My Family and Other Animals

by Gerald Durrell

  I had spent an interesting and energetic morning with the dogs. We had been up early and out in the olive groves while everything was still dawn-chilly and misted with dew; I had found this an excellent time for collecting insects, for the coldness made them lethargic and unwilling to fly, and thus more easily acquired. I had obtained two butterflies and a moth new to my collection, two unknown beetles, and seventeen locusts which I collected to feed my baby birds with. By the time the sun was well up in the sky and had gathered some heat we had unsuccessfully chased a snake and a green lizard, milked Agathi’s goat (unbeknownst to her) into a collecting jar as we were all thirsty, and dropped in on my old shepherd friend Yani who provided us with some bread and fig cake and a straw hat full of wild strawberries to sustain us.

  We made our way down to a small bay where the dogs lay panting or crab-hunted in the shallows while I, spread-eagled like a bird in the warm, transparent water, lay face downwards holding my breath and drifting over the landscape of the sea. When it grew close to midday and my stomach told me lunch would be ready I dried off in the sun, the salt forming in patches on my skin like a silky pattern of delicate lace, and started off home. As we meandered through the olive groves, shady and cool as a well between the great trunks, I heard a series of explosions in the myrtle groves away to the right. I moved over to investigate, keeping the dogs close to me, for Greek hunters were jumpy and would in most cases shoot before stopping to identify what they were shooting at. The danger applied to me too so I talked loudly to the dogs as a precaution. ‘Here, Roger… heel! Good boy. Puke, Widdle! Widdle, come here! Heel… that’s a good boy. Puke, come back…’ I spotted the hunter sitting on a giant olive root and mopping his brow and, as soon as I knew he had seen us, I approached him.

  He was a plump, white little man, with a moustache like an elongated black toothbrush over his prim little mouth, and dark glasses covered eyes as round and as liquid as a bird’s. He was dressed in the height of fashion for hunting – polished riding boots, new breeches in white cord, an atrociously cut hacking jacket in mustard and green tweed, beset with so many pockets that it looked like the eaves of a house hung with swallows’ nests. His green Tyrolean hat, with its bunch of scarlet and orange feathers, was tilted to the back of his curly head, and he was mopping his ivory brow with a large handkerchief that smelled strongly of cheap cologne.

  ‘Kalimera, kalimera,’ he greeted me, beaming and puffing. ‘Welcome. Houf! It’s a hot day, isn’t it?’

  I agreed, and offered him some of the strawberries that remained in my hat. He looked at them rather apprehensively, as if fearing they were poisoned, took one delicately in his plump fingers and smiled his thanks as he popped it into his mouth. I got the impression that he had never before eaten strawberries out of a hat with his fingers and was not quite sure about the rules.

  ‘I’ve had a good morning’s hunt,’ he said proudly, pointing to where his game bag lay, bulging ominously, blood-bespattered and feathery. From the mouth of it protruded the wing and head of a lark, so blasted and mangled it was difficult to identify.

  Would he, I inquired, mind if I examined the contents of his bag?

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ he said. ‘You will see I’m quite a marksman.’

  I did see. His bag consisted of four blackbirds, a golden oriole, two thrushes, eight larks, fourteen sparrows, two robins, a stonechat, and a wren. The last, he admitted, was a bit small but very sweet to eat if cooked with paprika and garlic.

  ‘But this,’ he said proudly, ‘is the best. Be careful, because it’s not quite dead.’

  He handed me a bloodstained handkerchief and I unwrapped it carefully. Inside, gasping and exhausted, a great, hard seal of blood on its wing, was a hoopoe.

  ‘That is not, of course, good to eat,’ he explained to me, ‘but the feathers will look good in my hat.’

  I had long wanted to possess one of these splendid, heraldic-looking birds, with their fine crests and their salmon-pink and black bodies, and I had searched everywhere for their nests so that I could hand-rear some young ones. Now here was a live hoopoe in my hands or, to be more exact, a half-dead one. I examined it carefully and found that it in fact looked worse than it was, for all it had was a broken wing, and this was a clean break as far as I could judge. The problem was how to get my proud, fat hunter to part with it.

  Suddenly I had an inspiration. I started by saying that it made me feel bitter and annoyed that my mother was not there at that moment for she was, I explained, a world-famous authority on birds. (Mother could, with difficulty, distinguish between a sparrow and an ostrich). She had, in fact, written the definitive work on birds for the hunters of England. To prove it, I produced from my collecting bag a battered and much-consulted copy of A Bird Book for the Pocket by Edmund Sanders, a book I was never without.

  My fat friend was most impressed. He turned over the pages muttering appreciative ‘po po po po’s’ to himself. My Mother, he said, must be a remarkable woman to have written such a book. The reason I wished she was there at this moment, I went on, was because she had never seen a hoopoe. She had seen every other bird on the island, including the rare kingfisher; to prove it I took the scalp of a dead kingfisher I had found and used as a talisman in my collecting bag and laid it in front of him. He was struck with this little skull-cap of bright blue feathers. They were much prettier than hoopoe feathers when one considered it, I said. It took a little time for the thought to penetrate but I soon had him begging that I would take the hoopoe to my mother, in exchange for the scrap of velvety blue feathers. I put on a nice display of astonished reluctance fading into grovelling gratitude, put the wounded hoopoe inside my shirt and hurried home with it, leaving my hunter friend sitting on his olive root looking like Tweedledum and trying happily to fix the kingfisher scalp to his hat with a pin.

  When I got home I took my new acquisition to my room and examined it carefully. To my relief, its long, curved rubbery beak, like a slender scimitar, was intact, for without the use of this delicate organ I knew that the bird could not survive. Apart from exhaustion and fright the only thing wrong with it appeared to be a broken wing. The break was high in the upper wing and, on investigating it gently, I found that it was a clean break, the bone having been snapped like a dry twig and not smashed and splintered like a green one. I carefully cut away the feathers with my dissecting scissors, washed the scab of blood and feathers away with warm water and disinfectant, splinted the bone with two curved slivers of bamboo, and bound the whole thing up tight. It was quite a professional job and I was proud of it. The only trouble was that it was too heavy and when I released the bird it fell over on its side, dragged down by the weight of the splint. After some experiment, I managed to make a much lighter splint out of bamboo and sticking plaster, and with a thin strip of bandage bound the whole thing firmly to the bird’s side. Then, with a pipette, I gave it a drink of water and placed it in a cardboard box covered with a cloth to recover.

  I called the hoopoe Hiawatha and the family greeted its arrival in our midst with unqualified approval, for they liked hoopoes and, moreover, it was the only exotic bird species they could all recognize at twenty paces. Finding things to eat for Hiawatha kept me very busy during the first few days of her convalescence, for she was a finicky patient, would only eat live food and was choosy about that. I had to release her on the floor of my room and throw the tit-bits at her – the succulent grasshoppers, as green as jade, locusts with plump thighs, their wings as crisp as biscuits, small lizards and tiny frogs. These she would grab and bang vigorously on any suitable hard surface – a chair or bed leg, the edge of the door or table – until she was sure that they were dead. Then, a couple of quick gulps and she would be ready for the next course. One day, when the family had all assembled in my room to watch Hiawatha feed, I gave her an eight-inch slow-worm. With her delicate beak, her finely banded crest, and her beautiful pink and black colour scheme, she looked a very demure bird, even more so because she generally kept
her crest folded back against her skull. But now she took one look at the slow-worm and changed into a predatory monster. Her crest rose and spread itself, quivering like a peacock’s tail, her throat puffed out, she uttered a strange little purring grunt deep in her throat and hopped rapidly and purposefully towards where the slow-worm was dragging along its burnished copper body, oblivious of its fate. Hiawatha paused and, with her splinted and her good wings spread out, she leaned forward and pecked at the slow-worm – a rapid, rapier-thrust of her beak, so quick it was difficult to see. The slow-worm, at the blow, writhed into a lashing figure of eight and I saw to my amazement that Hiawatha’s first blow had completely crushed the reptile’s eggshell fragile skull.

  ‘Good Lord!’ said Larry, equally amazed. ‘Now, that’s what I call a useful bird to have around the house. A few dozen of those around and we wouldn’t have to worry about snakes.’

  ‘I don’t think they could tackle a big one,’ said Leslie judiciously.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind if they just cleaned up the small ones,’ said Larry. ‘That’d be a start.’

  ‘You talk as if the house were full of snakes, dear,’ put in Mother.

  ‘It is,’ answered Larry austerely. ‘What about the Medusa-wig of snakes Leslie found in the bath?’

  ‘They were only water snakes,’ said Mother.

  ‘I don’t care what they were. If Gerry’s going to be allowed to fill the bath with snakes then I shall carry a brace of hoopoes around with me.’

  ‘Ooh, look at it now!’ squeaked Margo.

  Hiawatha had delivered a number of rapid blows down the length of the slow-worm’s body and she was now picking up the still-writhing length and dashing it onto the floor rhythmically, as the fishermen would beat an octopus against the rocks to make it tender. After a time there was no discernible life left in the body; Hiawatha stared down at it, crest up, head on one side. Satisfied, she seized the head in her beak. Slowly, gulping and throwing her head back, she swallowed it inch by inch. In a couple of minutes there was only half an inch of tail protruding from the corner of her beak.

  Hiawatha never grew really tame and she was always nervous, but she learned to tolerate human beings in fairly close proximity to her. When she had settled down I used to take her out onto the veranda where I kept various other birds and let her walk about in the shade of the grape vine. It was not unlike a hospital ward, for at that time I had six sparrows recovering from concussion brought about by being caught in break-back mousetraps set by peasant boys, four blackbirds and a thrush who had been caught by baited fish-hooks set in the olive groves, and half a dozen assorted birds ranging from a tern to a magpie recovering from the effects of gunshot wounds. In addition, there was a nest of young goldfinches and an almost-fledged greenfinch which I was hand-rearing. Hiawatha did not seem to mind the proximity of these other birds but she kept herself to herself, pacing slowly up and down the flagstones, brooding with half-closed eyes, aloofly aristocratic like a beautiful queen imprisoned in some castle. At the sight of a worm, frog, or grasshopper, of course, her behaviour would become anything but queenly.

  About a week after Hiawatha had entered my avian clinic I set off one morning to meet Spiro. This was a sort of daily ritual; he would blow loud blasts on his horn when he reached the edge of the property, which was some fifty acres in extent, and I and the dogs would tear through the olive groves to intercept him somewhere along the drive. Panting for breath, I would burst out of the olive groves, the dogs barking hysterically in front of me, and we would hold up the great, gleaming Dodge, its hood back, Spiro in his peaked cap crouching, massive, brown, and scowling behind the wheel. I would take my place on the running board, holding tight to the windscreen, and Spiro would drive on, the dogs in an ecstasy of mock fierceness trying to bite the front tyres. The conversation every morning was also a ritual that never varied.

  ‘Good mornings, Master Gerrys,’ Spiro would say. ‘Hows are yous?’

  Having ascertained that I had not developed any dangerous disease during the night, he would inquire after the rest of us.

  ‘And hows the familys?’ he would ask. ‘Hows your mothers? And Master Larrys? And Master Leslies? And Missy Margos?’

  By the time I had reassured him as to their health we would have reached the villa, where he would lumber from one member of the family to the other checking as to whether my information was correct. I was rather bored by the daily, almost journalistic interest Spiro took in the family’s health, as if they were royalty, but he persisted as if some awful fate might have overtaken them during the night. One day, in a fit of devilry, I told him, in response to his earnest inquiry, that they were all dead; the car swerved off the drive and crashed straight into a large oleander bush, showering Spiro and myself with pink blossoms and nearly knocking me off the running board.

  ‘Gollys, Master Gerrys! You mustn’t say things like thats!’ he roared, pounding the wheel with his fist. ‘You makes me scarce when you say things likes that. You makes me sweats! Don’t you ever say that agains.’

  This particular morning, having reassured himself as to the health of each member of the family, he lifted a small strawberry basket covered with a fig leaf from the seat by his side.

  ‘Here,’ he said, scowling at me. ‘I gots a presents for you.’

  I took the leaf off the basket. Inside crouched two naked and repulsive-looking birds. I was enchanted and thanked Spiro profusely, for they were baby jays, as I could see by their sprouting wing-feathers. I had never had jays before. I was so pleased with them that I took them with me when I went to my studies with Mr Kralefsky. This was the advantage of having a tutor who was as mad about birds as I was. Together we spent an exciting and interesting morning trying to teach them to open their mouths and feed, when we should have been committing the glittering pageantry of English history to memory. But the babies were singularly stupid and refused to accept either Kralefsky or myself as a substitute mother.

  I took them back home at lunch-time and during the afternoon tried to get them to behave sensibly, but without success. They would only take food if I forced their beaks open and pushed it down their throats with my finger, a process that they strongly objected to, as well they might. Eventually, having shoved enough down them to keep them more or less alive, I left them in their strawberry basket on the veranda and went to fetch Hiawatha, who had shown a marked preference for having her food served on the veranda rather than in the privacy of my room. I placed her on the flagstones and started to throw her the grasshoppers I had caught for her. She hopped eagerly, snapped up the first, killed it, and swallowed it with almost indecent haste.

  As she sat there gulping, looking rather like an elderly, angular dowager duchess who had swallowed a sorbet the wrong way at a ball, the two baby jays, lolling their heads, bleary-eyed, over the edge of their basket, caught sight of her. Immediately, they started to call wheezily, open-mouthed, their heads wobbling from side to side like two very old men looking over a fence. Hiawatha put up her crest and stared at them. I did not expect her to take much notice, for she always ignored the other baby birds when they called out to be fed, but she hopped nearer the basket and surveyed the baby jays interestedly. I threw her a grasshopper and she grabbed it, killed it, and then, to my complete astonishment, hopped up to the basket and crammed the insect down the gaping maw of one of the jays. Both babies wheezed and screamed and flapped their wings in delight and Hiawatha looked as startled as I was at what she had done. I threw her another grasshopper and she killed it and fed the other baby. After this, I would feed Hiawatha in my room and then bring her down onto the veranda periodically where she would act the part of mother to the baby jays.

  She never showed any other maternal feelings for the babies; she would not, for example, seize the little encapsulated blobs of excreta from the babies’ behinds when they cocked them over the edge of the nest. This task of cleaning up was left to me. Once she had fed the babies so that they stopped screaming, she lost
all interest in them. I concluded it must be something in the timbre of their call that aroused her maternal instincts, for although I experimented with the other babies I possessed and they screamed their lungs out, she took no notice at all. Gradually, the baby jays decided to let me feed them and as soon as they stopped calling at her appearance Hiawatha took no further notice of them. It was not simply that she ignored them; she seemed unaware of their existence.

  When her wing had healed, I removed the splint and found that although the bone had set well the wing muscles had become weak with lack of use, and Hiawatha tended to favour the wing, always walking rather than flying. To make her exercise it I used to take her down into the olive groves and throw her up into the air so that she was forced to use her wings to make a safe landing. Gradually, she started to take short flights as the wing strengthened and I began to think that I would be able to release her, when she met her death. I had taken her out onto the veranda one day and while I was feeding my assortment of babies Hiawatha flew or, rather, glided down to a nearby olive grove to practise her flying and make a light snack on some daddy long-legs that were just hatching.

  I was absorbed in feeding the babies and was not taking much notice when suddenly I heard hoarse, despairing cries from Hiawatha. I vaulted over the veranda rail and raced through the trees, but I was too late. A large, mangy, battle-scarred feral cat was standing with the limp form of the hoopoe in his mouth, his great green eyes staring at me over her pink body. I gave a shout and ran forward; the cat turned with oil-like fluidity and leaped into the myrtle bushes carrying Hiawatha’s body with him. I gave chase but once the cat had reached the tangled sanctuary of the myrtles it was impossible to track him down. I returned, furious and upset, to the olive grove, where all that was left to remind me of Hiawatha were some pink feathers and a few drops of blood scattered like rubies on the grass. I swore that if I ever came across the cat again I would kill it if I could. Apart from anything else, it presented a threat to the rest of my bird collection.