Gerald Durrell: Island Zoo

One of the most peculiar-looking and highly colored members of the monkey family is the mandrill. The one we have is called Frisky, because when he arrived he spent all his time skipping about the cage, and twirling round and round, as if he was dancing. Man­drills have an extraordinary coloring, with their blue and scarlet behinds, and their blue and red faces, with the strange tire-like ridges on the nose. In the wild state they are monkeys that live mainly on the ground (though they can climb trees if they want to) and they travel through the African forest in great herds. The fully grown males are very powerful creatures, and even a leopard will think twice about tackling one.

Just after Frisky arrived, when he was starting to get his beautiful colors, there was an accident. A painter was working on top of Frisky's cage, painting the woodwork. One morning he climbed up there with his pot of paint, and then found that he had forgotten his brush, so. leaving his pot of paint on top of the cage, he climbed down to fetch his brush. This, of course, was Frisky’s

Mandrill

chance. He had watched the painter for several days, and had been very interested in the painting operation, but this was the first time he had seen a chance to investigate the paint more closely. With the painter safely out of the way. Frisky ran up to the top of the cage, pushed his arm through the wire, and pulled at the paint pot. The next moment the pot tipped over, and Frisky had a shower bath of mushroom-colored paint, which I must say did not improve his appearance. As soon as the paint had dried on his fur, we put him in a cage with three female monkeys, hoping they would help him clean the dried paint from his fur. They certainly did, but not in the way we had hoped. Finding that the paint had dried hard to Frisky's fur, they all set to work and pulled and tugged to try and get it off, with the result that they were pulling Frisky’s fur out by the handful, and very soon we had a half-bald mandrill So we had to move Frisky to a cage by himself until his hair grew again.

The drills, which are related to the mandrills, are similar in their habits, and somewhat like them in shape, but they have not got the bright coloring of the mandrill. The adult male drill has a black face, and the only coloring on it is a curious red mark along the lower lip, as if it has been putting on lipstick, and not very suc­cessfully at that. In parts of West Africa, the drill is one of the commonest monkeys, and when I was out there collecting animals for my zoo, I was always being brought baby drills that the hunters had caught in the forests. Now these babies were very sweet little creatures, but they had one drawback. As soon as they had settled down they adopted you as their mother, and, having done this, they expected you to carry them round with you, as their mother would do when they were that age. If you put them in a cage and refused to carry them, they screamed blue murder. Now it is very difficult to get any work done with four or five baby drills clinging to various parts of your anatomy, like so many little Old Men of the Sea, and at last I had to work out a plan that satisfied the drills and allowed me to work. I wore an old coat for a couple of days and when the baby drills were thoroughly used to this garment, I hung it over the back of a chair and let the babies cling to it. This worked perfectly, for the drills seemed to think that the coat was a sort of extra skin which I could take off whenever I wanted to, and as long as they were clinging to the coat they thought they were still holding on to me.

Drill

It was in West Africa, where I got the baby drills, that I also got Sophie, the puttynose monkey. I think these monkeys are very handsome, for their black fur has each hair tipped with green, they have a nice white shirt-front, and, on their nose is a white spot, as if someone had thrown a snowball at them and it had stuck. Sophie was quite a baby when I first got her, and when she grew bigger I used to have her tethered on a long leash attached to a collar round her waist, so that she had plenty of room to move about, and she could watch everything that was going on in the camp. She was inclined to be a rather greedy monkey, and would eat almost any­thing that was eatable, if she got the chance, but what she liked best of all was grasshoppers. I used to get the local African children to catch these grasshoppers for me, and I kept them in a large blue tin. As soon as Sophie saw me with this tin she would get terribly excited, dancing up and down at the end of her leash and uttering loud squeaking cries. I would tip a pile of grasshoppers out on to the ground in front of her. and she would lean forward and grab a hand­ful and stuff them into her mouth as rapidly as she could and scrunch them up, screwing up her eyes tight, and wiping her hands hastily on her fur, for, although she loved the taste of grasshoppers, she did not like the way they wriggled and tickled.

Puttynose Monkey

A lot of people think that all monkeys can hang by their tails, but this is quite wrong. In actual fact very few monkeys can do this, and they all come from South America. The woolly monkey, for example, can use its tail like another limb. It can not only hang by it, but can, if it wants to, pick up things with it. Our woolly monkey is called Topsy, and we got her from a dealer’s shop.

She was very tiny—far too young to have been taken away from her mother—and, when I found her in the shop, she was very ill indeed, and there seemed very little chance of her living. However, we gave her injections and various medicines which we hoped would cure her. The trouble was that, at that age, Topsy would normally still be carried about everywhere by her mother. Naturally, she wanted something to cling to, but—not surprisingly—she did not trust human beings, and if we tried to handle her she would scream until we put her down. We were in despair, for we knew that she would not get better unless she had something to cling to which made her feel safe. Then we had an idea. We bought a very large teddy bear and put that in Topsy’s cage. To our delight she took to it at once, and spent all day with her arms, legs and tail wrapped round her new “mother.”

After a few days, of course, the teddy bear grew dirty, and we had to take it away to wash and dry it. Topsy objected strongly to having her mother taken away, and she just sat in her cage and screamed and screamed, until we could not stand it any longer, and we went into the town and bought her another teddy bear to take the place of the first one while it was being washed. Of course, this was a long time ago, and Topsy is now very grown-up, so much so that she has quite given up teddy bears and has a big guinea pig in her cage to keep her company.

Douracouli

Another monkey that, like Topsy, comes from South America is the douracouli. This is probably one of the strangest of the monkey family, for it is the only monkey that comes out at night instead of the day. They are quaint looking animals, for their mouths are so shaped that they look as though they are smiling the whole time. Then they have the nice white ‘‘picture frame” of fur round their faces, which makes them look like a cross between an owl and a clown. When I was collecting animals in South America, I once lived in a native hut in the forest and just outside the hut there were some fruit trees. The douracoulis would come down every evening to feed in these trees, and so I had a chance to watch them.