Read Online The New Noah by Gerald Durrell - Free Book Online Page A

mixture, so the resulting drink looked not unlike weak coffee. Most of the babies I had took this
drink immediately and would go absolutely mad when they saw the pots arriving at feeding time. They would shake the bars and scream and shout, and stamp on the floor of their cages with excitement
as they saw me pouring out the milk. The adult monkeys, however, took quite a long time to become used to this curious pale brown liquid. They seemed to be extremely suspicious of it, for some
reason.
    Sometimes I managed to get a newly-arrived monkey to drink this mixture by turning its cage round so that it could see all the other monkeys busily guzzling and hiccupping over their milk pots.
The new arrival would then become curious and decide that perhaps the stuff in his pot was worth investigating. Once he had tasted it, he would very soon grow just as enthusiastic over it as the
rest of the monkeys.
    Occasionally, however, I would get an extremely stubborn animal that would refuse even to taste his milk, in spite of watching all the others drinking theirs. I found the only thing to do in
this case was to take a cupful of milk and throw it over the monkey’s hands and feet. As they are extremely clean creatures, he would get to work to remove the sticky liquid from his fur by
licking it, and once he had got the taste and smell of the milk he would then drink it readily out of a pot.
    With most animals, feeding is fairly straightforward if you know what they eat in the wild state. The meat-eating animals, for example, such as the mongooses or the wild cats, can be fed on goat
or cow meat, raw egg and a certain amount of milk. The important thing with these animals is to make sure that they have plenty of roughage. When they kill their prey in the wild state, they will
eat the skin, bones, and all; so if they are used to having this roughage, they soon sicken and die should it be withheld from them in captivity. I used to keep a big basketful of feathers and fur,
and I would drop pieces of goat or cow meat into it and get them all covered with feathers and bits of fur before giving them to the mongooses.
    I came across this same problem of supplying roughage to birds of prey. Owls, for example, will eat a mouse, and then some time later sick up the bones and the skin, in the form of an oval
pellet. When you keep owls in captivity, you always have to make sure they are regularly producing these pellets, which are called castings, as this is a sure sign the bird is in good health.
    Once, when I was hand-rearing some baby owls, I could get no roughage that I thought was suitable for them, and so I was forced to wrap small pieces of meat in cotton-wool and push them down
their ever-open beaks. This worked very well, somewhat to my surprise, and the little owls produced pellets composed entirely of cotton-wool, for a number of weeks. Their cage looked rather as
though they had been having a snowball fight, with all these little white castings lying about on the floor.
    The animals which cause the collector most trouble are those species which have a restricted diet in the wild state. For example, in West Africa live the pangolins or scaly ant-eaters, great
creatures that have long pointed noses and long tails, with which they can hang from the branches of trees. They are covered with large, strong-overlapping scales so that they look like
strangely-shaped fir cones. In the wilds these animals feed solely on the ants’ nests which are built among the branches.
    While I was keeping these animals in Africa, I could quite easily have given them an endless supply of their natural food, but, unfortunately, you cannot do this when the animal is in England.
So you have to teach the animal to eat a substitute food, something that will be easily obtainable in the zoo to which it is going. It is no use landing in England an ant-eater that will only eat
ants, as there is no zoo that would be able to supply them.
    My scaly ant-eater