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

had to be taught to eat a mixture of unsweetened condensed milk, finely shredded raw meat, and raw egg, mixed up together in a sloppy paste. They are extremely stupid animals
and it generally took them several weeks to learn to feed on this mixture properly. For the first few days of their capture, they would generally overturn their pot of food, unless you tied it in
place.
    One of the most difficult creatures I had to deal with was a very rare animal known as the giant water shrew. This is a long black beast with a mass of white whiskers and a curious leathery tail
like a tadpole’s, that lives in the fast-running streams of the West African forest. Like ant-eaters, it had an extremely restricted diet in the wild state, feeding only upon the big brown
fresh-water crabs which are so plentiful in its natural habitat. When I obtained my first giant water shrew, I fed him on crabs for two or three days until he had settled down and got used to his
cage. Then I set about the task of trying to teach him to eat a substitute food on which he could live in England.
    From a local market, I obtained a large number of dried shrimps which the natives use in their food. These I crumbled up and mixed with a little raw egg and finely-chopped meat. Then I got the
body of a large crab, cut it in half, scooped out the inside and stuffed it full of the mixture. I joined the two halves together again and, waiting until the giant water shrew was really hungry,
threw this false crab into his cage. He jumped for it, gave two swift bites, which was his normal method of dispatching a crab, and stopped and sniffed suspiciously: obviously, this crab did not
taste like the ones to which he was used. He sniffed again and thought about it for a bit, and must then have decided the taste was quite pleasant, so he set to work and had soon eaten it up. For
several weeks after this he had a number of real crabs and a number of specially stuffed ones every day until he got quite used to the taste of the new food. Then I started to put my substitute
food mixture in a pot, with the body of a crab on top. While he was biting the crab, he discovered the food underneath, and, after repeating this experiment for a couple of days, he was taking the
mixture out of the pot without any trouble at all.
    When an animal was brought in, I could usually tell, more or less, what type of food it was going to require, but I always asked the native hunter, who made the capture, if he knew what the
animal ate, in case it had been noticed eating some particular food in the forest, which would help me to vary its diet in captivity. As a rule, however, the hunters had not even the faintest idea
what half their captives ate, and, if they did not know, they would just simply say the beast ate banga, the nut of the palm-oil tree. Sometimes this would be quite correct, as in the case of the
rats, mice, and squirrels. But on more than one occasion I had been assured by the native hunter that such unlikely things as snakes or small birds lived on this diet. I became so used to this that
whenever a hunter told me the animal he had brought in lived entirely on palm nuts, I disbelieved him automatically.
    One day I obtained four lovely forest tortoises which were in the best of health and which settled down very well in a little fenced yard that I built for them. Now, as a rule, tortoises are one
of the simplest creatures to feed. They will eat almost any form of leaf or vegetable that you give them, together with fruit, and, in some cases, a small piece of raw meat occasionally. However,
these tortoises proved to be the exception to the rule. They refused all the delicacies that I showered on them, turned up their noses at all the ripe fruit and tender leaves which I took such
pains to get for them. I could not understand it and began to worry quite a bit about them.
    One day a native hunter came to the camp and, while I was showing him the collection and telling him which