Catch Me a Colobus

by Gerald Durrell

  ‘Well, you should try collecting for us sometime.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask me?’

  ‘Maybe I will,’ I said, and then the Tannoy announced the arrival of Jacquie’s plane and I went to the entrance doors. It was while I was standing there that a brilliant thought occurred to me. There was the very girl, and she had actually offered her services. She would be perfect for fundraising. Nobody could resist those eyes, I felt sure. I waited impatiently for Jacquie to arrive, grabbed her by the arm and unceremoniously dragged her back into the arrivals hall.

  ‘Hurry up. Hurry up,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for a girl.’

  ‘Not again,’ said Jacquie.

  ‘No, no. This is a very special, very beautiful girl. She was here a minute ago, collecting something for something.’

  ‘What on earth do you want her for?’ asked Jacquie, suspiciously.

  ‘Well, she’s perfect for the fundraising committee,’ I said. ‘And she actually offered, and like a fool I didn’t get her name.’

  I looked frantically round the hall, but it was completely devoid of anything except elderly dowager duchesses and retired colonels.

  ‘Damn!’ I said. ‘I’ve missed the opportunity of a lifetime.’

  ‘Well, surely you can find out who she is? She must be somebody local,’ said Jacquie.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I suppose I could ask Hope.’ As soon as we got home I phoned up Hope.

  ‘Hope,’ I said, ‘who is a very beautiful girl, with hazel-green eyes and dark hair, who was collecting for something or other at the airport today?’

  ‘Really, Gerry!’ said Hope. ‘You do ask the most impossible questions. How do you expect me to know? And, if it comes to that, what do you want to know for?’

  ‘I want to start a fundraising committee,’ I said, ‘and she seemed to me to be an absolutely ideal person to have on it.’

  Hope chuckled.

  ‘Well, I can’t think of anybody off-hand,’ she said. ‘You might, of course, try Lady Calthorpe. She’s supposed to be very good at fundraising.’

  I groaned. I could just imagine what Lady Calthorpe was like. Long yellow teeth, cropped iron-grey hair, tweeds smelling of spaniels, and spaniels smelling of tweeds.

  ‘Well, I’ll think about it,’ I said.

  So the day of the bun fight dawned and, needless to say, there was fog at the airport. Pandemonium reigned about getting Peter Scott and his wife over, and we only did it in the nick of time, with the aid of somebody’s private plane. However, everything went off smoothly. In the morning I took Peter and his wife round the zoo, introduced them to members of the staff, and explained the work that we were trying to do. Peter, to my delight, seemed very impressed.

  The lunch was a very pleasant occasion; principally, I think, because nobody made any speeches. Then, in the afternoon, we all went round the zoo once more. There was just time for a bath and change before setting out for the real event of the day, which was the fundraising dinner. To this we had invited a small, but select, gathering of people, some of whom we hoped might be able to help us in other ways. Lord Jersey was the first speaker and he then introduced Peter Scott, who gave a marvellous speech on various aspects of conservation and the importance of the work that we were trying to do. I was supposed to be the next speaker, and was shuffling my notes in a desultory fashion in preparation, when my gaze was suddenly riveted on a girl sitting some distance away at another part of the table. It was the one that I had seen at the airport. What on earth, I thought, was she doing here? The problem so intrigued me that I almost forgot my speech. However, I struggled through it and sat down. I was determined, at the first available opportunity, to make my way across the room and capture the girl before she could escape for the second time.

  Soon there came a general shuffling of chairs and people started to leave the tables. I made my way, with all the speed that politeness would permit, through the mass of distinguished friends, and managed to catch the girl just as she was going out of the door. I laid my hand upon her shoulder, rather in the manner of a store detective who is arresting a shoplifter. She turned and raised disdainful eyebrows at me.

  ‘You’re the girl I met at the airport,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Well, at the airport,’ I continued, ‘you said that you would be willing to help us raise money. Was that just a joke, or do you still mean it?’

  ‘Of course I mean it.’

  For once in my life I had a piece of paper and a pen in my pocket.

  ‘Could I have your name and telephone number, and could I get in touch with you and discuss this further?’ I asked.

  ‘But of course,’ she said, ‘any time you like.’

  ‘Um . . . your name?’

  ‘Saranne Calthorpe.’

  I was flabbergasted. I stared at her for a moment.

  ‘But . . . but you can’t be Lady Calthorpe,’ I said, rather petulantly.

  ‘Well, I have been for quite a number of years.’

  ‘But . . . I mean . . . where’s the cropped hair, and the spaniels, and the look of an ancient mare?’ I asked in desperation.

  ‘Do I look like an ancient mare?’ she inquired with interest.

  ‘No, no!’ I said ‘. . . I didn’t mean that. What I meant was that I thought you’d look like an ancient mare. Are you sure there’re not two Lady Calthorpes on the island?’

  ‘As far as I know,’ she said, with supreme dignity, ‘I am the only one. You can phone me anytime you like,’ she added, and gave me her address and telephone number.

  I went back to Jacquie, jubilant.

  ‘I’ve found the girl,’ I said.

  ‘Which particular one?’ inquired Jacquie.

  ‘The one I was telling you about,’ I said impatiently. ‘The one at the airport. She’s Lady Calthorpe.’

  ‘But I thought you said that Lady Calthorpe was surrounded by spaniels and tweeds and things,’ said Jacquie.

  ‘No, no, no! This is that . . . that . . . lovely creature in . . . in . . . a black sort of dress with white jobs on it,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, that one,’ said Jacquie. ‘Yes . . . well, I suppose she could raise money.’

  ‘I shall contact her instantly,’ I said, ‘tomorrow morning. But now, for God’s sake, let’s go home and go to bed.’ And so we did.

  Taken all round the bun fight had been a great success. We’d had a chance to get advice from people like James Fisher, Walter van den Berg, the Director of Antwerp zoo, Richard Fitter of the Fauna Preservation Society, and many other people who had not only seen fit to praise the work we were doing, but gave constructive criticism. Not only that, but at last the amount of money raised would enable us to start work on our most urgent project, a series of new, large, outdoor cages for our apes. The plans for these had long been mouldering on the drawing-board, while Jeremy and I gloated over them. They were going to cost far more money than the Trust could afford. But after the bun fight we knew that we could start to build them and we were jubilant at the thought.

  Now, it has always been my contention that the two most dangerous creatures to let loose unsupervised in a zoo are a veterinary surgeon and an architect. The vet will insist on treating wild animals as if they are domestic ones. A bush dog or a dingo may be of the dog family, but you cannot treat them as though they were pekinese or spaniels.

  Generally, the vet, in despair, says: ‘Well, I should put it down, if I were you.’ We were fortunate in having two vets, Mr Blampied and Mr Begg, who took the opposite view. The last thing they ever wanted to do was to put any animal down at all.

  Architects are a different kettle of fish. If left unsupervised, they will design you a cage that is a poem architecturally but useless from the point of view of the staff who have
to use it or, more to the point, the animals who have to live in it. When it had come to the cages for the apes, Jeremy and I had watched the designs with great care to make sure that no mistakes were made. They were extremely difficult cages to design because they had to be built on sloping ground, facing south, along the wall of the mammal house. But the ground sloped in three different directions, which meant we had to build up a great staging of concrete upon which the cages could stand. The final design that Bill Davis, our architect, produced for us pleased me very much. Each cage was almost triangular so that the inmates of any cage could see what was going on in the other two. Apes are just as inquisitive about what their neighbours are doing as any human beings, so instead of muslin curtains from behind which they could peep, we gave them bars. The roof of this construction was sloping slightly backwards so that the apes could get the maximum amount of sunshine.

  The firm which was to build the cages moved in and began to clear the site. The cages in which the apes were living at the time were inside the house but they each had a window from which they could see the construction work going on, and this fascinated them. Oscar the orang-utan, who is the most mechanically-minded of all the apes, would sit, almost literally all day, with his face pressed against the glass, watching the cement being mixed and laid, an absorbed expression on his rather Chinese face. I went down one morning to see how the work was progressing, and was talking to one of the men.

  ‘I see that Oscar is making sure you build the cages properly,’ I said, pointing to where the ape was sitting with his face pressed against the glass.

  ‘’im!’ said the man. ‘’onestly, ’e sits there all day long. It’s worse than ’aving a bloody foreman watching you!’

  3. A Lion in Labour

  Dear Mr Durrell,

  My name is Miriam. I have written to ask your advice on the following:

  • Would it be at all possible for me to get a baby lion?

  • If so where would I get it and do you know about what the cost would be?

  • How old is the youngest I could get it (take it from its mother)?

  • Where would I have to keep it?

  • How old would I be able to keep?

  • What would I feed a very small, baby lion?

  • How large would he actually be?

  And anything else you think I would need to know! Thank you very much . . .

  In any large collection of wild animals you are liable to have your crop of illness and accidents, and sometimes these prove fatal, for animals are no less mortal than man. Under the heading ‘accidents’ you have, I’m afraid, to include the behaviour of the average member of the public. We have had, in the past, instances of monkeys being given razor blades and the great apes lighted pipes and cigarettes, so that they burnt themselves. Unless you have somebody permanently on watch it is difficult to guard against this sort of behaviour.

  Take, for example, the case of our two macaws, Captain Koe and McCoy. Now these were colourful birds and of a benign disposition, so when the weather was fine we would take them out of their cage and put them on a low granite wall that ran along the side of the mammal house where they would sit in the sunshine, preen their brilliant feathers and exchange hoarse chuckling conversation with any visitor who happened to be passing. One day, an exceptionally large lady, presumably exhausted by her tour of the zoo, went to rest on the wall where Captain Koe was sitting. Believe it or not, she actually sat on top of him. That anyone could sit on a bird the size of a macaw, with such multicoloured brilliant feathering, may seem incredible. It is a great pity that Captain Koe couldn’t have retaliated by biting the lady in question for there was ample target for him to aim at and macaws’ beaks are among the biggest of the parrot family. However, he was simply squashed.

  Our maintenance man, who happened to be passing at the time, noted the incident. The woman herself seemed completely unaware of the fact that she had done anything unusual. The maintenance man picked up the bird and brought it immediately to the office. Luckily, at that precise moment we had Tommy Begg, our veterinary surgeon, in the zoo doing his weekly check-up on the animals, and he immediately attended to Captain Koe. Both legs had been broken and these Tommy splinted skilfully, but in addition to this the ribs and breast-bone had been crushed and some of the ribs had pierced the lung. So, in spite of all we could do, in a short time the macaw was dead.

  The thing which amazed me most was the woman’s behaviour. Even allowing for the fact that she was short-sighted and couldn’t see a large bird clad in brilliant scarlet and blue feathering sitting on a wall, after she had sat on it she must have known that she had done some damage. Not only did she not come to the office to explain her mistake and inquire after the bird’s condition, but she did not even bother to phone up and find out how the bird was getting on. This is only one instance of the attitude of the general public. I should think, on average, one spends about seventy percent of one’s time protecting the animals from the public rather than the other way round.

  Like any sensible zoo, we do not allow the public to feed the animals. This is because they might give them the wrong sort of food, or too much of something that they happen to like particularly, and this will prevent them from eating the carefully balanced diet we have worked out for them. For instance, the great apes will go on eating chocolate, rather like children, until they feel sick, and then they will refuse their evening meal which would have done them much more good. They may then perhaps develop stomach trouble, and you have a long job curing the complaint that has arisen from wrong feeding. But some of the public who come to the zoo don’t take the slightest notice of the signs that we have all over the place, saying ‘Please do not feed these animals’, and continue to hurl bars of chocolate and other tidbits with gay abandon through the bars of the cages. One has, in any sizeable collection of animals, enough veterinary work to do during the course of the year without it being added to by the stupidity, and sometimes the cruelty, of the visitors.

  At one end of the zoo grounds we have a small lake, and here we kept a mixed collection of water fowl, including some quite rare species. They had lived there happily and bred for quite a number of years. Then we had a particularly hot summer. The little stream that fed the lake died away to a mere trickle and the lake itself became more and more shallow. Soon we started finding the odd dead bird which, after post-mortem, gave no satisfactory answers as to why it had died. And then, suddenly, we had a crop of about six birds die all at once, including two of our rare specimens. Tommy Begg viewed with mystification the dismal row of corpses that awaited him on his Monday morning visit.

  ‘What the hell’s the matter with that lake?’ he demanded, irritably. ‘We’ve had the water tested, and there’s nothing wrong with these birds as far as I can see.’

  Then he had an idea.

  ‘The only thing I haven’t looked for is gizzard worm,’ he said. ‘I wonder if it could be that?’

  Seizing the nearest body, which happened to be that of a Spurwinged goose, he carefully slit the gizzard with his scalpel. There was nothing to be seen. Then he opened the crop of the bird, and found the solution to the mystery. For the crop contained approximately an egg-cupful of twelve-bore lead pellets. Examining the crops of the other dead birds we found an equal quantity of lead shot in each one, and in one of them we even found the metal end of a twelve-bore shotgun cartridge. Now the crop of a bird can really be described as its teeth, in the sense that most birds take a certain quantity of sand or gravel or even small pebbles with their food. These lodge in the crop and help to grind and masticate the food as it passes through. As the sand or gravel or small stones are worn away over a period, the bird picks up a fresh supply to replenish its ‘teeth’. These birds had, from somewhere or other, found a large supply of lead pellets and had naturally eaten them, presumably mistaking them for small pebbles or gravel. They certainly acted as teet
h in the crop, but the food was wearing them away and the birds were suffering from lead poisoning.

  Of course, as soon as we realised the mysterious cause of these deaths, we caught up all the birds on the lake and searched the shore line carefully to see if we could find the source of the pellets. As there were so many of them in the crops of the birds that had died, we felt sure that they must have come across a whole boxful of twelve-bore cartridges, or something similar, but though we searched hard we could not find the spot where the birds had found them. One of the birds that we had removed from the lake started to sicken. It was obviously suffering from lead poisoning, so we tried to save it by the use of calcium disodium versenate injected intravenously. Unfortunately this failed and the bird died. How such a quantity of lead shot could be found in the lake remained a mystery for some time, until we discovered that until after the war the lake had not been a lake at all. It had just been a small valley with a tiny stream running through it. The owner of the property, our present landlord, Major Fraser, had dammed it up and turned it into a small lake. We came to the conclusion that, during the German occupation of the island, somebody had been in possession of a quantity of twelve-bore cartridges and, afraid of being found with them, had buried them in the valley. The gradual action of water and mud had worn away the cardboard cases of the cartridges and had released the pellets in a heap into the water, and during the exceptionally hot summer the water level had dropped, thus allowing the ducks and geese access to areas of mud which they would not otherwise have been able to reach.

  There are, of course, a number of other things that happen in the zoo against which you are completely powerless to protect yourself. For example, our African civets gave birth to a litter of cubs. This was quite an event as not many zoos had managed to breed civets. For three days the female proved an exemplary mother and then, for some reason unknown to us, she turned on her cubs and ate them.

  Then there was the case of our Serval cats. These handsome, long-legged cats, with their pricked ears, short tails and coats a lovely orangey-brown heavily spotted with black, are very beautiful creatures indeed, and we were extremely pleased when Tammy had two kittens. She too proved to be an excellent mother and for about a week the kittens throve and suckled well and she seemed very contented. And then, one day, on looking into her den, we discovered both cubs dead. Why this should have happened we had no idea. The cubs were completely unmarked so they obviously hadn’t been bitten by her. But a post-mortem soon revealed what the trouble was. They had died of suffocation. Tammy, during the night presumably, had rolled over, lain on top of the cubs, and suffocated them both without realising it. This sometimes happens to domestic cats, with their first litter of babies, until they’ve learnt the arts of motherhood