Golden Bats & Pink Pigeons

by Gerald Durrell

  He was now sweating even more profusely than before. He leant his rotund elbows on the forms to prevent another unfortunate episode, and took Ann’s passport. Laboriously he copied out her place and date of birth, her age and her profession. This was all plain sailing and he handed her back her passport with a wide glittering, triumphant smile; the smile of a man who has the situation under control. His confidence was premature, however, for, flushed with enthusiasm, he leant forward to take my passport and another sly gust of wind scattered his forms like confetti across the airport lounge. It took several minutes to retrieve them all and by that time Ann’s form had a handsome boot mark on it where a helpful member of the airport police had stamped on it as it slid past him along the floor.

  We re-established the Immigration Officer at his desk and he accepted, with gratitude, Ann’s offer that she stood behind him and held down his migratory paper forms while he devoted his time to filling them in. Rid of the burden of this paperwork, as it were, he was now free to show his mettle as Immigration Officer. He took my passport and riffled it with his chocolate-coloured fingers like an expert card sharper. He gave me what I think was supposed to be a shrewd and penetrating glance, but it was far too beguiling to be this.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ he asked.

  As Rodrigues had been waterlogged for two weeks and we were the first plane in from Mauritius in that time and as there was only that plane on the airport, I found the question baffling. If it had been made to me at London Airport, say, with hundreds of planes an hour coming in, it would have had some relevance, but here in Rodrigues with, at best, only four planes a week the question took on a slightly ‘Looking-Glass’ quality, I resisted the impulse to say that I had just swum ashore, and told him instead that I had come from Mauritius. He puzzled over the ‘author/zoologist’ designation under ‘Occupation’ in my passport, obviously thinking it might be something as dangerous as CIA or MI5; then, with some difficulty over the ‘zoologist’, he copied it out slowly and carefully on to his form. Then he stamped my passport and handed it back to me, with his ingratiating smile, and I made way for John. Meanwhile, Ann was having a struggle with the forms, as quite a stiff breeze had sprung up. She was now helped in her task by the policeman who had contributed his boot mark to her form. He seemed determined that the police force should not be lagging behind the immigration authorities in devotion to duty.

  The immigration man now took John’s passport and asked him where he had come from.

  ‘Yorkshire, in England,’ said John innocently, before I could stop him.

  ‘No, no,’ said the immigration man, confused by this largesse of information, ‘I mean where you come from now?’

  ‘Oh,’ said John, ‘Mauritius.’

  The immigration man wrote it down carefully. He opened John’s passport and laboriously copied out the relevant information regarding John’s nascence. Then he looked at John’s occupation and saw the dreaded and incomprehensible word ‘herpetologist’. His eyes shut and his face wrinkled in alarm. He looked like a man who every night for years has awoken, screaming, from a dream in which his superiors have not only asked him to define what a ‘herpetologist’ was but to spell it as well. Now his dream had come true. He licked his lips, opened his eyes, and glanced nervously at the dreaded word, hoping it had gone away. It stared back at him implacably, ununderstandable and unspellable. He made a valiant attempt.

  ‘Herpa … er … Herper …’ he said, and looked desperately at the policeman for help. The policeman leant over his shoulder and glanced at the word that was confusing his colleague, with the amused air of one for whom The Times crossword puzzle is child’s play, then his eyes alighted on ‘herpetologist’ and he became less confident.

  ‘Herp … herp …’ he said, dolefully and unhelpfully.

  ‘Herpa … herper …’ said the immigration man.

  ‘Herp … herp … herp …’ said the policeman.

  It began to sound like one of the lesser-known, and more incomprehensible German operas.

  ‘Herpetologist,’ I said, briskly.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said the Immigration Officer, wisely.

  ‘What is that?’ asked the policeman, more bluntly.

  ‘It means someone who studies snakes,’ I explained.

  He gazed at the word, fascinated.

  ‘You have come here to study snakes?’ asked the policeman, at last, with the air of one humouring a dangerous lunatic.

  ‘Here, there are no snakes,’ said his colleague, speaking with the authority of one who would never let a snake wriggle through Immigration if he could help it.

  ‘Well, no, we’ve come here to catch bats,’ I said, incautiously. They stared at me, disbelievingly.

  ‘Bats?’ asked the policeman.

  ‘Bats is not snakes,’ said the Immigration Officer, with the air of Charles Darwin giving the fruits of his life’s researches to the world.

  ‘No, I know,’ I said, ‘but we have come here at the invitation of the Commissioner, Mr Hazeltine, to catch bats.’ I felt sure that Mr Hazeltine, whom I had never met, would forgive me this innocent falsehood. Both the policeman and the immigration man nearly stood to attention at the mention of the Commissioner’s name.

  ‘You know Mr Hazeltine?’ asked the immigration man.

  ‘He asked us to come,’ I said, simply.

  The immigration man knew when he was beaten. He laboriously and carefully spelt out ‘Herpetologist’, stamped John’s passport and smiled at us with evident relief. We shook hands with him and the helpful policeman, and as we did so, they wished us a happy stay in Rodrigues. I wondered why it was necessary to burden a simple, straightforward and happy island people with a bureaucracy that was so out of place and so futile in such a setting.

  We got into the hotel jeep and were driven along the winding roads, through an eroded and desiccated landscape. Here and there the edges of the road were green and there were pockets of dusty trees and bushes around ramshackle, corrugated iron huts. The driver assured us that, after its recent rainfall, the island was green. I wondered, looking at the dry and dusty landscape under the fierce sun, what it had looked like before.

  Eventually, the jeep edged its way down the one main street of Port Mathurin, the metropolis of Rodrigues. This was edged with a scrappy collection of wooden and corrugated iron houses and shops, but its length was as bright as a flower bed with the inhabitants of the port dressed in their bright clothes, busy about their shopping. A little outside the port, the jeep came to a standstill and there, on the crest of the hill above us, was the hotel. It was a low structure with a broad, steeply-pitched roof covering a deep, shady verandah that surrounded the building. This verandah was approached by wide steps and had complicated, wrought iron railings, painted white, running round its length. On the verandah were scattered tables and long cane chairs. The hotel, perched on the hilltop, commanded a view of the whole of Port Mathurin and the reef some three miles away. It resembled nothing so much as a rather exaggerated film set for a Somerset Maugham story, and this atmosphere was enhanced by the steep path leading up to it, flanked by hibiscus bushes covered with large magenta and orange flowers, that looked like paper cutouts, and a herd of slightly grubby, but most attentive and welcoming pigs that were holding a convention under and around the hotel itself.

  Once we had established ourselves and made contact with Mr Hazeltine, the Commissioner, who lived in an imposing old residence, surrounded by massive trees loaded with epiphytes within a walled garden and whose gate was guarded by a belligerent-looking cannon, we contacted Mr Marie, the Head of the Forestry Department, and he offered to drive us out to view the bats. According to him, the bat colony resided in the valley of Cascade Pigeon, some three miles away from Port Mathurin. He thought that there might be two or three odd specimens living a solitary existence in other parts of the island, but he was sure that the bulk of the colony was in this valley. So we piled into his Land-Rover and, together with young Jean Claude Raba
ude, a Forest worker, who was also a keen amateur naturalist and who had helped Anthony Cheke on his expedition, we drove out to the valley.

  When we got there, we parked the jeep and made our way down the rocky, slippery slope, along a path that resembled nothing so much as a stream bed. Presently, about halfway to the bottom of the valley, we came on to a rocky promontory that commanded a view up the valley slope to the left. Here the trees were fairly low, some twenty feet in height, but in their midst grew a number of very large mango trees. It was these tall trees, with their broad, glossy, shade-giving leaves, that constituted the roosting area for the bats.

  At first glance through the binoculars it appeared that each mango tree had produced a strange crop of furry fruit, chocolate brown and golden red, but as the bats yawned and stretched, you could see the leather, umbrella-like wings were dark chocolate brown, while the fur on the bodies and heads ranged from bright, glittering yellow, like spun gold, to a deep fox red. They were, without doubt, the most colourful and handsome fruit bats I had ever seen. They had rounded heads with small, neat ears and short, somewhat blunt muzzles that made them look like pomeranians. The bulk of the colony hung in these three mango trees, and solitary individuals roosted in the smaller trees around.

  Having located the colony, we had to try to assess its numbers with some degree of accuracy. As many bats were roosting deep in the shady mango trees, they were not always visible and as, periodically, one or more bats would fly from one mango tree to another, or simply flap their way in a leisurely fashion across the hillside and back again, the count presented problems. First of all, the five of us counted the colony from where we stood, and we took a number mid-way between all our estimates. We felt this was fairly haphazard, since a lot of bats were on the move, but even so we were encouraged by the fact that two of us had counted more than the number that Anthony Cheke had estimated two years previously.

  According to Jean Claude, who was convinced that the colony had increased substantially since Cheke’s day, the best time for counting – that is, when the bats were the stillest – was first thing in the morning when they had just arrived back from their night feed, and at noon when the sun was hottest. As it was only eleven o clock, we decided to wait until noon and count again. In the meantime, we looked round for a suitable spot in which to set up the net, should we decide to catch any bats.

  It was John who found the perfect glade, a clearing facing down towards the valley, surrounded by big trees which were ideal for slinging the nets from, and which provided us with maximum shelter from the sun. In the torrid quiet of noon, we counted the bats again. They were very still now, with only the occasional movement when they spread their dark wings and flapped them to keep cool. We counted over one hundred. Greatly elated, but determined to be cautious, I sent John round to the other side of the valley with Jean Claude to do another count. Then, to make finally sure, we counted them flying from the roost that night and again the next morning. Our final estimate was that the colony consisted of between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and thirty individuals, certainly not an impressive number but heartening, nevertheless, as it meant that the colony had increased by some thirty-five specimens since Cheke counted them.

  Thus encouraged, we decided that the maximum number we could take without damaging the survival chances of the colony and the minimum number we needed for successful breeding groups was eighteen specimens. As with most animals which lived in colonies, I felt that the bats would need the stimulus of their own kind about them if they were to settle down and breed successfully, therefore, it was useless thinking in terms of one pair or even two pairs. The numbers had to give the impression of a colony, albeit a small one. But it is one thing to decide how many and what sexes of an animal you are going to catch, even if you know where it is; quite another to accomplish this successfully.

  The clearing we had chosen for our operations was about a quarter of a mile from the colony, and lay on the route down the valley which they seemed to take when flying off to feed each evening. When they actually flew down the valley, it was at a slightly lower level than the clearing but here I was hoping that the Jak fruit (now making the hotel unique as a hostelry) would come into its own and lure the bats up to our level.

  The method of capture we chose was simplicity itself. With the aid of Jean Claude and a compatriot (who distressed my intrepid explorer’s instincts by wearing a tee shirt emblazoned with the words ‘I dig President Kennedy’) we hitched up some eight mist nets to the trees so that they formed a hollow square or box, some fifty feet by seventy feet, with walls about forty feet high. Then, out of wire netting, we built something that looked like a miniature coffin, heavily disguised with branches, and slung it in readiness in the centre of the nets. This was to be the repository for the fruit. Thus, having organised everything satisfactorily, we sped back to the hotel, had a hasty meal and returned to the valley, armed with torches and fruit, just as the twilight was turning greenish, preparatory to fading into grey.

  The bats were waking up, getting ready for their nightly sortie for food. They were more vocal and they kept taking off from the mango trees and flying in anxious circles round it before settling again. It was obvious that it was not quite dark enough for them yet. We stuffed our wire coffin with over-ripe mangoes, bananas and pineapples, and then I approached the Jak fruit with a machete. Without waiting for it to protest, I split it in twain lengthways, and then wished I had not done so. I had believed that it was impossible for the smell of this endearing fruit to get any stronger, but I was wrong. Within seconds, apparently, the whole of Rodrigues smelt strongly of Jak fruit. Hoping the bats would appreciate it, even if we did not, we stuffed the fruit into the coffin and hauled the whole thing up until, in its shroud of branches, it hung some twenty feet up in the centre of the nets. Then we found ourselves a suitable hiding place in the bushes overlooking the trap, and settled down to wait. Unfortunately, owing to the fact that we had been forced to discard most of our clothing in an effort to save weight, we were all clad in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, a garb that did not help us when approximately three-quarters of the mosquito population of Rodrigues decided to join us in our vigil.

  So we waited, our ears ringing with the shrill, excited, friendly cries of the mosquitoes, while the green twilight faded into grey and then an even darker shade. Just before it became too dark to see, the bats started to flight. They flew singly, or in little groups of three or four, heading down the valley towards Port Mathurin. As they flapped across the sky at the edge of our clearing, they looked astonishingly big and their slow, heavy flight made them resemble something out of a Dracula movie. With praise-worthy single-mindedness, they flew down the valley, not deviating to right or left, and completely ignoring us, our nets and our odoriferous bait of overripe fruit. We sat there in a haze of mosquitoes, scratching ourselves and glowering at the passing stream of bats. Presently, the stream thinned to a trickle and then to the odd late risers, flapping hurriedly after the bulk of the colony. Soon there were no bats at all. Not one of them had displayed the faintest interest in our Jak-fruit-permeated clearing.

  ‘Well, this is jolly’ said John, stretching his lanky form out of one of the bushes, like a wounded giraffe. ‘I’m rather glad we came really, I would hate to think of all these mosquitoes going hungry’

  ‘Yes, it’s a form of conservation programme really’ I said. ‘You can imagine how many mosquitoes we have saved from starvation tonight. In years to come, the World Wildlife Fund will probably erect a posthumous Golden Ark on this spot to commemorate our contribution to nature.’

  ‘It’s all very well for you to joke,’ said Ann, bitterly. ‘You don’t seem to be affected when they bite you, whereas I itch like hell and then swell up and go red.’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said, soothingly, ‘just close your eyes and try to work out what we are going to do with all those bats we are going to catch.’

  Ann grunted derisively. After a couple of hour
s, when no bats had appeared and when the mosquitoes had returned for the main course, as it were, we held a council of war. I felt it was important that at least one of us should stay there all night in case a bat or bats returned and got caught. The nets were slung up in such a complicated way that it was impossible to lower them, and I did not want any bats to hang in the nets all night, should one be caught. After some discussion, we all decided to stay and made ourselves as comfortable as we could among the bushes, having decided that one would keep watch, while the others slept.

  Then, in the early hours of the morning, the rain began. There was no warning, no thunder, no lightning, none of those brash preliminaries. There was suddenly a roar like an avalanche of steel ball-bearings as the clouds parted and dropped rain on us with the concentrated fury of a suddenly opened flood gate. Within seconds, we were soaked and sitting in what appeared to be the opening stages of a waterfall, that had all the promise of growing into something like Niagara. The rain, in contrast to the hot, steamy night, felt as if it had newly emerged from some glacier, and we shivered with cold. We removed from the bushes to a spot under the tree as this afforded us a little more shelter; the leaves were being machine-gunned by huge raindrops and the water was running in streams down the tree trunks.

  We stood it for an hour, then an investigation proved that the sky over the whole island was black and stretched, as far as we could make out, from Cascade Pigeon across the Indian Ocean to Delhi. It was obvious that no self-respecting bat was going to fly around in that torrential downpour, so we packed up our dripping equipment and made our way back to the hotel where we could at least shelter from the rain and the mosquitoes, and snatch two or three hours’ sleep. We were determined to be back at the nets at dawn, for this was when the bats would return from their feeding grounds and might conceivably blunder into our nets.