Gerald Durrell - Island Zoo

Quokka

Australia is a country that probably has more peculiar animals living in it than any other part of the world. One of the curious things about most Australian animals is that they carry their young in a sort of pocket or pouch, as, for example, the kangaroo does. The creatures we have in the zoo to represent the great group of these pouched animals are the tiny and charming quokkas, or short­tailed paddymelons. They are really like a pigmy kangaroo, about the size of a large rabbit. The babies are born very tiny and help­less, but nevertheless manage to find their way up into the mother's pouch, in which they live for about four months. By this time they are almost half the size of their mother, and her pouch bulges with the fat baby inside, and frequently you can see his little head poking out as the mother hops about. Quokkas are found in Western Australia, but, unfortunately, are getting very rare in the wild state and the Australian Government, very wisely, has allowed a certain number to be caught and sent to zoos in different parts of the world so that they can be bred in captivity. In this way, even if the quokka disappeared in the wild state, it would not be lost forever. We are very proud of our quokkas, and even prouder of the fact that they have had two babies since they have been with us.

Crested Porcupine

The rodents or gnawing animals are a huge family whose mem­bers are found in nearly every type of climate and country in the world. Some of them, like the house mouse and the brown rat, are among man’s worst enemies, for not only do they destroy vast amounts of food each year, but they can also carry diseases. One of the largest of the rodents, and one that is quite harmless to man, is the crested porcupine. They are large and rather handsome beasts, with their long black and white quills that—when they are alarmed or excited—stand out like the war bonnet of an Indian. The one we have we call Delilah, and she is a great character. When you go into the cage with her, she gets very indignant, and rushes round and round in circles, snorting loudly, growling like a lion, rattling her quills like castanets, and generally tries to persuade you that she is a very fearsome creature. Actually, she is not nearly as bad as she likes to make out, but we have to be careful, because her two-foot long quills could do you a lot of damage if you got a legful of them. Porcupines do not throw their quills, as a lot of people believe.

What they do, when attacked by an enemy is turn their back to him, wait until he comes close enough, and then, with lightning speed, they back into him. The quills are only very loosely planted in the porcupine’s skin, and having jabbed them well into the enemy, the porcupine walks off and leaves her quills sticking into him, like a pincushion. Sometimes it has been known that quite large animals, even leopards, have been killed in a fight with a porcupine by its quills, and the quills can be responsible for turning lions into man-eaters, for if they try to kill a porcupine and get the quills in their paws, the points generally break off in the pad. This causes a nasty poisoned wound, and the lion then finds it impossible to hunt fast-moving creatures like antelope and zebra, and he takes to hunt­ing man, who is a much easier victim to catch.

Among the most delightful of the smaller rodents are the squirrels, and one of the most attractive is the little North American flying squirrel. They do not, of course, actually fly like a bird, but float through the air like a glider. Running from wrist to ankle on each side of their body is a wide flap of skin. When the squirrel wants to get from one tree to another, he runs up the trunk as high as he can, and then jumps into the air. As he jumps, he stretches out his arms and legs, which pulls the two flaps of skin tight, like a pair of wings, and then he glides down to the next tree. We have a small colony of flying squirrels, and among them is one called Christo­pher. I gave him to my wife as a Christmas present one year, and

Flying

Squirrel

he arrived three days before Christmas, sitting in a small box full of cotton wool and looking at us with large, black, frightened eyes. As flying squirrels only come out at night, we thought we would keep Christopher's cage in the bedroom to begin with, so that we could watch him when we lay in bed, and so that he would get tame more quickly. Well, on the second day Christopher had gnawed a large hole in the back of his cage and had escaped. After a long hunt I found that he had taken up residence behind the wardrobe. As he seemed quite happy there, we left him, and each evening we would put his food on the dressing table, and as soon as we were in bed we would see his little face poking out from behind the wardrobe, to make sure that we really were in bed. Then he would scuttle up to the top of the wardrobe, launch himself into the air and glide down to the dressing table as gracefully as a paper dart. He would sit there, squeaking excitedly to himself, while he examined his food, and then, taking a tidbit, he would climb up on top of the cupboard again to eat it. We really gave him too much food, and we knew he was storing some of it, because in the morning there was never any­thing left on the dressing-table. But we could not discover where he was storing it. Then came New Year’s Eve, and I was invited to a party for which I had to wear my dinner jacket. I went to the drawer of the dressing-table in which I kept my dress shirts, and then discovered where Christopher had been storing his food. My brand- new cummerbund (which I had never worn) had been carefully chewed into bits, and these had been used to construct several little nests, one on the front of each of my clean dress shirts. In these nests had been stored seventy-two hazel nuts, five walnuts, fourteen pieces of bread, six dead mealworms, fifty-two bits of apple and twenty grapes. The apple and the grapes had, of course, gone all squishy and had left complicated patterns of brown juice stains across the fronts of each shirt. This was really too much, and so (in spite of Christopher's indignant squeaks) I caught him and put him in a strong cage which he could not gnaw through. In future he would have to store his food in his own bedroom.

Our local Jersey red squirrel, Jinny, is very much the same as the red squirrels found in England, except that she is slightly smaller and darker. Some people were felling some trees one day, and when one of the trees came crashing down they found to their dismay that there was a squirrel's nest, or drey, in the upper branches. Investigating it, they found Jinny inside. She was very young then, with her eyes only just open. They brought her to us, and we set to work, feeding her with a fountain-pen filler. She soon grew very tame, and if her meal was a bit late in arriving she would sit in her cage and “chuck, chuck, chuck” at us until she got her milk. As she grew older, of course, she started to eat fruit and nuts, and it was then that we discovered what a greedy squirrel she was. She would always accept food, even if she was full, and she would take it to the back of the cage, put it on the ground, and then cover it over with sawdust. About this time we acquired Zoot, the thirteen-lined ground squirrel. As he was quite a baby, we thought that he would like to live in the same cage with Jinny. They settled down very well, and seemed to get very fond of one another. But Zoot had a habit that Jinny did not appreciate. He would sit and watch her when she buried her little stores of food under the sawdust, and as soon as she had moved away Zoot would go and dig everything up and carry it to a different part of the cage and bury it himself. Then when Jinny was feeling peckish, she would come down to her food store and find it gone. She would have to search all over the cage to find it and re-bury it again. Zoot would watch her, and as soon as she left he would dig it up and take it somewhere else for re­burial. Poor Jinny, although she was very fond of Zoot, this habit of his nearly drove her mad.