Gerald Durrell - Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons

Presently, the path dipped down into the valley and we were walking through a jungle of straight Chinese guava stems, interspersed here and there with a twisted, black ebony tree, or a group of Traveller’s palms, like neat eighteenth-century fans whose handles had been stuck in the ground. The path was steep and knotted across it lay roots like varicose veins. The whole was drenched in rain so the water gleamed at every footstep in the mud, like a splintered mirror, and the mud itself turned into a caramel-coloured, sticky slide that, conspiring with the roots, could break a leg or an ankle as one would snap a stick of charcoal. The sun was starting to sink and shadows slanted across the path, which added further to the hazards. As we slid and tripped our way down into the valley, the air grew heavy and warm, and sweat was now added to make our condition even more aquatic. Presently we slid down a precipitous slope and the forest changed from a mixed assortment of plants to groves of cryptomeria trees, at first glance looking rather like a prickly species of pine tree, dark green with heavy bunches of needles.

‘Pink Pigeon Valley,’ said Dave, proudly. ‘Took me an age to discover it. This is where most of them hang out.’

As he spoke, from the trees on our left came a loud, husky, seductive call: ‘caroo, caroo, caroo, coo, coo, coo’.

There,’ Dave exclaimed, ‘there’s one now. They’ve arrived early.’

With great enthusiasm, he threw back his head and imitated what appeared to be a whole flock of Pink pigeons in a variety of moods, ranging from anger to abject love. The real pigeons fell silent, seeming surprised by this sudden cacophony of sound, much as someone humming in the bath would be taken aback to be suddenly joined by the massed choirs of the Russian army.

‘Funny,’ said Dave, surprised. ‘They generally answer. Oh well, we’d better spread out and start spotting, they’ll all be coming in to roost pretty soon.’

Acting on his instructions, we spread out and made our way through the close-growing cryptomeria trees, seeking either trees we could climb and so view sections of the valley, or areas where there were breaks in the trees where we would get an uninterrupted sight of the pigeons flighting in. I found myself a large cryptomeria on a slope with branches growing practically down to the ground, so that scrambling up it was as easy as climbing a ladder. Some forty feet from the ground, I wedged myself into a convenient fork, unslung my binoculars and prepared to wait for the Pink pigeons. From my vantage point, I had a wide field of view which included a large slope of the cryptomeria forest where, Dave assured me, the pigeons roosted every night.

As I waited, I mused on the extraordinary method of capture that Dave had evolved. You arrived just before the sun went down and waited until the pigeons flighted in. When it was beginning to get dark they would flap heavily from wherever they were perching into another tree. This was the tree they would generally roost in, and it was this one that you had to mark. When it grew really dark, for the moon was fatal to such a venture, you approached the tree with torches, surrounded it and pinpointed the sleeping pigeon with your light beams. Then, quite simply, you shinned up the tree and either with your hands or a net shaped like a pair of sugar tongs, caught the bird, either soundly asleep still, or else awake but in a daze such as only a pigeon can get into. It sounded the most improbable technique but I had travelled in far too many countries and seen too many unlikely methods of capturing animals, to dismiss it out of hand.

The sun was now very low and the sky turned from a metallic kingfisher-blue to a paler, more powdery colour. The valley was washed with green and gold light, and the whole scene was calm and peaceful. A group of zosterops, minute, fragile, green birds, with pale, cream-coloured monocles round each eye, appeared suddenly in the branches above me, zinging and twittering to each other in high-pitched excitement as they performed strange acrobatics among the pine needles in search of minute insects. I pursed up my lips and made a high-pitched noise at them. The effect was ludicrous. They all stopped squeaking and searching for their supper, to congregate on a branch near me and regard me with wide eyes from behind their monocles. I made another noise. After a moment’s stunned silence, they twittered agitatedly to each other and flapped inch by inch nearer and nearer to me until they were within touching distance. As long as I continued to make noises, they grew more and more alarmed and, with their heads on one side, drew closer and closer until they were hanging upside down a foot from my face, peering at me anxiously and discussing this strange phenomenon in their shrill little voices. I was just wondering whether I could get them actually to perch on me, when two Pink pigeons flew over the brow of the hill and settled in a cryptomeria fifty feet away. By raising my glasses to watch, I put my Lilliputian audience of zosterops to flight.

‘Two have just flighted in,’ shouted Dave from the stream bed at the bottom of the valley. ‘Did anyone mark them?’

He had told me how tame the pigeons were, but I was still surprised to see these two billing and cooing in the tree, totally oblivious to Dave’s shout.

‘I’ve marked them,’ I yelled back, and again was faintly astonished that the pigeons, who were very close to me, did not fly away, panic-stricken. They sat side by side on the branch, their breasts glowing pale cyclamen-pink in the rays of the sinking sun, occasionally rubbing beaks in what, for pigeons, was a passionate kiss. From time to time the one I took to be the male would bow to the female and give his loud, husky chant. The female, like all female pigeons, succeeded in looking vacant, affronted and hysterical all at once, like a Regency maiden about to have the vapours. Presently, the other pigeons flighted in and then there were four more; each one’s arrival was greeted with a shout from one or other of our band. On one occasion, through my binoculars, I was watching Major Glazebrook climb laboriously to the straggling top branches of a cryptomeria on the other side of the valley, when a pair of pigeons flighted in and settled on a branch within six feet of him. Another one landed the same distance away from me and regarded me gravely for several minutes before deciding I might be dangerous and flying away. Given their tameness — or was it merely stupidity? — I was surprised that there were any of the species left, they presented such an easy target for an unscrupulous marksman.

We settled down, watching our respective pigeons, and as the sun sank, and the valley became washed in shadow, the birds flapped heavily from tree to tree. The pair I was watching flew languidly out of sight among the branches; I was just preparing to descend from my tree and go in search of them, when they reappeared and settled themselves comfortably on a high branch. They looked smug and satisfied, and I hoped that they had at last chosen their roost for the night, but just before it grew too dark to see them, to my intense annoyance, they took flight again. This time, fortunately, they only flew some twenty feet to a higher branch and there settled themselves. Gradually, the valley grew dark. I slowly eased my way down the tree to the ground — a not unhazardous undertaking. In the depths of the

valley, Dave, for some reason best known to himself, elected to impersonate an entire sounder of wild boar and was splashing about in the stream, grunting and squealing, screaming and moaning in the most lifelike fashion. It was calculated, one would have thought, to have given permanent insomnia to any Pink pigeons. However, it appeared to be a sound they were well used to and they slumbered on, uninterruptedly.