A Treeful of Bears
‘His form is ungainly – his intellect small –’
(So the Bellman would often remark).
Hunting of the Snark
The temperature in the cab of the Land-Rover was soaring somewhere in the nineties, and we were hot, dusty and tired, having driven up from Melbourne, through New South Wales and over the border into Queensland. The contrast between these blue and cloudless skies and the fierce sun compared with the freezing drizzle we had been subjected to in Melbourne was most marked. However, none of us dared complain, for only twenty-four hours previously we had been cursing the cold and praying for sunshine. Now we had it in abundance, and the sweat trickled lavishly down our faces. Presently the road curved gently down into a valley filled with rustling pink-trunked eucalyptus trees, and by the side of the road was a neat notice-board on which was printed.
DRIVE CAREFULLY
KOALAS CROSS HERE AT NIGHT
I knew then that we were getting close to our objective, David Fleay’s Fauna Reserve at Barren Pines.
David Fleay is probably one of Australia’s best-known naturalists. For years he has kept and written about the fascinating fauna of Australia, and among other things, was the first man to breed the duck-billed platypus in captivity. For years I had known of David Fleay’s work and he was one of the people I most wanted to meet in Australia; for many years he had been in charge of the Healsville Sanctuary in Victoria, but recently he had left there and moved up to Queensland to start his own Reserve on the Gold Coast, that strip of sunlit beaches that is the Australian Riviera. Half an hour’s drive and three Koala Crossing signs later we came to a pleasant house tucked away on a hillside overlooking a valley filled with eucalyptus trees and shrubs and plants ablaze with multicoloured, sub-tropical flowers. We rang a convenient bell and waited dutifully, and presently David Fleay appeared.
If anybody could be said to look ‘typically’ Australian, then it is definitely David Fleay. He is the personification of what everyone thinks an Australian ought to look like, but so seldom does. Over six feet in height, he was well built but not over muscular – whipcord rather than weightlifter. His face was weatherbeaten and wind-wrinkled, and his blue eyes were gentle, tolerant and shrewd, with a perpetual twinkle lurking in their depths. To complete the picture of the typical Aussie, he was wearing a Stetson-type hat and looked as though he had just wandered in from some mysterious foray into the outback. He greeted us with warm enthusiasm and with a certain diffidence which was charming; so many people, when they reach David’s eminence, are apt to have a far better opinion of themselves than their achievements warrant, but David was so modest and self-effacing that it was a pleasure to talk to him. He never boasted about his own achievements but gave all the credit to his animals, for they, as far as he was concerned, were the most important things in life. Apart from breeding the platypus, itself no mean achievement, David has kept and bred more of the smaller and rare Australian marsupials than anyone else in the world, and so his knowledge is vast.
A lot of David’s animals – the kangaroos, wallabies, emus and so on – were kept in spacious paddocks and visitors could enter these through self-closing doors. Thus the public were, so to speak, caged with the animals, which was an excellent idea for it allowed them to get on much more intimate terms with the creatures they had come to see. Collecting a large bucketful of bread crusts, David took me down to the largest of the paddocks, which housed a mixed collection of kangaroos, wallabies, ibis and a young cassowary named Claude. He stood about three feet high and was clad in hair-like plumage which looked as though he never preened it – he looked, to be perfectly candid, like a badly made feather duster. He had thick, ostrich-like legs, a Donald Duck beak and a wild and determined eye: in spite of the fact that he was considerably smaller than the kangaroos and wallabies whose paddock he shared, there was no doubt at all as to who was the boss. David and I sat on a fallen tree trunk and started to distribute our largesse, and in a moment we were surrounded by a milling mob of kangaroos and wallabies, all nuzzling eagerly but gently at our hands to get the bread crusts. Claude had been standing at the far end of the paddock, meditating – to judge by his expression – on the sins of the world, and he suddenly woke up to the fact that there was a free meal going which he was in danger of missing. He came out of his trance with a jerk and ran towards us with a loping stride, his big feet thumping the ground; arriving at the outskirts of the mob of marsupials around us, he proceeded to fight his way to the front row by the simple process of kicking every kangaroo and wallaby backside in sight. They were obviously used to this form of attack and were quite adroit at hopping out of the way at the crucial moment, and at one point, when Claude decided to use both feet to kick a large grey kangaroo out of the way, the kangaroo (in a very cowardly fashion) hopped to one side and Claude fell flat on his back. He got to his feet, his eyes blazing, and waded into the crowd of marsupials with such vigour that they all scattered before him like sheep before a sheep dog. Any one of the bigger kangaroos could have killed Claude with one well-directed kick, but they were too well-mannered to attempt this. Having driven off all the competition Claude came back to us and proceeded to engulf bread crusts with a speed that had to be seen to be believed. Presently the kangaroos and wallabies started to drift back again, and Claude had to keep interrupting his gluttony in order to chase them away. When Claude was fully grown he would measure some five feet in height, and I could not help thinking that if he persisted in his beligerent attitude to other creatures it would be safer – when he reached manhood – to give him a paddock on his own.
In the next enclosure was David’s group of emus – large, slow-moving and wearing the most vacuous and self-satisfied expressions. Among them was a white one with pale gentian blue eyes, who was busy sitting on a nest of four eggs. The marital life of an emu is one that would delight the most militant of suffragettes: having enjoyed all the pleasures of the nuptial couch (as it were) the female then lays her eggs and forgets about the whole sordid business. It is the male who constructs the nest (if it can be dignified with that term), collects the eggs, sits on them devotedly – without food – until they hatch out, and then takes charge of the youngsters and looks after them until they are old enough to fend for themselves. Meanwhile the females are simply disporting themselves in the eucalyptus groves, the ultimate in emancipation.
I wanted to see the eggs that the white emu was incubating so assiduously, and David told me to go into the paddock and push him off the nest, as he was perfectly tame and would not take exception to this. Until I tried it I had never realised how difficult it is to remove a reluctant emu from its nest. To begin with it seems to weigh about a ton, and secondly there does not appear to be any part of its anatomy on which you can get a firm grip. He just sat there phlegmatically while I struggled with his ungainly body and achieved nothing more than the dislodging of several handfuls of feathers. At last, by getting my knee under his breast and using it as a lever, I raised him to his feet and managed to push him back from the nest, then I hastily crouched over the nest, as though I was brooding the eggs, to prevent him from returning. The emu stood just behind me, staring down at me thoughtfully. In spite of the fact that David had assured me he was tame, I still kept a close eye on him, for a well-placed kick from an emu could easily kill one, and I can’t imagine a more infra dig way for a naturalist to die than to be kicked to death by a bird.
The eggs looked as though they were made of terracotta and were some six inches long, in a very beautiful shade of dark olive green, with a sort of raised pattern all over the shell, like a bas relief. While I had been concentrating on the eggs I had, momentarily, forgotten the rightful owner of the nest, so it came as something of a shock to realise that he had seized this opportunity to creep up on me. I suddenly felt him spreading his great, feathery bulk over my back, almost precipitating me into the nest on top of the eggs; he laid his long neck over my shoulder and then, twisting his head ro
und, peered into my face benignly from a distance of about six inches, at the same time producing a sound deep inside his breast that sounded like a mad tap-dancer in a pair of army boots cavorting on a bass drum. Not being quite sure how to cope with these advances I just stared into the bird’s hypnotic blue eyes and did nothing. He had now twisted his head almost upside down, presumably to see if my face looked more attractive this way up. He gave another burst of drumming and then, digging his feet into the ground, pushed me inexorably towards the nest – I felt that the implication was that I should share with him his labour of love, but I had better things to do than squat on a lot of emu eggs. Slowly, so as not to give offence, I rose to my feet and retreated. The emu watched me go sadly; his expression implied that he had hoped of better things from me. Then he stood up, shuffled his feathers with a sound like an oak tree in a summer breeze, stepped forward to the nest and lowered himself delicately on to his precious eggs.
When I had recovered from my amorous interlude with the emu, David took me to see some specimens of which he was – quite rightly – inordinately proud: it was his breeding colony of taipan, Australia’s deadliest snake. Just simply keeping some snakes in captivity is difficult, and to keep them and breed them is a great achievement, but to have kept and bred something as rare and shy as a taipan is a very great triumph. They are the third largest poisonous snake in the world (only being beaten by the king cobra and the black mamba) and can grow to a length of eleven feet; a large one can produce as much as three hundred milligrammes of poison, an unpleasant dose to have injected into your bloodstream should you be bitten. It is twice as much venom as is produced by any other poisonous Australian snake, and is pumped into you with the aid of half-inch long fangs.
David’s group were lolling about elegantly in their well-appointed cage, and they really looked wonderful. Their bodies were a rich, burnished copper, so that they looked as if they had been newly polished; their underparts were a sort of iridescent mother-of-pearl, and their faces a pale, biscuit brown. They had very slender necks and large lustrous eyes and they looked what they were: beautiful and deadly. David told me of the exciting hunts he had been on to capture these snakes – hunts which were not only exciting but dangerous as well, for a taipan has been known to kill a horse in five minutes with a well-aimed bite. He showed me Alexandra, a slim and beautiful seven footer, who was the proud mother that had regularly laid twenty eggs each year. David removed the eggs and kept them in a special incubator where, after a hundred and seven days of incubation, they finally hatched. The remarkable thing was that the eggs measured two and a half inches by one and a half, and yet the babies that hatched out from them measured fifteen inches long: taipans are obviously adept at getting a quart into a pint pot. David regularly ‘milks’ his snakes of their venom, and this is then sent to the Commonwealth Serum Laboratory to be made into taipan anti-venom, which has already saved the lives of a number of people who have had the misfortune to be bitten. This ‘milking’ is done by covering a glass or some similar receptacle with a piece of gauze. The snake is then caught, its mouth opened, and the fangs are sunk through the gauze. The poison then drips into the glass container.
At that moment the bell outside the house clanged imperiously and two brolgas, or native cranes, in a paddock nearby spread their wings and started a wild dance, pointing their beaks to the sky and trumpeting like mad.
‘Tea’s ready,’ said David laconically. ‘They always dance when they hear the bell. Very useful if you want to photograph them.’
The brolgas continued their mad dance while we drank our tea and watched them. They were handsome birds, a soft slate grey with a vivid red and yellow marking on the head. Like most cranes they were consummate dancers and pranced and pirouetted and bowed in the most dainty manner; in the wild state they will sometimes gather together in great groups and hold a sort of avian ball, waltzing and prancing with each other under the blue skies, a sight which – according to many people – is one of the most extraordinary things you can see in Australia.
After tea, David took us to see the animal for which he is most famous; the unbelievable duck-billed platypus. Although the platypus has been written up ad nauseam, it is such an incredible creature that it’s worth running over its more startling features once again. The rubbery beak and the webbed feet are like a duck’s; the body is covered with a short and exceedingly soft fur like that of a mole; the short, somewhat paddle-shaped tail resembles that of a beaver; on the hind legs the male is armed with spurs that contain a poison almost as virulent as that of a snake; finally, as if all that was not enough, it is a mammal (which means that it is warm-blooded and suckles its young on milk) but the young are hatched out of eggs. The platypus, incidentally, has no teats like a normal mammal, but merely an area of spongy skin through which it exudes the milk which the young ones then lap up. It is a strictly insectivorous creature, feeding on fresh-water crayfish, worms and grabs, and consuming its own weight in these delicacies each night. It is this prodigious appetite that is one of the many reasons that platypus are so difficult to keep in captivity.
David’s pair were housed in his specially designed platypusary. This was a large, shallow pond, at one end of which were the wooden sleeping quarters – shallow boxes filled with hay connected to the pond by long wooden tunnels lined with Sorbo rubber. The reason for this is that in the wild state the platypus burrows are narrow, and when the animal wends its way up the burrow to its bedroom the surplus moisture in its fur is squeezed out by contact with the walls of the burrow: in captivity, David has found that it is best to line the tunnels with hay or Sorbo rubber, which will perform the same function, for should a platypus reach his bedroom with his fur still damp he will almost inevitably catch a chill and die. The platypuses were not in their pond when we arrived at the platypusary, so David obligingly opened up a bedroom, plunged his hand into the crisp hay bed, and pulled one out for our inspection.
Now, although I had never seen a live platypus, I had, over the years, seen films and photographs of them; I knew about their curious anatomy, how many eggs they lay, what they feed on, and so on. In fact I felt I knew the platypus fairly well, but as I gazed at the creature wriggling in David’s hands I suddenly realised that all my study of the platypus over the years had left me completely unprepared for one thing: the personality of the beast. The curve of the beak gave it a benign and perpetual smile, and its round, brown, boot-button eyes gleamed with personality. It looked, quite frankly, like one of Donald Duck’s nicer relatives clad in a fur coat some three sizes too large for it. You almost expected it to quack and in fact the noise it did make resembled the disgruntled growl of an indignant broody hen. David placed the platypus on the ground and it waddled about eagerly, with movements reminiscent of a baby otter, snuffling interestedly at every object it came across.
David has not only kept and bred the platypus in captivity (the first man to do so) but he has twice undertaken the hazardous task of accompanying platypus to the New York Zoological Society. When you consider the organisation involved in such a venture, the mind boggles: the thousands of worms, crayfish and frogs to be obtained for the journey; the special platypusary that has to be built; the slow and careful conditioning of the animals to prepare them for the trip, for platypuses are immensely highly strung and any upset can make them go off their food and die. It says much for David’s abilities and patience that on both occasions he landed his charges alive and well, and they lived successfully for a number of years in the United States.
‘You know, there was a very odd rumour circulating in England during the war,’ I said to David, ‘it was about 1942, if I remember right. Someone told me that a platypus was being sent to the London Zoo, but I heard no more about it, so I suppose it was only a rumour. Do you know anything about it?’
‘That wasn’t a rumour,’ said David grinning, ‘that was a fact’ ‘What,’ I asked in astonishment, ‘ferrying platypus about in the middle of a world war?’
‘Yes’, said David, ‘sounds a bit mad, doesn’t it? Suddenly, in the middle of the war, Winston Churchill decided that he wanted a platypus. Whether he thought it would be good for morale, or a good propaganda story, or whether he just wanted a platypus, I don’t know; anyway, I was approached by Menzies and given the job of catching the animal, getting it used to captivity and preparing it for the voyage. Well, I got a nice young male and after keeping him for six months I thought he was about ready for the voyage. I’d briefed an apprentice on the ship about keeping the animal, and given him masses of written instructions as well. The whole ship was intensely interested in the scheme and I got wonderful co-operation, so eventually the platypus sailed on the Port Philip.’
David paused and gazed thoughtfully down at the platypus, which was endeavouring to eat his shoe, then he bent and picked it up carefully by its tail and slid it into its bedroom.
‘Do you know,’ he continued, ‘they got that platypus right across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, across the Atlantic and then – two days out from Liverpool – there was a submarine alert. Well, they had to drop depth charges, of course. As I told you, a platypus is highly temperamental and very susceptible to noise; the depth charges exploding were the last straw as far as the animal was concerned, and it just died. Two days out from Liverpool!’