The one Reptile House inhabitant that never seemed to become overweight, no matter how much he ate, was our dragon, known as George. He was a Guiana dragon, a rather rare and interesting kind of lizard from the northern parts of South America. They measure about two feet six inches in length, and have large, heavy heads with big, dark, intelligent eyes. The body and tail are very crocodile-like in appearance, the tail being heavily armoured and flattened on top, whereas the back is covered with heavy scales which are bean-shaped and protrude above the surface of the skin. The colouring is a warm rusty brown, fading to yellowish on the face. They are slow, thoughtful and attractive lizards, and George had a very mild and likeable character.
Probably one of the most remarkable things about Guiana dragons is their feeding habits. Before George arrived we had read up all we could on the species, but none of the textbooks was very helpful. However, they seemed to be perfectly normal lizard-type creatures, so we thought that their diet would be similar to that of any large carnivorous lizard. So George duly arrived, was petted, admired and placed reverently in a large cage which had been prepared for him, with a special pond of his own. This amenity he appeared to appreciate fully, for the moment he was released into his quarters he made straight for the pond and plunged in. He spent half an hour or so squatting in the water, occasionally ducking his head beneath the surface for a few minutes at a time and peering thoughtfully about the bottom of the pond. That evening we gave him a dead rat, which he regarded with considerable loathing. Then we tried him on a young chicken, with the same result. Fish he retreated from as if it were some deadly poison, and we were in despair, for we could think of nothing else that he might like. Just when we were convinced that George was going to starve himself to death, John had an idea. He went off and fetched a handful of fat garden snails and tossed them into George’s pond. George, who had been sitting on a tree trunk at the back of the cage and looking very regal, eyed this floating, frothing largesse with his head on one side. Then he came down to the pool, slid into the water and nosed interestedly at a snail, while we watched hopefully. Delicately he picked up the snail in his mouth and, throwing back his head, allowed it to slide to the back of his mouth. Now that his mouth was open I could see that he had the most astonishing teeth I had ever seen in a lizard: teeth that were, of course, perfectly adapted for eating snails. Those in the front of the mouth were fairly small, pointed and inclined slightly backwards into the mouth. These were the grasping teeth, as it were. Once they had hold of the snail, the lizard threw back his head so that the mollusc slid and rested on the teeth at the back of the mouth. These were huge, shoe-box-shaped molars with carunculated surfaces which looked more like miniature elephant’s teeth than anything else. With the aid of his tongue, George manoeuvred the snail until it rested between these ponderous molars, and then closed his jaws slowly. The snail cracked and splintered, and when he was quite sure that the shell was broken he shifted the whole into the centre of his mouth and, by careful manipulation of his tongue, extracted all the bits of broken shell and spat them out. Then the smooth, shell-less body of the snail was swallowed with every evidence of satisfaction. The complete process took about a minute and a half, after which George sat there for a bit, licking his lips with his black tongue, and musing to himself. After a time he leant forward and daintily picked up another snail, which he despatched in the same manner. Within half an hour he had eaten 12 of these molluscs, and we were jubilant, for, having now discovered George’s preference, we knew there would be no more difficulty in keeping him.
It is always a relief when a reptile starts to feed itself, for if it refuses food for a certain length of time it has to be force-fed, and that is a tricky and unpleasant job. Many of the constricting snakes refuse food on their arrival, and have to be force-fed until they have settled down, but it is not an operation one relishes, since, with their fragile jaws and teeth, it is very easy to break something and thus set up an infection in the mouth. I think the worst force-feeding job we ever had was with a pair of young gharials. These are Asiatic members of the crocodile family, and in the wild state feed on fish. Instead of the strong, rather blunt jaws of the alligators and crocodiles, the gharial’s jaws are long and very slender resembling a beak more than anything. Both the jaws and the teeth are very fragile, the teeth especially so, for they appear to fall out if you look at them. In consequence, when our two young gharials arrived and steadfastly refused all food, including live fish in their pond, our hearts sank, as we realised we would have to force-feed them. The process was tedious, protracted and difficult, and had to be done once a week for a year before the gharials would feed on their own. First, you take a firm grip on the back of the creature’s neck and his tail. Then you lift him out of the tank and place him on a convenient flat surface. Whoever is helping you, then slides a flat, smooth piece of wood between the jaws at the back of the mouth, immediately behind the last teeth. When the jaws are prised a little apart, you slightly release your grip on the reptile’s neck and slide your hand forward, push your thumb and forefinger between the jaws and hold them apart. This is generally much easier than it sounds. The other person then arms himself with a long, slender stick and a plateful of raw meat chunks or raw fish. Impaling a piece of meat or fish on the end of the stick, he inserts it into the reptile’s mouth and pushes it towards the back of the throat. This is the tricky part, for in all members of the crocodile family the throat is closed by a flap of skin: this arrangement allows the creature to open its mouth beneath the surface without swallowing vast quantities of water. The food has to be pushed past this flap of skin and well down into the throat. Then you massage the throat until you feel the food slide down into the stomach. As I say, it is a tedious task, as much for the gharial as for you.
By and large, the creatures that seem to cause the least trouble in the Reptile House are the amphibians. They usually feed well, and they do not seem to suffer from the awful variety of cankers, sores and parasites that snakes and lizards contract, though I must admit they can come up with one or two choice complaints of their own on occasions, just to enliven things for you. The pipa toads were a good example of this. These extraordinary creatures come from British Guiana, and look, quite frankly, like nothing on earth. Their bodies are almost rectangular, with a leg at each corner, so to speak, and a pointed bit between the front legs that indicates where the head is supposed to be. The whole affair is very flattened and a dark blackish brown colour, so the creature looks as though it had met with a nasty accident some considerable time ago and has been gently decomposing ever since. The most extraordinary thing about these weird beasts is their breeding habits, for the pipa toads carry their young in pockets. During the breeding season the skin on the female’s back becomes thickened, soft and spongy, and then she is ready for mating. The male clasps her, and as soon as she is ready to lay she protrudes a long ovipositor which curves up on to her back, underneath the male’s stomach. As the eggs appear, he fertilises them and presses them into the spongy skin of the back. They sink in until only a small proportion of the egg is above the surface of the skin. This exposed portion of egg hardens. So, inside their individual pockets, the tadpoles undergo their entire metamorphosis until they change into tiny replicas of their parents. When they are ready to hatch, the hardened top of the shell comes loose, and the tiny toads push it back and climb out, looking rather like someone getting out of a bubble-car.
I had once been fortunate enough to witness the hatching of some baby pipa toads, and I was anxious to see if we could breed them in the Zoo. So I ordered a pair from a dealer, and on their arrival duly installed them in the Reptile House. We kept them in a large aquarium full of water, for, unlike other toads, pipas are entirely aquatic. They settled down very well, and were soon devouring monstrous great earthworms by the score. All we had to do now, I thought, was to wait for them to breed. One morning John came to me and said that one of the pipas had apparently bruised itself on the stomach, though he coul
d not see how this had happened. I examined the toad and discovered that what appeared to be a bruise was something which looked like a gigantic blood blister. It was difficult to know what to do. If the toads had not been acquatic and had had dry skin, I would have anointed the area with penicillin. Within 24 hours both pipas were dead, their bodies covered with the red blisters which were full of blood and mucous. I sent them away for a post-mortem, and the report came back that they were suffering from an obscure disease called red-leg. I had a strong feeling that this had something to do with the water in which they had been kept: it was ordinary tap water but rather acid. So I purchased another pair of pipas, and this time we kept them in pond water only. This has, so far, proved successful, and, at the time of writing, both toads are flourishing. With a bit of luck, I might get around to breeding pipa toads yet, unless they can think up something new to frustrate me.
Another amphibian with almost as fascinating breeding habits as the pipas is the little pouched frog. We had five of these delightful tubby little frogs, handsomely marked in green and black, which were brought to us from Ecuador. They did very well, eating prodigiously, but they showed no signs of wanting to breed. So we moved them into a bigger tank where they had more land and water space, and this did the trick. Out of the breeding season, the female’s pouch, which is on her lower back, is scarcely noticeable. If you look closely, you can see a faint line down the skin, with a slightly puckered edge, as if at one time the skin had been torn and healed up rather badly. However, when the breeding season comes round, the slit becomes much more obvious. The frogs begin to sing to each other, and presently you will see the females going off into quiet corners and indulging in a very curious action. They manage, by great contortion, to get one hind leg at a time up over their backs, insert the toes into their pouches and proceed to stretch the skin. When the pouch is stretched to their satisfaction, they are ready to breed. The method by which they put the eggs into the pouch is still a mystery to me, for, unfortunately, I missed the actual egg-laying. The next thing we knew was that the female had a bulging pouchful of spawn which protruded from her back and made her look as though she had been disembowelled. The female carries the eggs around until she knows, by some means or other, that the tadpoles are ready to hatch, whereupon she goes and sits in the water. The tadpoles wriggle free of the gelatine-like spawn and swim off on their own, the mother taking no further interest in them. We found that the tadpoles did very well on strips of raw meat and white worms, the tiny worms that fish fanciers breed as food. When they grew their legs and came out on land, we fed them on fruit flies and tiny earthworms, until they were old enough to graduate to house-flies and bluebottles.
Amphibians are much easier to breed than reptiles, for you do not have to worry about the moisture. Reptiles lay eggs with a parchment-like shell which is either soft or hard. If the temperature of the cage is not right, and if the moisture content of the air is too great or not enough, the contents of the egg will either dry up or else go mildewed. Although we have had some successes with hatching reptile eggs, the chances against are always ninety to one. One success we did achieve, of which we were rather proud, was in hatching some Greek tortoise eggs. The Greek tortoise is probably one of the commonest pets, and they invariably lay eggs with monotonous regularity, but these very seldom hatch.
Thinking that this batch of eggs was going to be no more successful than all the others had been, John did not worry over-much about them. He buried them in the sand at the bottom of one of the cages which had what he thought was a suitable temperature. Week after week passed, and eventually he forgot all about them. He was, therefore, considerably astonished one morning to find a baby tortoise perambulating about the cage. He called me and we dug up the rest of the eggs. Out of the six, four were in the process of hatching. In one egg the baby was almost out, but in the other three the babies had only just started to breach the shell. We placed them in a small aquarium on a saucer of sand, in order to watch the hatching more conveniently. The eggs were almost the size of ping-pong balls, and much the same shape; the parchment-like shell was tough, and it was clearly an exhausting job for the babies to break out of their prisons. The one who had made the biggest hole in his shell could be seen quite plainly inside, as he twisted round and round, now using his front feet and now his back ones to enlarge the hole. On his nose he had the little horny ‘beak’ which baby tortoises are supposed to use to make the first breach in the shell; this later drops off. But I did not see this one use his ‘beak’ at all – all the hard work was done with the front and hind legs, with frequent pauses for him to regain his strength. It took him three-quarters of an hour to break out, and then the egg split in half and he trundled off across the sand, wearing one half on top of his carapace, like a hat. When they emerged from the egg, their shells were spongy, misshapen and extremely soft, and they were each the diameter of a two-shilling piece. However, after an hour or so a change had taken place; it was as though someone had inflated them with a bicycle pump. The shell had filled out, and, instead of being flattened, it was now handsomdy domed and looked much harder, although it was, in actual fact, still as soft as damp cardboard. They were now so much larger than the egg that, unless I had watched them hatching myself, I would have said they could not possibly have emerged so recently from such a small prison. I noticed that their nails, when they hatched, were very long and sharp, presumably to help them break through the egg shell. Within a very short time, though, they had worn down to a normal length.
I had spent several hours watching this hatching process, and it was worth every minute of it. I had the greatest admiration for these rotund and earnest little tortoises, for breaking out of the egg was no easy matter. What amused me most, I think, was the way – after he had been using the hind feet to enlarge the hole – the tiny reptile would swivel round inside the shell, and the next moment a minute, wrinkled and rather sad little face would be poked through the hole in the shell, as if the tortoise wanted to reassure himself that the outside world was still there and still as attractive as it had been when he last looked. We were very lucky to have been able to hatch these tortoises, but what was even luckier was the fact that Ralph Thompson, who illustrated this book, happened to be staying with me at the time, and was thus able to draw the whole of the hatching process from start to finish, which he assured me he thoroughly enjoyed, in spite of the fact that, owing to the high temperature in the Reptile House, his glasses kept misting over.
CHAPTER FOUR
CLAUDIUS AMONG THE CLOCHES
Dear Mr Durrell,
Do you ever stuff your animals? If you ever wanted to stuff your animals I could stuff them for you, as I have a great experience in stuffing animals...
On acquiring new animals, one of the many problems that face you is the process of settling them in, for until they have learnt to look upon their new cage as home, and have also learnt to trust you, they are unsettled. There are many different ways of making animals feel at home, and these vary according to the species. Sometimes special titbits have to be given, so that the animal forgets its fear of you in its eagerness for the food. With highly nervous creatures you may have to provide them with a box in which they can hide, or cover the front of the cage with sacking until they have decided that you mean them no harm. There are times when the most extraordinary methods have to be used to give an animal confidence and the trouble we had with Topsy was a case in point.
I was in an animal dealer’s shop in the North of England one cold winter’s day, looking around to see if he had anything interesting I could buy for the Zoo. As I walked round the shop I suddenly noticed a very dank, dark cage in one corner, and peering at me from behind the bars was one of the most pathetic little faces I had ever seen. It was coal-black with large, lustrous eyes that seemed to be perpetually full of tears. The fur surrounding this face was reddish-brown, short and thick like the pile on an expensive carpet. I looked closer and saw that the face belonged to a baby woolly
monkey, one of the most charming of the South American primates. This one could not have been more than a few weeks old, and was far too young to have been separated from its mother. It crouched miserably on the floor of the cage, shivering and coughing, its nose streaming, its fur matted and tangled with filth. From the condition and smell of the cage I could see that it had enteritis as well as a cold which looked as though it was bordering on pneumonia. It was not an animal that anyone in their right senses would contemplate buying. But then it peered up at me with its great, dark eyes filled with despair, and I was lost. I asked the dealer how much he wanted for the baby. He said that he would not dream of selling it to me, as I was a good customer and the baby was sure to die. I replied that I realised the animal was a bad risk, but that if he would let me have it I would pay him if it lived, but not if it died. Rather reluctantly he agreed to this, and we bundled the plaintively squealing baby into a box full of straw, and I hurried back to Jersey with it. I knew that unless it was treated rapidly, it would die, and already it might well be too late.
On my return to Jersey, we put the baby, which someone christened Topsy, into a warm cage and examined her. First, I realised she would have to have antibiotic and vitamin injections to combat the enteritis and the cold. Secondly, her thick fur, matted with her own excreta, would have to be cleaned, for if it was left in that state she could develop skin rash and eventually lose all her fur. Our chief problem, though, was how to get Topsy to allow us to do these things. Most baby monkeys will, within a matter of hours, take to a human foster-parent, and they are generally no trouble at all. As Topsy’s experience of human beings had obviously been of the worst possible kind, she threw herself in fits of screaming hysterics (as only a woolly monkey can) if we so much as opened the door of her cage. To manhandle her was, therefore, going to do more harm than good, and yet she had to have treatment or die. Then we had a brainwave: if Topsy would not accept us as foster parents, would she accept something else? How about a teddy-bear? We were all a bit doubtful about this, but we had to try something, and so we obtained one. The bear had a pleasant, if slightly vacuous expression, and was just about the size that Topsy’s mother would be, so we put it in the cage and awaited results. At first, Topsy would not go near it, but at last her curiosity got the better of her and she touched it. As soon as she discovered that it was cuddly and furry, she took to it, and within half an hour was clinging to it with a fierce, possessive passion that was quite touching.