While we waited for John to return from Jersey I took the chance of showing Lee the reef. To any zoologist the coral reef is one of the most fantastic sights in the world, for not only are the coral formations so incredible, like the most bizarre, colourful and complex baroque architecture, but the creatures that inhabit these beautiful underwater landscapes are equally unbelievable. Every day we snorkelled for two or three hours on the reef and every day we saw at least four or five species of fish we had not seen previously. We were bedazzled by the shapes and colours of the fish, the corals and all the other sea life that inhabited the coral groves in millions.
But at last our holiday came to an end, for John returned and we had to make plans for visiting our second island, the uninhabited Round Island, home of rare sea-birds, strange palm trees and unique reptiles.
2. The Dying Island
One of the chief problems for reptiles is that this vast group of fascinating and useful creatures has had a very bad press since the Garden of Eden reportage hit the headlines. Most people shudder when you mention reptiles and are under the erroneous impression that all snakes and other cold-blooded creatures are slimy, poisonous and malign. In fact they are not slimy, but dry and cool to touch like a snakeskin bag. They only turn on you if you tread on them or threaten them, and you would do the same. Finally, of the myriad reptile forms in the world only a tiny proportion are poisonous. They are all of them, even the poisonous ones, of great benefit to mankind in eating insects, pests and rodents. It has been calculated that the number of snakes being killed in India per annum would, if left to themselves, devour so many rats and mice that the Indian people would benefit by the saving of millions of tons of grain that these rodents eat.
We are very proud of our magnificent reptile breeding facility in Jersey, particularly as we obtained it in a curious way. Raising money for the conservation of animals is always difficult, but it’s comparatively simple if you’ve got something cute and cuddly like the giant panda. Because of their undeserved reputation, to raise money for snakes and lizards and tortoises is very difficult indeed. Which is why, for a long time, we had to house our reptiles in a converted garage. Then one year we held a conference, a first world conference on the breeding of endangered species in captivity. During the course of the meeting a Canadian member of the Trust approached me.
‘Mr Durrell, I’ve been to your place now several times and I think it’s marvellous,’ he said. ‘I think the animals are in a wonderful condition, but I think your reptile house stinks.’
I agreed, but had to explain that the converted garage was all we could afford.
‘You find the money,’ I said jokingly, ‘and I’ll build you the finest reptile house in the world.’
He looked at me pensively for a moment, and then he went off and that was the last I thought of it. But at the end of the conference he came to see me once again:
‘Mr Durrell, were you serious when you said that if I found you the money that you’d build the finest reptile house in the world?’ he asked.
‘I certainly was,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘Well, um, among my other qualifications, I, um, happen to be an eccentric millionaire,’ he said.
For a moment I stared at him disbelievingly, then:
‘Step into my office,’ I said faintly.
So that is how we got what must be one of the finest reptile houses in the world, if not the finest, as it is here that we have had some spectacular successes. Among the rarest of these are three species which are found only on Round Island, a minute carunculated bit of volcanic tuff fourteen miles off the Mauritian coast. Two are lizards, the sleek, handsome Telfair’s skink and the dark, soft-skinned, cat-eyed Guenther’s gecko. The third is a snake, the Round Island boa, which presents problems to both zoogeographers and taxonomists. How did a boa-like snake (when boas are New World snakes) come to evolve on a tiny speck of land in the Indian Ocean? John and I had collected colonies of all three species on previous trips to the Mascarenes and all have successfully bred. (As a matter of fact, as I was writing this chapter I received the news that our Round Island boa’s eggs had hatched out, and the first time this species has been bred in captivity and a great herpetological and conservation triumph.) So, on this trip, we were anxious to revisit Round Island to try and get more specimens of each species to increase our gene pool.
The Mauritian authorities offered us their full cooperation and so we found ourselves, late one morning, riding blue, glittering waves, just off the island, in six fathoms of beautifully transparent water. Our small boat’s anchor held us in position while John Hartley, accompanied by three of the burly policemen the Mauritian Government had generously assigned to help us with our equipment, swam ashore towing lines to set up a small crane we would use to get our supplies and equipment (and ourselves) ashore. I watched rather apprehensively as John bobbed along in the water, because getting ashore in that swell can be dangerous, for the waves can dash you against the razor-sharp rocks. Lee was too excited to worry about the risks to anyone, including herself.
John scrambled enthusiastically ashore with the policemen and they were all soon busy lashing together the landing lines. Even with the ropes and the help of the Mauritian policemen, landing on Round Island was more exciting than I felt was strictly desirable for one of my ripening vintage and avoirdupois. Still, the arrangement was a considerable improvement over the way it had been done in the past. There is only one landing site on the entire 370-acre island and it consists merely of a large flat rock where someone long ago attached a couple of iron rings to which lines can be made fast. The last time I visited the island the landing drill consisted of leaping from the gunwales of the boat’s dinghy as it rose and fell on the polished swells, and coming down with an undignified crash on the slippery rock. This time you were swung ashore by the crane while sitting in a loop of rope. I must say it made me feel like an elderly Peter Pan. Lee, on the other hand, looked very decorative in a large sun-hat, thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
Once the boat had left and you were marooned with your supplies and equipment, you then discover that landing was the easy part. Our first objective was the picnic tree, a large pandanus that spread its fan-like leaves about 250 feet above us, at the top of the escarpment and so we loaded ourselves down with our paraphernalia and began to climb. Centuries of erosion of the volcanic tuff have turned the island landscape into a jumble of deep pleats and scallops, and although the surface appears smooth, when you step on it the thin crust is likely to crumble and slip away under your feet. The heat is intense, even in the early morning, and the air is heavy with salt. By mid-afternoon the rock is often hot enough to literally fry eggs on. By the time we had reached the top of the cliff; panting and bathed in sweat, we were grateful for the little pools of shade offered by the pandanus.
At one time all the lower slopes of the island were covered with thick palm forest and the higher parts were forested in ebony and other hardwoods. But in the early nineteenth century rabbits and goats were introduced and they have created a desert. Goats in particular go straight through a forest eating everything on the ground, including seedlings (without which the forest cannot renew itself) and even climbing up the trees skillfully as monkeys in their pursuit of the last leaf. Fortunately, rats were not introduced, for if they had been it would have been the end of the reptile fauna.
The Government of Mauritius had turned Round Island into a nature preserve, we hope just in time to save what remains of the two species of lizard, two species of snake and two species of palm tree that have evolved on this tiny speck of land and that exist nowhere else in the world. The goats have finally been eliminated so there is some hope that, in time, the forest may make a comeback, if one can get the rabbits under control.
No sooner had we stretched ourselves thankfully in the shade of the pandanus than out from every nook and cranny in the rocks emerged a host
of large, iridescent Telfair’s skinks. They were charmingly tame and poked their noses into everything, peering at us enquiringly with large, intelligent eyes. They are completely fearless because they have no natural predators: they are right at the top of the food chain on the island, and they pursue all the smaller lizards and eat them if they can. It seems to me an enormous privilege to have such a reptile climb up onto my lap and eat the morsels of food I offer it, particularly when you think that it has come down from the age of the dinosaurs. However, Lee decided it was a somewhat doubtful privilege when a very large Telfair’s who was sitting in her lap seized her finger instead of the bit of banana she was offering him. They have powerful jaws and it was some time before we could staunch the blood.
‘Never mind,’ I consoled her, tying a handkerchief around her finger. ‘Just think, you’re probably the first female doctor he’s ever bitten. ‘What a distinction.’
‘Thank you,’ she said witheringly. ‘I shall treat with caution in future all the things you tell me are tame.’
But as we drank Coca-Cola and shared our sandwiches it was frightening to realise that there are so few of them left that one very bad cyclone could make these lovely creature vanish forever.
We set up camp under a scattering of palm trees at the edge of a small valley. It was in fact close to the area where I had camped on my previous visits. Camping has always been an exhilarating if somewhat hazardous experience on Round Island. On my first trip for example, the shearwaters were nesting in their hundreds in holes underneath our tent. As soon as darkness fell the babies all started shouting and honking to one another in a cacophonous underground chorus. Then they emerged and started not only invading the tent (which they doubtless thought was a lovely outsize burrow) but also climbing to the ridge and sliding down the slopes of the tent, as if it were some sort of ski slope. The sound of their claws scraping on the canvas was as conducive to sleep as a knife squeaking on a plate.
I had warned Lee about the possibility of being kept awake by baby birds and she, in her enthusiasm, thought it would be very amusing. However, it turned out that—to my relief—the shearwater breeding season was just over, and so I looked forward to an uninterrupted night’s sleep without strong-smelling baby shearwaters trying to climb into my bed or honk loudly in my ear. But it was not to be, for the moment the sun sank there appeared from nowhere literally hundreds of thousands of tiny dark moths each about three-sixteenths of an inch long. They found our tent and our persons absolutely irresistible. We were, in their opinion, the most delectable things that they had encountered in their small lives. Myriads of them gathered to make the most of us. Within minutes the tent was thick with them, the canvas walls a black, moving, fluttering mass. In desperation, in spite of the heat, we closed the tent flaps, but it was no use for the moths were small enough to find their way through the tiniest chink. Rather than spend the night locked in with a seething mass of moths, we took our blankets out onto the rocks; but here it was just as bad. We were covered with thousands of them and they crawled all over us, into our hair, our eyes, up our noses, into our ears. You could kill five hundred with a slap, but immediately another five hundred took their place.
‘Didn’t you say you once used to collect moths?’ asked Lee, spitting out a mouthful.
‘Yes,’ I said, irritably. ‘I used to be quite fond of the damn things, but after this, give me baby shearwaters every time.’
‘Well, at least you didn’t get shearwaters up your nose,’ said Lee.
‘No, I suppose that could be a consolation of some sort,’ I observed.
‘What interesting lives we naturalists lead,’ said Lee, expectorating another brigade of lepidoptera, ‘so romantic, so interesting.’
We were thankful to see the dawn stain the sky tangerine, against which the palm trees stood in black silhouette, while around them hung a grey mist of moths flying off to their daytime resting places.
By noon the following day we had captured our quota of Telfair’s skinks, having hiked as far away from the picnic tree as we could. We had collected our first batch near the tree last time and so we wanted to make sure our new additions were from a different area. It is possible to catch the Telfair’s by hand, but on Round Island that could be an exhausting and sometimes dangerous proposition, because of the heat and uncertain footing. I speak from bitter experience when I say that it was no fun at all sliding pell-mell down these rocky gorges on your backside, using your elbows for brakes—and I have scars to prove it. So what we did was to snare them in fine nylon nooses attached to the ends of long bamboo poles. Once you have slowly and gently slipped the noose over the head and forelegs, you jerk it tight for long enough to grab the skink and drop it in a cloth collecting bag, where it is quite comfortable until you can get it back to base camp and put it in a proper cage.
Locating and capturing the other species we were after, the Guenther’s gecko, was a more difficult proposition. There are only about a hundred of them left in the wild state and their marvellous camouflage makes them hard to spot. They are adapted to live in the palm trees and their velvety skin is a mottled grey and chocolate that looks just like lichen, or some discolouration on the tree bark; and with the little suction pads they have on their toes, they can scuttle up and down the tree trunks like a fly on a window-pane. However, in spite of the difficulties, by the time the day was out we had a number of fat, healthy specimens of both sexes to add to our breeding stock back in Jersey.
The biggest triumph of the day, though, was John’s. We had spent a long, hot and prickly time investigating the low-growing clumps of palms which is where one of the species of Round Island boa likes to hang out. It is tedious and painstaking work for, first of all, as there are only some seventy specimens left they are not as one would describe as common. Secondly, they merge beautifully with their surroundings and generally stay very still so they are hard to see. Lee, John and I were just searching what must have been our hundredth palm tree apiece, when John uttered a yell of triumph and started dancing about, waving his arms, looking like an exceptionally lanky crane doing a mating dance.
‘Quickly, quickly!’ he yelled, ‘I found one.’
Lee and I ran to join him and surrounded the palm in case the snake tried to make a break for it. Once sure it could not escape, John inserted a long arm into the palm leaves and caught it skillfully round the neck. Then I carefully unravelled its body with Lee’s help and we soon had it disentangled from its lair. It was the biggest one we had caught to date and, to our delight, a female, which is just what we needed.
Isn’t she a beauty,’ crowed John with joy. ‘A positive Pythagoras.’
‘What’s a positive Pythagoras?’ asked Lee, puzzled; and I explained:
It was in the days when we still had our reptiles in Jersey living in the converted garage and the creatures had to be taken out of their cages so that their homes could be cleaned every week. Among our specimens we had a huge, beautiful but bad-tempered python called Pythagoras, some twelve feet long. He had to be extracted from his cage and incarcerated in a big laundry basket while cleaning progressed. John, who was in charge of the reptiles then, had been told never to attempt this on his own, for Pythagoras was dangerous. One morning, however, John foolhardily tried to do it on his own. I happened to pass the reptile house and heard calls for help. Going in, I found John wound round from head to foot, like a maypole, by Pythagoras’s coils. I grabbed the python’s tail and started to unwind him, but as fast as I did so he wound round me, until John and I were completely tangled up in the reptile’s coils. In the end, we both had to call for help until another member of the staff came to our rescue, an embarrassing moment for both of us.
It’s frustrating having to leave a place like Round Island after only a couple of days, for you know that if you had six weeks or so you could get down to doing some really sensible ecological work and could learn so much about the is
land’s flora and fauna. But we had had very good luck, and we had the satisfaction of knowing the island’s reptiles were a little safer now than they had been before we arrived. The beauty of trying to save Round Island is in the fact that we don’t have to stop man from doing anything. In practically every other place we have worked, saving endangered species involves getting someone to stop digging or someone to stop building or stop cutting down trees and so on. But on Round Island, man did his damage a hundred and eighty-odd years ago in however long it took him to open a few boxes and let loose the rabbits and goats. The goats are gone now, and one day the rabbits will be, too, we hope. As things stand now, you can see evidence of the havoc these creatures wreak everywhere you look: their shallow burrows dug where they promote maximum erosion; the tops of the palm seedlings nipped off; the pruning and stunting of the patches of pretty convolvulus-type ground cover that is trying valiantly but forlornly to hold the soil together against the onslaught of wind and rain.
But once we can stop the rot, to a very great extent this dying island can help save itself, through natural regeneration. And meanwhile we will be breeding the skinks and geckos and the boas, getting ready to reintroduce them into their natural habitat some time in the future. But ideally, what would make us all happiest, strangely enough, would be to close down our breeding colonies because the island was safe and captive breeding was no longer necessary to help these unique reptiles.
3. The Bat Colony of Rodrigues
The great blue expanse of the Indian Ocean in which the Mascarenes lie scattered is the breeding ground for cyclones. Here they hatch and, bearing deceptively demure and feminine names, they prowl ferociously, ready to suddenly turn and run screaming at an island when least expected, churning the waves to froth-covered monsters, whipping the land with winds like huge solid fists that tear and uproot trees and play with houses as though they were constructed of cardboard. Apart from the damage to human life and to property, these cyclones are enormously detrimental to the flora and fauna of the islands, and particularly dangerous for those species whose numbers are few and whose food supply is already limited. The duration of a cyclone is important too, for such things as birds and bats cannot fly in those gargantuan gusts of wind and so they cannot feed and in the momentary lulls when the wind dies to a whisper they find the trees stripped of leaves and fruit and insects, blown away like chaff. Of the many cyclones that have hit the Mascarenes in the last decade, they all, without exception, seem to have singled out the island of Rodrigues to vent their wrath on. In 1968, for example, one by the seductive name of Monique leapt on the island and lashed it with winds up to 170 miles per hour.