Catch Me a Colobus

by Gerald Durrell

  Three of the birds were extraordinarily wild and Shep said he got the impression they must be wild-caught birds and not ones that had been bred in captivity. The fourth bird, however, was remarkably docile. This was one of the cock birds. He was so docile, in fact, that we began to get a little suspicious. But Shep fed them and gave them water and, as they were so nervous, we covered the aviary with hessian so that they wouldn’t be frightened by any members of the public passing close by. The following morning Shep and I went to look at them, and the docile cock bird was even more docile; in fact, so docile that it was obvious there was something wrong with him. But while we were phoning up Tommy Begg to get his advice, the bird died. Tommy came and did an immediate post-mortem examination, and we soon discovered the cause of death. The bird’s lungs were riddled with aspigilosis. This is a particularly virulent form of fungus disease which, once it attacks the lungs, spreads with ferocious rapidity, and for which there is no known cure. The bird might have lived, even in that condition, for some years, but the long and arduous trip had been too much for it.

  It had stirred up the lung complaint and the bird had died in consequence.

  ‘I think it was a good idea of yours to get two pairs,’ I said, gloomily, to Shep.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You know, I had a feeling that something like this might happen. Wouldn’t it have been awful if that had been one of the only pair that had been sent?’

  I couldn’t have agreed with him more.

  Now we were left with two hens and one cock bird, but as far as we could see they were all in very good condition and so we had high hopes that we might be able to breed from them. They had the whole of the summer and the following winter to settle down, and by the spring they had become comparatively tame. The cock bird seemed to fancy one hen bird more than the other, and so we ran those two regularly in one aviary and kept the old hen separately. Then, one morning, Shep came bursting into my office, carrying in his arms the female White-eared pheasant.

  ‘Good God,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter? She hasn’t gone and scalped herself or anything, has she?’

  For pheasants have a habit, when they are frightened, of flying upwards like rockets and hitting their heads on the wire tops of the cages, sometimes scalping themselves completely.

  ‘No, it’s worse than that,’ said Shep. ‘She’s egg-bound.’

  The bird had obviously been straining for some considerable time to pass the egg, and was in a very exhausted state. We gave her some glucose and water, and I phoned up Tommy Begg. He told me to give her a shot of penicillin and then try all the normal remedies for easing the egg out intact. So we injected her, and then, with the aid of oil, steam from a boiling kettle, and every remedy we could think of, endeavoured to extract the egg. But it was no use. It was impossible to do, and the bird was far too exhausted to help us. There was only one thing to be done, and that was to break the egg inside her and then remove it piecemeal, a very dangerous procedure which might well lead to peritonitis, as we all knew. We succeeded in getting the egg out, and all the contents, and gave her a gentle enema with warm water just in case there had been any bits that had escaped our notice inside. Then we put her in a dark box in a warm place and left her, we hoped, to recover. But a couple of hours later she was dead. Shep and I stood looking down at her body.

  ‘Well,’ I said, attempting to look on the cheerful side, ‘we’ve still got a pair, at any rate.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Shep. ‘We’ve got a pair, I suppose. But he doesn’t really fancy that hen, you know.’

  ‘Well, he’ll just jolly well have to fancy her,’ I said.

  So we put them in together. It was too late for them to breed that season, so we waited for the following spring anxiously. By this time they had settled down quite well together and the cock bird seemed to be showing certain signs of affection towards the hen. Then, one morning, Shep came into the office, looking as gloomy as he could possibly look.

  ‘It’s the White-eareds again,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, God, not again!’ I said. ‘Now what’s happened?’

  ‘You come and look,’ he said.

  We walked up to the aviaries and stared in. There was the cock bird limping around so heavily that I thought, for a moment, he must have broken his leg. It was Shep’s guess that during the night something had frightened him and he had flown up, and as he fell backwards had caught his toe in the wire and wrenched the muscles in his thigh, possibly damaging some of the nerves. Shep and I looked at each other and we both knew what we were thinking. A cock pheasant, unless he has the use of both legs, finds it very difficult, if not impossible, to tread the hen successfully. Unless we could cure the leg it looked as though we had no chance of breeding the White-eared pheasants. With great reluctance we caught the cock bird and I examined his leg and thigh. It was not dislocated at the hip, nor were any of the bones broken, so our original diagnosis that it must be a sprain gave us some hope that it might clear up. We gave him an injection of D.3, a product that we found effected miraculous cures in the paralysis that you sometimes get in monkeys’ hind limbs, and watched his progress day by day. But he didn’t seem to get any better; he just hobbled around the cage, barely putting his foot on the ground, and then only the tip of his toes just to keep his balance. I never said anything to Shep, and Shep never said anything to me, but both of us, in our hearts, were convinced that our efforts to breed the White-eared pheasants were doomed to failure.

  5. Leopards in the Lavatory

  Samuel John Aliru

  c/o Phillip Ansumana

  R.C. School, Bambawullo

  Dear Sir,

  I am here asking you kindly to develop my 221 Kodak film which I am here sending with my brother Phillip Ansumana. If you are able to undertake the developing and printing please do so.

  I would have come with him but I am just composing a song and which I hope to present it to you next week.

  I am also a scholar and I attend the Wesley Secondary School at Sezbwema.

  Yours truly,

  Samuel John Aliru

  Respondez s’il vous plait.

  For some considerable time I had been endeavouring to persuade the BBC to film an animal-collection trip, but they had been very myopic about the whole thing. I tried to convince them that the fascination of the trip lay not only in catching the animals but in keeping them as well, and then bringing them back by sea. I felt this would all make excellent film material. However, they dithered about it for a year or so, before eventually saying yes. I was delighted, as I thought it would be excellent for the Trust. First of all, the publicity would be considerable; secondly, the Trust would be obtaining some nice animals for its collection; and, thirdly, though hitherto I had had to find the money for all my expeditions myself, the BBC would at least be assisting me with financing this one. The Trust at that time, although doing very well, could not afford to start indulging in collecting trips.

  We first thought of going to Guyana, but the political unrest there at the time made it seem a rather unwise spot to choose. I had once been caught in a revolution and had been forced to let half my animals go, and I didn’t want this to happen in the middle of filming a series for the BBC. After some thought I decided on Sierra Leone. It was a part of West Africa that I had never visited, it contained some particularly rare creatures which the Trust could do with, and also I happened to love West Africa and its inhabitants very much indeed. I was delighted when the BBC said that Chris Parsons was going to be the producer. He was an old friend of mine and I had worked with him before; in fact, we had done a mammoth trip through Malaya, Australia and New Zealand together, and I knew and liked him enormously. So I went over to Bristol and we formulated our plans. I decided that I and a member of the staff would go out by sea, arrange the base camp, and catch as many animals as we could in the shortest possible space of time, and then the ca
mera crew and Chris Parsons would fly out to join us. We worked it out so that we would have about a fortnight for collecting before they arrived. It was essential to have some animals already caught for some of the film sequences when they arrived. Then I had to decide which member of the staff to take with me. I picked John Hartley, otherwise known as Long John. He is six foot two high and immensely thin, so that he looks rather like a Cruikshank caricature, but he was young and a hard worker and he was wildly enthusiastic when I suggested it to him.

  Then came the very necessary but rather tedious process of collecting all the equipment that we would need for the trip. You are never quite sure, on a trip like this, what will be obtainable in the country itself, and so as to be on the safe side you have to make yourself almost entirely self-supporting. We took hammers and nails, screws, traps and nets and cages of various sorts, babies’ feeding bottles in case we got any young animals, hypodermic syringes and various medicines in case any of the animals got ill, and a host of proprietary products such as Complan, a sort of powdered milk which we found was very useful for rearing baby animals. When this had all been accumulated it made quite a considerable pile. Then, as always seems to happen when you are organising an expedition of any sort to anywhere in the world, a snag arose. We discovered that no ships that called at Freetown would carry animals. In desperation I phoned Elder Dempster and spoke to one of the directors. Luckily he had read some of my books and had liked them, and so they kindly waived their rule about carrying animals on passenger vessels. They said that we could not only go out on the Accra but come back on her too and bring all our animals with us.

  So, on a bleak, grey, drizzly day at Liverpool docks, Long John and I got our mountain of luggage on board the Accra and we set sail that evening. Jacquie had decided not to come with me. She had been to West Africa twice and the climate didn’t agree with her at all. Instead, she was going off on her own with Hope Platt and Ann Peters, my secretary, for another visit to the Argentine.

  It was rather good that during the course of our voyage we ran into one of the worst storms possible. Storms at sea do not worry me in the slightest and I am never seasick, but I was interested to see whether Long John would be. It is no fun having to look after a lot of animals if you are going to be seasick. Luckily, Long John proved to have a stomach like iron and we didn’t miss a single meal. We spent a lot of our time in the smoking-room, relaxing, drinking beer, and looking at all the books we had brought with us on West African fauna and memorising the habits of the creatures that we hoped to collect. Long John would lie spread out in his chair like a ship-wrecked giraffe but, as I pointed out to him, the voyage was the only time that we would have for relaxation so he’d better make the most of it while he could. I also told him that he would have to be prepared to rough it. I drew gloomy pictures of grass huts full of spiders and scorpions, hot beer, having to bathe out of a bucket, and similar terrors of the tropics.

  We arrived at Freetown on a beautiful, blistering hot day, and the lovely aromas of West Africa were wafted across the sea to us; smells of palm oil, flower scents, and rotting vegetation, all combining into a lovely, heady mixture.

  I had been lucky enough to obtain an introduction to Mr Oppenheimer through a Mr Geddes, who is a Trust member, and he had instructed the Diamond Corporation of Sierra Leone to give me all the assistance I required. I knew that we would have to spend some time in Freetown and so one of the things I had done was to write ahead and ask whether they could either book us rooms in a hotel or, if it was possible, get us a small flat somewhere. I was somewhat embarrassed when a chauffeur, in immaculate livery, came on board as soon as the ship had docked and asked me if I was Mr Durrell. I said yes, and he said he had got the car waiting to drive me to one of the Dicor flats, as they call them, which had been put at our disposal during our stay in Freetown. I hadn’t expected much because I had been warned that accommodation in Freetown was cramped and pretty hot and sticky. I asked him to wait while we got all our luggage through Customs, which was done with the utmost efficiency. In fact I think it is the only Customs shed that I have ever been in and out of in so short a space of time with such a mountain of varied goods. We piled these into the back of the enormous four-wheel drive truck that Land Rovers had kindly lent to us, and I got into the posh-looking car with the chauffeur while Long John drove the truck behind. We drove through the town and then, a little way outside it, came to a pleasant area where the houses were set well back in gardens that were a riot of flowers. Presently we went up a curving drive, aflame with hibiscus bushes, and there was a great glittering block of flats. I looked at them in astonishment.

  ‘Is this the place?’ I asked the driver.

  ‘Yessir,’ he said.

  We drew up in front of the flats and immediately stewards in white uniforms appeared and took our bags up to the third floor where we were ushered into a flat that took my breath away. To begin with, it was enormous; the main living-room could have held about fifty people. Secondly, it looked like a Hollywood set. Thirdly, it was air-conditioned, and fourthly, from the veranda that ran along the front of the living-room, you had a magnificent view right down over the hills to Lumley Beach, one of the best beaches in Sierra Leone, that stretches for miles.

  ‘Well,’ said Long John, looking around, ‘this is a bit of all right, isn’t it? I don’t mind this sort of grass shack, if this is what you meant.’

  ‘I didn’t mean anything of the sort,’ I said severely. ‘You wait till we get up country; then you’ll really have to rough it. This is just a little bit of . . . er . . . extra, as it were. We’re very lucky to have it.’

  I wandered into the kitchen and found the steward in there. He stood smartly to attention.

  ‘Are you the steward?’ I inquired.

  ‘Yessir,’ he said, beaming. ‘I am the steward for this flat. My name is John. I am also the cook, sir.’

  I glanced round the kitchen, which was gleaming and immaculate, and spotted in one corner an enormous fridge.

  ‘I suppose,’ I said tentatively, ‘I suppose you haven’t got any beer, have you, John?’

  ‘Yessir! Yessir! I bring it straight away, sir.’

  I went back to the living-room and sat down in a chair, still a bit bewildered by all this luxury. Long John came sauntering in. He’d been exploring the rest of the flat.

  ‘There’re three bedrooms,’ he said, ‘and all of them are almost as large as this room. It’s incredible.’

  ‘Well I’ve discovered that there’s some iced beer,’ I said. ‘So I don’t suppose we’ll starve.’

  We had a great number of things to do and people to see. I had to get the permits for collecting animals, and for their export, and make contact with various people we thought might be helpful to us when we were up country. The awful part about this was that our enormous Land-Rover was classified as a lorry, and the same applied even to the smaller one. Lorries are not allowed in the interior streets of Freetown. This problem, however, was solved by the kindness of the District Commissioner, who put a car and a chauffeur at our disposal.

  Then we had to decide where we were going to make our base camp and, after some deliberation, I decided that the focal point should be the town of Kenema, some four hundred miles up country. I chose it because it was quite a sizeable town and therefore would make the getting of food and supplies more easy, and also because the Diamond Corporation had an office there and, as they were being so helpful to us, I felt that if they were within reach it would be a good thing. On the Accra we had met up with Ron Fennel, who was working in Sierra Leone as adviser to the government and had suggested Kenema to me originally. When I had asked him whereabouts he thought we might be able to form a reasonable base camp, he said, ‘Why don’t you try the chrome mines?’ At first I thought he was joking. I didn’t really fancy living in a mine. But he went on to tell me that some five or six miles from Kenema itself there
were some chrome mines and a lot of empty houses which had been built for the miners and their families. The chrome had given out and the whole place was now deserted. He felt sure that I could get official government sanction to take over one, if not two, of these houses and live in it. I thought this an excellent idea and eventually tracked down the official in question who promptly gave me the permission I required.

  I don’t like cities as a rule but Freetown I found enchanting. The streets all had the most delightfully incongruous names, such as St James’s, The Strand or Oxford Street – all terribly British. English colonists are wonderful. Give an Englishman a swamp two thousand miles from anywhere and he will, in a blaze of originality, call it Piccadilly. Charming London buses ploughed through the streets carrying vast quantities of Africans, and on every side there were great skyscrapers, like white honeycombs, standing next to the remnants of the old Freetown, beautiful, large weather-board houses. By and large I preferred the old architecture to the new, but they seemed to blend in well together.