The days passed, and at regular intervals we visited the two villages. They assured us that they had dug and dug with no success – which I could well believe. All I could do was to raise the price we were willing to pay for the rabbits to an astronomical degree, in the hopes that this would give them the incentive to go on trying no matter how often they failed. But each time we came away from the villages empty-handed I felt more and more depressed.
And then, one day, our, luck seemed to change. We went on our routine call to the villages and in the one called Parras, as soon as we drew up in the dusty main street opposite the mayor’s house, we could tell from the way he rushed out beaming and waving to us, that they had had success. He led us through his house and out into his tiny backyard and there, in the cages that we had left with him, were three Teporingoes. They were all unharmed, sitting placidly in the cages and seeming as phlegmatic about their capture as the original one. Carefully we lifted them out and sexed them, and my spirits dropped slightly, because all proved to be female. Nevertheless, four Teporingoes were better than none, so we paid the triumphant mayor for the rabbits and took them back to the flat. As an experiment we tried putting two in one cage, but we soon found that they were of a pugnacious disposition and had to keep them all caged separately.
The new rabbits took to the strange diet that we had to give them as easily as the first one, and this was a hopeful sign. The one thing that really worried me was that our time was running out. We had only a few days left before Shep was due to fly back to Jersey with whatever we had managed to acquire, and the one thing that we didn’t have was our full quota of Volcano rabbits. Most important of all, we still had no male. A couple of days after Shep’s departure the rest of us were due to make our way down to Vera Cruz to board the ship, so there would be no time left for us to catch more Volcano rabbits. We went out to the villages every day now, inciting them to further efforts and raising the price to a ridiculous sum but, although they obviously were working hard at it, no more Teporingoes were forthcoming. In desperation, I felt that there was only one thing to be done. Taking Dix with me to act as translator I went back to see Dr Morales of the Ministry of Agriculture, and explained my predicament. I pointed out that, having travelled so far and spent so much money trying to obtain the Volcano rabbits, to take only four – and all of them females – back to Jersey was futile to say the least. If he would allow my permit to be re-issued in Dix’s name, Dix could then try and obtain six more Teporingoes after I’d left. Among those I was fairly certain there would be some males. To my relief, Dr Morales was most sympathetic. He saw my point, and immediately agreed to transfer my permit to Dix, for which I was most grateful.
The next twenty-four hours were a tremendous rush. Special traveling cages had to be built for the Teporingoes, and a special cage for the Thick-billed parrots – one that would not only be suitably light for air travel but which would be indestructible – for the parrots had formidably large beaks and could demolish anything made out of plain wood in a quarter of an hour or so, and I had no desire to have them loose in a plane flying across the Atlantic.
The day came when Shep had to leave with his precious cargo, and we went down to the airport to see him off. He promised me that he would get Catha to phone me a couple of days after his arrival to let me know how our four Volcano rabbits were faring. We had found that it was simpler to communicate with the Trust by telephone than by cable because the cable came out at the other end in such a garbled form that whoever you’d sent it to was forced to reply by asking you what you’d said in the first place. By the time this had gone on for two or three cables it became infinitely cheaper to telephone.
A couple of days later Catha phoned me. She told me that the Volcano rabbits, the parrots, and Shep, had all arrived intact. The rabbits had settled down, as had the parrots, and there was nothing to worry about. This was a tremendous relief, but the next thing was that Dix should procure some more Teporingoes for us, among which would be a male. I briefed him on this job so often that I must have become a bore. I impressed upon him that he must sex carefully all the rabbits that might be caught and, although he could accept another three females, after that – if any females were caught – he must let them go and keep trying until he got a sufficient number of males to make up the complement on the permit. He knew how to feed and look after them and how to cage them for the journey, so I was not worried on that score, and I knew that his natural love of animals and his sensitivity would make him look after them properly. Having tied up all the loose ends, we made our way back to Vera Cruz and got on board the ship. It had been a fascinating but also a frustrating trip. If Dix could pull off the final thing and get us a male Teporingo I felt that the whole expedition would have been a success, but I could only wait with my fingers crossed and hope for the best.
On our arrival in Jersey one of the first things I did was to make a beeline for the Teporingoes to make sure they were all right. I learnt from Gill, the girl who had been looking after them, that nineteen days after their arrival the oldest female had given birth to twins and that for forty-four hours everything seemed to be going all right. Then the babies were found dead in the nest. I think this must have been caused by inadequate attention on the part of the mother. She had, after all, been caught when she was pregnant, transported from a high altitude to a smog-ridden city, taken by air to Jersey and a very low altitude, and had not really got accustomed to her surroundings before she had been faced with the problem of bringing up two babies. It was disappointing from our point of view but you could hardly blame the mother.
Weeks passed and there was still no word from Dix. I kept writing him encouraging letters, urging him on, to which he didn’t bother to reply and I began to have a feeling that, having worked so hard and tirelessly with us on the trip, he’d grown dispirited with the whole idea of Volcano rabbits. Then, one morning, the telephone rang. Was I prepared to take a telephone call from Mexico? I couldn’t tell the operator how eagerly I’d been awaiting this call, so I merely said ‘Yes’ in a flat voice. Dix came on, and it was one of those miraculous lines where his voice was as clear as a bell, almost as though he’d been in the room speaking to me. He told me that he’d succeeded at last in getting six more rabbits, two of which were males, and that they’d settled down in his house and were feeding well. He’d just completed constructing the travelling boxes for them, and he’d be sending them off within the next twenty-four hours. I got from him the flight number of the plane from Mexico and all the other details. I was wildly excited. When you go on an expedition you can’t always guarantee success, but so far, on all my expeditions, I’d had incredible luck. It seemed that now the Mexican expedition was not going to be a failure either. As soon as Dix was off the line I contacted London Airport. I spoke to every official I could think of on the subject of Volcano rabbits; I stressed their rarity and the importance of their being sent to the Animal Shelter should they arrive too late to catch a connection to Jersey; I phoned up Mr Whittaker at the Animal Shelter itself, which is run by the RSPCA, told him the glad tidings, and gave him minute details as to what to do should they have to be in his care overnight. There was nothing more I could do except sit back with ill-concealed excitement and wait for their arrival.
We had worked out that their flight would arrive in the morning, which would give plenty of time for them to be put on another plane to Jersey, and when the great day dawned I waited impatiently for some news. Two hours after the plane must have touched down at London Airport I phoned to see what was happening. None of the officials knew anything about Volcano rabbits. I got on to Mr Whittaker. No, he’d not received the rabbits, although he had everything prepared for them. At lunchtime I phoned again, and still the officials denied all knowledge of Volcano rabbits. By this time I was getting a little desperate and was wondering whether I should put in a phone call to Dix to find out whether he had, in fact, succeeded in getting them off on that parti
cular flight. At four o’clock that afternoon I phoned London Airport again. Again they denied all knowledge of the rabbits.
Once again I got on to Mr Whittaker and told him that I was exceedingly worried. He said that nobody had been in touch with him about any livestock in the airport, but that he would investigate and phone me back. Eventually he told me that he had tracked the rabbits down, and they were now in his care. Apparently, there had been some small discrepancy in the papers so necessary for the petty civil servant, and the rabbits had been pushed into a hangar somewhere and left while the vital work of fixing their papers had gone on. Mr Whittaker assured me that he’d had a look at them and, although obviously frightened, they all seemed in good health. It was too late that day for him to get them on a plane to Jersey so he had to keep them overnight and fly them across to us the following morning.
When the cage arrived at the zoo we tore the sacking from the front as gently as our eagerness allowed and peered in. There were five rabbits alive, looking somewhat startled. The sixth was dead. Carefully, we unpacked them and sexed them. The dead one, needless to say, was a male. Among the other five was one male and four females. To say that I was angry would be putting it mildly. I felt that the quite unnecessary delay at London Airport had deprived us of this male. Our new arrivals were put in cages separate from the ones that we had already got, to await all the tests that were so necessary before we could introduce them.
I paced up and down the office and wondered what was the best way of blasting London Airport out of existence. Suddenly I had an idea. Sir Giles and Lady Guthrie were members of the Trust, took a deep interest in our work and had helped us on many occasions. Sir Giles was the Chairman of BOAC. If he couldn’t scald somebody’s tail for them, nobody could. I picked up the telephone and asked for his number. It turned out he was away in Switzerland but Lady Guthrie answered. I told her the tale of the Volcano rabbits and I explained that the only reason I wanted to make a fuss was that should other rare creatures be consigned to us at some future date, and for some reason or other they had to spend some time at London Airport, I didn’t want the same sort of thing to happen.
‘Of course not,’ she said briskly. ‘Absolutely ludicrous! I’ll see to it myself. As soon as Giles gets back I’ll get him on to it.’
And this is exactly what she did. Over the course of the next week or so I got letters of abject apology from various officials at London Airport, making innumerable excuses for the bad handling of the rabbits. These were satisfying in that I knew in future anything consigned to us would automatically light up a red warning light in the minds of officials. But no amount of apologies would bring back to life our male Teporingo.
What we did now was examine the females at regular intervals and when we found they were in oestrus we would introduce the male into the cage for a few hours and keep a careful watch. This was necessary because, as I said before, the Teporingoes were highly pugnacious, and we didn’t want to run the risk of the last male being killed by one of the females. This went on for some time and then, one day, we found that one of the females had built herself, in her bedroom, a neat nest of straw lined with fur from her own body. In it were two babies. This was, of course, a terrific thrill for us. We watched the babies’ progress day by day, and as they grew bigger and bigger we felt more and more swollen-headed. But perhaps we became a little too proud of our achievement for, as often seems to happen on these occasions, fate dealt us a couple of nasty blows. Firstly, Gill went down one morning and found that, in some inexplicable way, one of the baby rabbits had managed to strangle itself with a hawthorn branch, getting it wound round its neck and jammed in the wire. This left us with just one female baby. The next thing was that our male died. The post mortem showed that he’d died from coccidiosis which is one of those diseases very difficult to diagnose in the early stages. Immediately all the remaining rabbits were given ‘Sulphamezathine’ as a preventative against them catching it – for all of them, at one time or another, had been mixed with the male, but, in spite of this, we lost two females in the same way.
We were now, it seemed, back to square one. We had a lot of females and no male. However, at this time we had just prepared and published our fifth Annual Report in which there was a full account of the Mexican expedition, together with photographs of the female rabbit with her baby. I sent copies of this to both Dr Corzo and Dr Morales and, of course, to Dix Branch, and at the same time I wrote to Dix and asked him if he’d be willing to undertake a rabbit hunt on his own, should I be able to get permission from the Mexican government for some more rabbits to be captured. He wrote back enthusiastically, saying that he would do everything possible to help. I sat down and wrote to Dr Morales explaining our predicament. I said that, although we had a group of females which we couldn’t turn into a breeding group because there was no male, we had at least proved a number of things and that therefore our efforts had not been entirely in vain. For example, we’d proved that the Volcano rabbit could be kept in captivity and, moreover, kept at a much lower altitude than it was used to, and that it could be bred in captivity. We’d also found out a number of interesting pathological things about it, including the fact that the particular ‘brand’ – if you like to call it that – of coccidiosis that it was suffering from might be a brand peculiar to that animal. And we had worked out the gestation period which hitherto had been in doubt. In view of our success rather than our failure I asked Dr Morales whether it would be possible to issue Dix Branch with a permit to try for some more Volcano rabbits for us. To my great delight he wrote back the most charming letter saying that, as we had been so successful, he would most definitely grant Dix a permit to capture some more rabbits. I hope that this will come to pass shortly, and that this time we will have greater luck and establish a colony of these rare and attractive little creatures in the Trust’s collection.
10. Animals for Ever
When man continues to destroy nature, he saws off the very branch on which he sits since the rational protection of nature is at the same time the protection of mankind.
‘Extinct and Vanishing Animals’
On the book-shelves that line my office there are two squat, fat, red books that glower at me continuously. They are the first things that catch my eye in the morning and the last things that catch my eye as I close the office door at night. They act as a constant reminder. These are the Red Data Books produced by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. One deals with mammals, the other with birds, and they list the mammals and birds in the world today that are faced with extinction – in most cases directly or indirectly through the interference of mankind. As yet there are only these two volumes, but there are more to come, and they will make a depressing line when they eventually arrive, for there is a further one on reptiles and amphibians, another on fishes, and yet another on trees and plants and shrubs.
I was once interviewed by a reporter from some newspaper or other, who said:
‘Tell me, Mr Durrell, how many species of animals are actually endangered?’
I went to the bookshelf, I took down the two fat, red volumes, and I plonked them in his lap.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I haven’t had the courage to count them.’
He glanced down at the two volumes and then looked up at me with real horror on his face.
‘Good God!’ he said. ‘You don’t mean to say that all these are threatened?’
‘Oh, those are only half of them,’ I explained. ‘Those only deal with the birds and the mammals.’
He was visibly shaken by this, because even today the majority of people do not realise the extent to which we are destroying the world we live in. We are like a set of idiot children, let loose with poison, saw, sickle, shotgun and rifle, in a complex and beautiful garden that we are slowly but surely turning into a barren and infertile desert. It is quite possible that in the last few weeks or so, one mammal,
one bird, one reptile, and one plant or tree, have become extinct. I hope not but I know for certain that in the same time one mammal, bird, reptile, and plant or tree, have been driven just that much nearer to oblivion.
The world is as delicate and as complicated as a spider’s web, and like a spider’s web, if you touch one thread, you send shudders running through all the other threads that make up the web. But we’re not just touching the web, we’re tearing great holes in it; we’re waging a sort of biological war on the world around us. We are felling forests quite unnecessarily and creating dust bowls, and thereby even altering the climate. We are clogging our rivers with industrial filth, and we are now polluting the sea and the air.