speed it has to process visual information three times faster than a human. If a pigeon watched a feature film, twenty-four frames per second would appear to it like a slide presentation. They would need at least seventy-five frames per second to create the illusion of movement on screen (this is why pigeons seem to leave it until the very last second to fly out of the way of an oncoming car: it appears much less fast to them).
According to the seventeenth-century natural historian John Aubrey, the traditional remedy for the bite of an adder was to apply the ‘fundament of a pigeon’ to the wound to suck out the poison.
The US navy has tried to exploit their keen-sightedness by training them to spot sailors lost at sea: they can pick out a far-away orange life-raft much better than a human. They have also been put to work inspecting drug capsules for defects. Pigeon vision is smart as well as sharp: they can tell tthe difference between Cubist works by Picasso and Impressionist canvases by Monet and are even able to tell when the Monets are hung upside down. They also navigate with great precision, using a combination of odour trails, the sun’s position, the earth’s magnetic field and, as they get closer to home, visual landmarks like road systems.
Pigeons mate for life; widowed birds accept new mates very slowly. They are also model parents: the male and female take turns to incubate eggs, and care for their young in the nest. Both produce ‘pigeon milk’ in their crops. It isn’t real milk – there is no lactose in it – but looks like cottage cheese and is fed to the chicks for their first ten days. That’s why you don’t see baby pigeons: they grow so quickly that by the time they leave the nest, they are almost the size of an adult.
Platypus
Electric otter
When George Shaw made the first written description of the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) in 1799, he first carefully checked the specimen he had been sent from Australia for signs of stitching. Even so, many of his naturalist colleagues continued to believe it was a hoax: a duck’s bill sewn on to the body of a small beaver. It took thirty years for it to be accepted as a mammal – the lack of nipples made it difficult to locate the mammary glands under its stomach fur. But it wasn’t until 1884 that the real bombshell fell. A Scottish embryologist called W. H. Caldwell finally uncovered a platypus nest and revealed the astonishing news that here was a mammal that laid eggs (the Aborigines had been saying this for years, but no one had listened). The platypus has remained notorious ever since, ridiculed as evolution’s little joke.
A popular nineteenth-century view, still held in some quarters, describes the platypus as a crude early prototype of the mammal, subsequently abandoned. It is true that together with the four species of egg-laying echidnas it sits in the monotreme (‘one-holed’) order, the oldest surviving group of mammals. But to disparage it as a primitive, ‘halfway house’ between reptiles and mammals makes no more sense than calling a craftsman who builds wooden furniture from scratch more ‘primitive’ than someone who puts up flat-pack shelving from Ikea. The platypus is a perfect example of a creature that has, in isolation, adapted itself to exploit a rich habitat. Think of it as Australia’s otter, an opportunistic carnivore, guzzling down freshwater crayfish, shrimps, fish and tadpoles with little competition. It has kept some of the ‘reptilian’ features, like egg-laying and a lizard-like way of walking, because there was no pressure to change them. But it has also evolved other new adaptations of astonishing sophistication.
In 1943 Churchill asked the Australian prime minister to send a live platypus to cheer him up. Sadly, ‘Winston’ died en route but Churchill had him stuffed and kept him on his desk for the rest of the war.
The most ingenious of these is the ‘duck’s bill’ itself. The platypus is a nocturnal creature, feeding at night and dozing in its burrow or ‘wedging’ under a rock or tree root by day. Hunting at night under water poses a challenge, as smell and sight are useless. The platypus’s solution – unique among mammals – is to borrow a trick from fish and turn its ‘nose’ into an electrical probe. The bill is covered in 40,000 sensors that can pick up the tiniest electrical fields generated by muscle impulses in its prey. As well as that, it also has 60,000 motion sensors, allowing it to act as both eye and hand, with mechanical and electrical information combining to create a vivid picture of its dark underwater world.
BILL BRAINED
It has also come up with its own dual-purpose propulsion system. As with beavers, the tail is used to store fat, but when the platypus swims, it acts as a rudder not a propeller. All the power comes from the large webbed front limbs. On land, these skin flaps fold away so it can use its front claws to burrow. Though as fast as an otter in water, the platypus rivals the mole as a digger of tunnels on land, which is why it earned it the name ‘watermole’ among the early settlers. Duck, mole, otter? Perhaps it’s the mark of a true original that it can only be described in terms borrowed from something else.
Porcupine
Raunchy and rhythmic
‘Porcupine’ literally means ‘spiny pig’, although they are rodents and not remotely related to either pigs or hedgehogs. There are twenty-five species, split between Old and New Worlds. All are spiny, but some New World species can climb trees and swing from branches using their tails like spider monkeys. In Europe, they are native only to Italy and Greece but have been known in Britain since 1110, when Henry I was given one as a pet.
Never rub bottoms with a porcupine. GHANAIAN PROVERB
The inevitable question that crops up with porcupines concerns their love life. As it turns out, avoiding the spines is the least remarkable detail. Porcupine sex often begins with both male and female walking on their hind legs astride sticks, which they use to stimulate their genitals. Once whipped up into a frenzy they stand belly to belly. With his now erect penis, the male soaks the female from head to toe with urine (streams reaching more than 6 feet have been recorded) and begins to make a loud squeaking, similar to the ‘love song’ of mice. The female turns her back on him and arches her tail over her back. There aren’t any quills underneath it and he has no quills on his belly. The actual mating lasts only a minute but the male porcupine has a secret weapon. As with other rodents, his penis points backwards in its sheath, unfolds like a penknife when erect, and has bristly barbs on its tip. But the porcupine also has two pointy ‘nails’ on the underside that aren’t found in any other animal. Whether they are for ‘latching on’, or giving added pleasure, we don’t know.
The outcome, after a long gestation, is called a porcupette. Unusually for a rodent, there is only one. It is born with its eyes wide open and a fully developed set of quills, which are ready to use within twenty minutes. Indian porcupines (Hystrix indica) seem quite happy with the set-up.
They mate for life, and are the only rodents that copulate even when there is no possibility of conception, a helpful adaptation for the monogamous.
The scientific name for the Old World porcupines comes from the Greek word for them, Hystrix, while the North American porcupine’s Latin name, Erethizon dorsatum, translates literally as ‘I have a back that provokes’. Despite Pliny the Elder’s assertions, they can’t fire their quills, but tiny erector muscles in the skin do make them stand up. Then they lunge backwards, swiping their tails violently. Even tigers run scared.
There can be over 30,000 quills on a single animal, and they grow replacements. The quills are covered in backward-pointing scales. These help the quill to work slowly into flesh where it can be fatal if it hits a vital organ. To remove a quill, cut off the end sticking out first to equalise air pressure inside the wound.
Native Americans used porcupine quills to create sacred designs. The Arapaho no longer practise the craft because the last of the seven women who fully understood the designs died in the 1930s. To attempt quillwork without the
proper ritual knowledge is considered dangerous.
African porcupines are attracted by loud drumming and can be taught to shuffle in time to the beat. Porcupine is still eaten there and in Italy, where they have a reputation for yielding even crispier crackling than pork.
Quoll
The Australian killer pussycat
The five species of quoll are known as ‘marsupial cats’, although they aren’t remotely related to the felines. They don’t look much like them either: their snouts are longer, more like a mongoose’s or a ferret’s, and they have spotted coats and long bushy tails (their family name Dasyurus means ‘hairy tail’). But they fill the cat-shaped hole in the marsupial world, surviving as nocturnal, solitary predators with the most powerful bite for their size of any animal except their closest relative, the legendary Tasmanian Devil (Sarcophilus laniarius).
This killer streak even surfaces during sex. The female Northern quolls (Dasyurus hallucatus) all come into season at the same time each winter, leading to a free-for-all, as males try to mate with as many females as possible. Grabbing the female’s neck in razor-sharp jaws, they drag them off for an average mating session of three hours, and sometimes for as long as twenty-four. It takes this long because they don’t produce many sperm and need to ejaculate repeatedly to ensure conception. There’s a lot of screeching and biting, as the females crouch with their eyes closed thinking of the spring, but many get injured, and some are even killed and partially eaten by their mate.
In the case of the Northern quolls, at least, they get their own back. The males often don’t recover from the exertion of the rut. They lose weight, become anaemic, their scrotum shrinks, their fur falls out and they get infested with lice. Within a week or two they die, martyrs to their genes. This reduces competition for food, giving the females and their offspring a better chance of survival, but also avoids the risk of incest the following season.
The Northern quoll is the smallest of the five and although it’s not much larger than a guinea pig, it is fearless, taking on rats, snakes, lizards and pretty much anything that crosses its path. Unfortunately, this includes the poisonous cane toad (see above), which has encroached on its territories, and which it eats before it realises the danger. The population decline is now so steep that conservationists and local Aboriginal groups in the Northern Territories have transported small groups of Northern quolls to outlying toad-free islands.
All the Australian quoll species are threatened, both by introduced predators and by their own adaptive shortcomings. A recent test with the Eastern quoll (Dasyurus viverrinus) demonstrated that it couldn’t tell the difference between the call of a fox and that of a cow. It is now only found on Tasmania and, although it regularly pops out thirty young, only the first six to find a nipple survive.
Even the Spotted-tailed or Tiger quoll (Dasyurus maculatus), the largest carnivore on mainland Australia, has been added to the endangered list, as its population has shrunk to fewer than a thousand. Its version of the quoll ‘suicide gene’ is to site its communal dung-heap in the middle of bush roads.
The word ‘quoll’ was first recorded by Captain Cook in 1770. It comes from dhigal in the Guugu Yimidhirr language of Northern Queensland, which he transcribed as Je-Quoll.
In 2001, Michael Archer, director of Sydney’s Australian Museum, suggested that to save quolls from extinction, people ought to take them up as pets: ‘Instead of canoodling with dogs and cats, cuddle a quoll instead!’
Rabbit
The unstoppable pet-pest
‘The introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting.’ Rarely has a human prediction proved more wrong. These were the words of Thomas Austin, an English settler in Australia who released twenty-four rabbits on his farm in 1859. Ten years later, there were so many across Australia that even a cull of two million made no dent in the population. By 1950, when the myxomatosis virus was introduced as a biological control, there were over one billion Aussie rabbits, the fastest spread of mammals ever recorded. As a result, an eighth of all native Australian mammals and an unquantifiable number of plant species perished, their habitats destroyed by overgrazing and erosion. Myxomatosis worked – the rabbit population was decimated, but the small number that survived have bred a genetic resistance to the disease, so a new, less effective virus (rabbit haemorrhagic disease) was introduced in 1995. The population is currently a hundred million and growing.
WORLD’S 3rd MOST POPULAR PET
What makes the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) so successful? Firstly, diet. They will eat most things that grow, and in quantity: a single rabbit can eat enough grass to stuff a decent-sized pillow every day. Secondly, unlike hares and most other rabbit species, they run a communal burrow system which supports a large number of breeding females. And finally, they breed like – well – rabbits. A doe is usually either pregnant, lactating or both at once; she can produce thirty kits a year and they are all able to reproduce within six months of being born. Males tend to disperse to new colonies, females stay put to breed until the warren gets too crowded. Unless predation or disease intervenes, rabbit populations spiral.
Despite appearances, rabbits aren’t rodents, they are lagomorphs (‘hare-shaped’), one of over fifty species, including hares, pikas, jackrabbits and cottontails. Lagomorphs have a special trick: eating their food twice. Whereas a cow chews the cud, they eat their own droppings. Not the dry fibrous spheres we find scattered outside their burrows, but the contents of their large intestine, which look like bunches of shiny green grapes and are full of bacteria, generating essential nutrients, especially B vitamins. Strictly speaking, despite their provenance, these are not faeces, but food. They are coated with rubbery mucus to protect them from the digestive process and rabbits eat them directly from their bottoms.
The Sumatran striped rabbit (Nesolagus netscheri) is so rare and shy that there is no word for it in the language used where it lives. It was thought extinct in the 1930s, and has only been seen three times since.
It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that the resourceful rabbit became a serious agricultural problem in Britain. When they were first introduced by the Normans, rabbits were a valuable farm animal, kept in enclosed warrens (by warreners) for their meat and fur. Poaching rabbits was a high crime carrying draconian punishment. But by the 1820s, not only were landowners ‘enclosing’ their land with endless miles of hedges (the perfect environment for escaped rabbits), they also unleashed an orgy of shooting, poisoning and trapping of the foxes, martens, stoats and birds of prey that had previously controlled rabbit numbers. Ironically, the ‘spot of hunting’ that Thomas Austin fancied on his new Australian farm transformed the rabbits back home from crop to pest. The once exotic rabbit now costs British agriculture £100 million each year. Ironically, rabbit meat sold for the British table is mostly factory-farmed and imported from China, Hungary and Poland.
Raccoon
Porky New Yorker
You can learn a lot about raccoons from the words for them in other languages. The English ‘raccoon’ is derived from Algonquian Indian arahkoonem: ‘they rub, scrub, scratch.’ In Dakota-Sioux, a raccoon is weekah tegalega, ‘magic one with painted face’. In Abnaki, it’s asban, ‘one who lifts up things’. The Delaware Indians called it wtakalinch, ‘very clever with its fingers’. Spanish colonists adapted the Aztec word mapache (‘that which has hands’), although the Aztecs also called it eeyahmahtohn (‘the little old lady who knows things’).
Raccoons are the best-known wild animals in North America. They have a black mask over their eyes and a bushy tail with between four and ten black rings. They have five toes on each foot and their front paws are provided with thumbs, thanks to which they can lift latches, unscrew jars, disentangle knots, turn doorknobs and open refrigerators. Their paw-prints look like tiny human baby handprints. Raccoons adapt remarkably easily to the human environment and many of them live happily in New York City. Th
ey can live to be sixteen in the countryside but urban raccoons eat a similar diet to teenagers, becoming so dependent on French fries and doughnuts that they can’t survive in the wild.
Raccoon is a popular dish in the southern United States, the centrepiece for a traditional ‘coon dinner’. Once the gamey fat has been removed, it is excellent roasted with a stuffing of sweet potato.
Fat is a raccoon issue: for some, 50 per cent of their body mass is fat. The fattest-ever raccoon was called Bandit; he lived outside Ice Cream World in Walnutport, Pennsylvania, and loved to feast on peanut butter and blueberry slush puppies. Raccoons are rightly called omnivores. They really will eat anything. They tuck into crayfish, apples, mice, eggs, insects, walnuts, frogs, fish, sweetcorn, clams, cherries, turtles, acorns, snakes and even road kill. Almost all non-American languages, from German and Finnish to Chinese, Japanese and Bulgarian, call them ‘washing bears’ because they seem to wash their food before eating it. For a long time, scientists thought this was because they couldn’t produce enough saliva to swallow anything dry. In fact, this is not so. They have plenty of saliva, and they’re not actually washing what they’re about to eat. They do dunk food in water – an odd behaviour called ‘dabbling’ – but it appears they’re just sorting out what is edible and not too sharp to ingest. If there’s no water about they will still exhibit similar ‘dabbling’ behaviour and they’re quite happy to eat food that has dirt on it. In search of food, raccoons are good climbers. They can rotate their back feet through 180° and climb head-first down trees, but they are equally at home in chimneys, haylofts and attics.