Dear Mr Durrell,
At a garden fete the other day a lizard was found in the ice-cream container…
I know that it is a confession of acute and depraved eccentricity, but nevertheless I must admit that I am fond of reptiles. They are not, I grant you, overburdened with intelligence. You do not get the same reaction from them that you would from a mammal, or even a bird, but still I like them. They are bizarre, colourful, and in many cases graceful, so what more could you want?
Now, the majority of people will confess to you (as though it were something quite unique) that they have an ‘instinctive’ loathing for snakes, and with much eye-rolling and grimacing they will give you many reasons for their fear, ranging from the sublime (’It’s instinctive’) to the ridiculous (’They’re all sort of slimy’). I have been, at one time or another, bored by so many snake-complex admissions that as soon as the subject of reptiles crops up in conversation with anyone I want to run away and hide. Ask the average person his views on snakes and he will, within the space of ten minutes, talk more nonsense than a brace of politicians.
To begin with, it is not ‘natural’ for human beings to fear snakes. You might just as well say that they are naturally afraid of being run over by a bus. Most people, however, are convinced they are born with a built-in anti-snake feeling. This can be quite simply disproved by handing a harmless snake to a child who is too young to have had its head filled with a lot of nonsense about these creatures; the child will hold the reptile and play with it quite happily and without a trace of fear. I remember once putting this point to a woman who had been gurgling on about her snake phobia for what seemed like years. She was most indignant. “I’ve never been taught to fear snakes, I’ve always been like that,” she said haughtily, and then added in triumph, “and my mother was like that, too.” Faced with such logic, what could one reply?
People’s fears of snakes seem to be based on a series of misconceptions. The most common one is the conviction that all these creatures are poisonous. In actual fact, the non-poisonous ones outnumber the poisonous ones by about ten to one. Another popular idea is that these reptiles are slimy to touch, whereas snakes are dry and cold, and feel no different from a pair of snakeskin shoes or a crocodile-skin handbag. Yet people will insist that they cannot touch a snake because of its sliminess, and think nothing of handling a wet cake of soap.
Our reptile house is fairly small, but we have a pretty good cross-section of reptiles and amphibia on show. I derive a lot of innocent amusement out of going in there when it is crowded and listening to the general public airing its ignorance with an assurance that is breathtaking. For instance, the snake’s tongue: this is purely a scent organ with which the creature smells, hence the way it is flicked rapidly in and out of the mouth; it is also used as a feeler, in the same way that a cat uses its whiskers. The snake experts, however, who visit the reptile house know better. “Cor, Em,” someone will shout excitedly, “come and look at this snake’s sting… Coo, wouldn’t like to be stung by that!” And Em will hurry over and peer horrified at the innocent grass snake, and then give a delicious shudder. All reptiles can, of course, spend long periods completely immobile, when even their breathing is difficult to detect, unless you look closely. The classic remark was delivered by a man who, having peered into several cages in which the reptiles lay unmoving, turned to his wife with an air of one who has been swindled, and hissed, “They’re stuffed, Milly.”
A snake moving along the ground or through the branches of a tree is one of the most graceful sights in the world, and when you consider that the creature is walking with its ribs the whole thing becomes even more remarkable. If you watch a moving snake carefully, you can sometimes see the ribs moving beneath the skin as the snake draws itself along. The creature’s unblinking stare (another thing to which people object) is due not to the fact that the snake is trying to hypnotize you, but simply to its having no eyelids. The eye is covered with a fine, transparent scale, like a watch-glass. This is very clearly noticed when a snake sheds its skin, which they all do periodically. The skin comes loose around the lips, and then, by rubbing itself against rocks or branches, the snake gradually peels it off. If you examine this shed skin, you can see that the eye scales have been shed as well.
All snakes are adapted for feeding in the same way, but their methods of obtaining their food vary. The non-poisonous ones and the constrictors (such as the pythons) grab their prey with their mouths, and then try to throw two or three coils of their body round the victim as rapidly as possible, thus holding and crushing at the same time. The poisonous ones, on the other hand, bite and then wait for the poison to take effect, which is generally very soon. Once the prey has undergone its last convulsions, it can be eaten. The poison fangs, of course, are in the upper jaw, and usually near the front of the mouth. When not in use, they fold back against the gum, like the blade of a penknife; as the snake opens its mouth to strike, they drop down into position. The fangs are hollow, like a hypodermic needle, or else they have a deep groove running down the back. The poison sac, to which they are connected, lies above the gum. As the snake bites, the poison is forced out and trickles down the groove or hollow in the fang and so into the wound. However, whatever the method of attack, once the prey is dead, the swallowing process is the same in all snakes. The lower jaw is jointed to the upper one in such a way that it can be dislocated at will, and, of course, the skin of the mouth, throat, and body is extremely elastic, so the snake can swallow a creature considerably larger than its own head. Once the food is in the stomach, the slow process of digestion starts. Any portions of the animal that are impossible to assimilate, such as hair, are regurgitated in the form of pellets at a later date. On one occasion a large python was killed, and in its stomach were found four round balls of hair, the size of tennis balls and very hard. On being cut open, each one was found to contain the hoof of a wild pig. These sharp hooves could have damaged the lining of the python’s stomach, and so each one had been carefully covered with a thick, smooth layer of hair.
In the majority of zoos nowadays dead creatures are fed to the snakes. This is not because it is better for the snakes, or that they prefer it, but simply because of misplaced kindness on the part of the general public, who imagine that a white rat or a rabbit suffers terribly when put into a cage with a snake. That this is nonsense I have proved to my complete satisfaction, for I have seen, in a Continental zoo, a rabbit perched on the back of a python (obviously not hungry), cleaning its whiskers with tremendous sang-froid. The director of the zoo told me that when white rats were given to the snakes, it was imperative that they should be removed if they were not eaten straight away; otherwise they proceeded to gnaw holes in the snake’s body.
While snakes are passive and rather expressionless beasts, lizards can display considerable intelligence and character. One such reptile we had was a mastigure, which I christened Dandy, owing to his great partiality for dandelion flowers. One must, I think, face the fact that mastigures are not the most attractive of lizards, and Dandy was a particularly unattractive member of his species. Nevertheless, his eager personality made him a likeable creature. He had a blunt, rounded head; a fat, flattened body; and a heavy tail covered with short, sharp spikes. His neck was rather long and thin, and this made him look as though he had been put together out of bits of two totally unrelated species. His colour could be described only as a rich, dirty brown. Dandy’s liking for dandelion flowers amounted to an obsession. He had only to see you approaching the reptile house with something yellow in your hands, and he would immediately rush to the front of his cage and scrabble wildly against the glass. If it was a dandelion you were carrying, you had only to slide back the glass front of his cage and he would gallop out onto your arm, panting with emotion; then, closing his eyes, he would stretch out his long neck and, like a child waiting to have a chocolate popped into its mouth, would open his jaws. If you pushed the flower into his mouth he would munch away in ecstasy, the petals dangling outside his mouth and making him look as though he had a bright yellow military moustache.
Dandy was the only lizard I have known that would genuinely play with you. If he was lying on the sand, and you let your hand creep slowly towards him, as though you were stalking him, he would watch you, his eyes bright, his head on one side. As soon as you were close enough, he would suddenly whip his tail round, give you a gentle bang on the hand with it, and then scuttle away to a new position; you were then expected to repeat the whole performance. That this was real play I have no doubt, for the blows he dealt you with his tail were very gentle, whereas I have seen him bash another lizard with it and not only send it flying but draw blood.
Not long after we got Dandy, we had trouble with teguexins. These are large, handsome, and very intelligent lizards from South America. They can grow to about three and a half feet in length, and their skin is beautifully patterned in yellow and black. They are quick-witted, belligerent creatures, and the female we had was quite the most vicious in the reptile house. Tegus, as they are called for short, have three methods of attack, all of which they employ—together or separately—cheerfully and without any provocation. They will either bite, scratch with their well-developed claws, or lash you with their tails. Our female preferred to start hostilities with her tail. As you opened her cage she would regard you with obvious dislike and mistrust, inflate her throat and start to hiss, and at the same time curve her body into a half-moon shape like a bow. Once your hand came near enough, she would suddenly straighten out, and her tail would lash round like a stock whip. If she found that this method of defence did not deter you, she would run forward and try to grab you with her mouth. If she succeeded, she would hang on with the tenacity of a bulldog, at the same time bringing up reinforcements in the shape of her sharp, curved hind claws, which could tear chunks off you. I did not think this tegu’s character was an exception. After a fair amount of experience with tegus in their natural state, I had come to the conclusion that they were by far the most evilly disposed of the lizards, and were, moreover, so fast and intelligent that they were a force to be reckoned with when in captivity.
We were always suffering at the hands, or rather the tail, of our female tegu, and so it was with somewhat mixed feelings that we discovered her lying dead in her cage one morning. I was puzzled by her sudden death, for she had appeared to be in the very pink of fighting condition, having bitten me vigorously only a couple of days before. So I decided to do a rough post-mortem and try to find a clue to the cause. To my astonishment, on opening the stomach, I found a huge mass of whitish substance, not unlike fish roe, which I took to be a gigantic growth of some sort. Wanting to find out about this mysterious growth, I shipped the body off for a more detailed and expert post-mortem, and awaited the results with interest. Finally they came through. They were terse and to the point: the mass of white substance had been not a growth but a large quantity of pure fat. The lizard had died of heart trouble brought on by this fatty condition, and it was suggested that we feed less abundantly in future. On reflection, it was plain, for in the wild state tegus are very active creatures. Therefore, if you confine them in a limited area and give them a rich and continual food supply, they are bound to become over-fat. I vowed that the next tegu we obtained would be treated very differently.
Our chance came not long afterwards, when a dealer offered us a pair. On arrival they turned out to be wonderful specimens, well-marked and with glossy skins—the male with a great, heavy head and fleshy jowls; the female with a longer, more slender head. Contrary to our expectations they did not prove to be typical tegus at all. Instead of being fierce and unhandleable, they were as tame as kittens, and liked nothing so much as to lie in your arms, being gently rocked, and drowse off to sleep. If you went and stood by their cage, they would make the most frantic and flattering efforts to climb through the glass and into your arms. Apart from these bursts of social activity, they showed little desire to do anything much, except to lie around in abandoned attitudes, gazing benignly at any human beings who happened to be around in the reptile house.
As a result of all this feverish activity, of course, they grew fatter and fatter, and, viewing their increasing girth with alarm, we decided that something would have to be done, or we would have another couple of heart failures on our hands. The answer was exercise; so every morning Shep would let them both out to wander round the reptile house while he did his work. To begin with—for the first two or three days—this worked like a charm, and the tegus, breathing heavily, pottered about the floor for a couple of hours each morning. Then, however, they discovered that by climbing over a low barrier they could get into the tortoise pen, over which hung an infrared light. So each morning when they were let out, they would rush short-windedly over to the tortoise pen, climb in, and settle themselves under the infra-red light and go to sleep. The only answer to this was to cut down on their food, and consequently they were dieted as rigorously as a couple of dowager duchesses at a health resort. Needless to say, they took a very poor view of this, and would gaze plaintively through the glass as they watched the other inmates of the reptile house enjoying such delicacies as raw egg, mincemeat, dead rats, and chopped fruit. We hardened our hearts, though, and continued with the diet, and within a very short time they had regained their sylph-like figures, and were much more active as a result. Now we let them eat what they like, but at the least sign of corpulence back they will go to the diet until their size is respectable again.
The one reptile-house inhabitant that never seemed to become overweight, no matter how much he ate, was our dragon, known as George. He was a Guiana dragon, a rather rare and interesting kind of lizard from the northern parts of South America. They measure about two feet six inches in length, and have large, heavy heads with big, dark, intelligent eyes. The body and tail are very crocodile-like in appearance, the tail being heavily armoured and flattened on top, whereas the back is covered with heavy scales which are bean-shaped and protrude above the surface of the skin. The colouring is a warm rusty brown, fading to yellowish on the face. They are slow, thoughtful, and attractive lizards, and George had a very mild and likeable character.
Probably one of the most remarkable things about Guiana dragons are their feeding habits. Before George arrived we had read up all we could on the species, but none of the textbooks were very helpful. However, they seemed to be perfectly normal lizard-type creatures, and so we thought that their diet would be similar to that of any large carniverous lizard. When George arrived he was petted, admired, and placed reverently in a large cage prepared for him, with a special pond of his own. This amenity he appeared to appreciate fully, for the moment he was released into his quarters he made straight for the pond and plunged in. He spent half an hour or so squatting in the water, occasionally ducking his head beneath the surface for a few minutes at a time and peering thoughtfully about the bottom of the pond. That evening we gave him a dead rat, which he regarded with considerable loathing. Then we tried him on a young chicken with the same result. Fish he retreated from as if it were some deadly poison, and we were in despair, for we could think of nothing else that he might like.
Just when we were convinced that George was going to starve himself to death, Shep had an idea. He fetched a handful of fat garden snails and tossed them into George’s pond. George, who had been sitting on a tree trunk at the back of the cage looking very regal, eyed this floating frothing largesse with his head on one side. Then he came down to the pool, slid into the water, and nosed at a snail, while we watched hopefully. Delicately he picked up the snail in his mouth and, throwing back his head, allowed it to slide to the back of his mouth. Now that his mouth was open I could see that he had the most astonishing teeth I had ever seen in a lizard: teeth that were, of course, perfectly adapted for eating snails. Those in front were fairly small, pointed, and inclined slightly backwards. These were the grasping teeth, as it were. Once they had hold of the snail, the lizard threw back his head so that the mollusc slid and rested on the teeth at the back of the mouth. These were huge, shoebox-shaped molars with carunculated surfaces which looked more like miniature elephants’ teeth than anything else. With the aid of his tongue, George manoeuvred the snail until it rested between these ponderous molars, and then closed his jaws slowly. The snail cracked and splintered, and when he was quite sure that the shell was broken he shifted the whole into the centre of his mouth and, by careful manipulation of his tongue, extracted all the bits of broken shell and spat them out. Then the smooth, shell-less body of the snail was swallowed with every evidence of satisfaction. The complete process took about a minute and a half, after which George sat there for a bit, licking his lips with his black tongue, and musing to himself. After a time he leaned forward and daintily picked up another snail, which he dispatched in the same manner. Within half an hour he had eaten twelve of these molluscs, and we were jubilant, for, having now discovered George’s preference, we knew there would be no more difficulty in keeping him.
It is always a relief when a reptile starts to feed itself, for if it refuses food for a certain length of time it has to be force-fed, and that is a tricky and unpleasant job. Many of the constricting snakes refuse food on their arrival, and have to be force-fed until they have settled down, but it is not an operation one relishes, since, with their fragile jaws and teeth, it is very easy to break something and thus set up an infection in the mouth. I think the worst force-feeding job we ever had was with a pair of young gavials, or gharials. These are Asiatic members of the crocodile family, and in the wild state feed on fish. Instead of the strong, rather blunt jaws of the alligators and crocodiles, the gavial’s jaws are long and slender, resembling a beak more than anything. Both the jaws and the teeth are fragile, the teeth especially so, for they appear to fall out if you look at them. In consequence, when our two young gavials arrived and steadfastly refused all food, including live fish in their pond, our hearts sank, as we realized we would have to force-feed them. The process was tedious, protracted and difficult, and had to be done once a week for a year before the gavials would feed on their own. First, you take a firm grip on the back of the creature’s neck and his tail. Then you lift him out of the tank and place him on a convenient flat surface. Whoever is helping you then slides a flat, smooth piece of wood between the jaws at the back of the mouth, immediately behind the last teeth. When the jaws are prised a little apart, you slightly release your grip on the reptile’s neck and slide your hand forward, push your thumb and forefinger between the jaws, and hold them apart. This is generally much easier than it sounds. The other person then arms himself with a long, slender stick and a plateful of raw meat chunks or raw fish. He impales a piece of meat or fish on the end of the stick, inserts it into the reptile’s mouth, and pushes it towards the back of the throat. This is the tricky part, for in all members of the crocodile family the throat is closed by a flap of skin; this arrangement allows the creature to open its mouth beneath the surface without swallowing vast quantities of water. The food has to be pushed past this flap of skin and well down into the throat. Then you massage the throat until you feel the food slide down into the stomach. As I say, it is a tedious task, as much for the gavial as for you.
By and large, the creatures that seem to cause the least trouble in the reptile house are the amphibians. They usually feed well, and they do not seem to suffer from the awful variety of cankers, sores, and parasites that snakes and lizards contract, though I must admit they can come up with one or two choice complaints of their own on occasion, just to enliven things for you. The pipa toads were a good example of this. These extraordinary creatures come from British Guiana, and look, quite frankly, like nothing on earth. Their bodies are almost rectangular, with a leg at each corner, so to speak, and a pointed bit between the front legs that indicates where the head is supposed to be. The whole affair is very flattened and a dark blackish brown colour, so the creature looks as though it had met with a nasty accident some considerable time ago and has been gently decomposing ever since. The most extraordinary thing about these weird beasts is their breeding habits, for the pipa toads carry their young in pockets. During the breeding season the skin on the female’s back becomes thickened, soft, and spongy, and then she is ready for mating. The male clasps her, and as soon as she is ready to lay she protrudes a long ovipositor which curves up onto her back, underneath the male’s stomach. As the eggs appear, he fertilizes them and presses them into the spongy skin of the back. They sink in until only a small proportion of the egg is above the surface. This exposed portion of egg hardens. So inside their individual pockets the tadpoles undergo their entire metamorphosis until they change into tiny replicas of their parents. When they are ready to hatch, the hardened top of the shell comes loose, and the tiny toads push it back and climb out, looking rather like someone getting out of a bubble car.
I had once been fortunate enough to witness the hatching of some baby pipa toads, and I was anxious to see if we could breed them in the zoo. So I ordered a pair from a dealer, and on their arrival installed them in the reptile house. We kept them in a large aquarium full of water, for, unlike other toads, pipas are entirely aquatic. They settled down very well, and were soon devouring monstrous earthworms by the score. All we had to do now, I thought, was wait for them to breed. One morning Shep came to me and said that one of the pipas had apparently bruised itself on the stomach, though he could not see how this had happened. I examined the toad and discovered that what appeared to be a bruise was something which looked like a gigantic blood blister. It was difficult to know what to do. If the toads has not been aquatic and had had dry skin, I would have anointed the area with penicillin. Within twenty-four hours both pipas were dead, their bodies covered with the red blisters, which were full of blood and mucus. I sent them away for post-mortem, and the report came back that they were suffering from an obscure disease called ‘red-leg’. I had a strong feeling that this had something to do with the water in which they had been kept: it was ordinary tap water but rather acid. So I purchased another pair of pipas, and this time we kept them in pond water only. This has, so far, proved successful, and at the time of writing both toads are flourishing. With a bit of luck, I might get around to breeding pipa toads yet, unless they can think up something new to frustrate me.
Another amphibian with almost equally fascinating breeding habits as the pipa is the little pouched frog. We had five of these delightful, tubby little frogs, handsomely marked in green and black, which were brought to us from Ecuador. They did very well, eating prodigiously, but they showed no signs of wanting to breed. So we moved them into a bigger tank, where they had more land and water space, and this did the trick. Out of the breeding season, the female’s pouch, which is on her lower back, is scarcely noticeable. If you look closely you can see a faint line down the skin, with a slightly puckered edge, as if at one time the skin had been torn and healed up rather badly. However, when the breeding season comes round, the slit becomes much more obvious. The frogs begin to sing to each other, and presently you will see the females going off into quiet corners and indulging in a very curious action. They manage, by great contortion, to get one hind leg at a time up over their backs, insert the toes into their pouches and proceed to stretch the skin. When the pouch is stretched to their satisfaction, they are ready to breed. The method by which they put the eggs into the pouch is still a mystery to me, for unfortunately I missed the actual egg-laying. The next thing we knew was that the female had a bulging pouchful of spawn which protruded from her back and made her look as though she had been disembowelled. The female carries the eggs around until she knows, by some means or other, that the tadpoles are ready to hatch, whereupon she goes and sits in the water. The tadpoles wriggle free of the gelatine-like spawn and swim off on their own, the mother taking no further interest in them. We found that the tadpoles did very well on strips of raw meat and white worms—the tiny worms that fish fanciers breed as food. When they grew their legs and came out on land, we fed them on fruit flies and tiny earthworms, until they were old enough to graduate to house-flies and bluebottles.
Amphibians are much easier to breed than reptiles, for with them you do not have to worry about the moisture. Reptiles lay eggs with a parchment-like shell which is either soft or hard. If the temperature of the cage is not right, and if the moisture content of the air is too great or not enough, the contents of the egg will either dry up or become mildewed. Although we have had some successes with hatching reptile eggs, the chances against are always ninety to one. One success we did achieve, of which we were rather proud, was in hatching some Greek tortoise eggs. The Greek tortoise is probably one of the commonest pets, and it invariably lays eggs with monotonous regularity, but these very seldom hatch. Thinking that this batch of eggs was going to be just as successful as all the others had been, Shep did not worry over-much about them. He buried them in the sand at the bottom of one of the cages which had what he thought was a suitable temperature. Week after week passed, and eventually he forgot all about them. He was, therefore, considerably astonished one morning to find a baby tortoise perambulating about the cage. He called me and we dug up the rest of the eggs. Out of the six, four were in the process of hatching. In one egg the baby was almost out, but in the other three the babies had only just started to breach the shell.
We placed them in a small aquarium on a saucer of sand, in order to watch the hatching more conveniently. The eggs were almost the size of ping-pong balls, and much the same shape; the parchment-like shell was tough, and it was clearly an exhausting job for the babies to break out of their prisons. The one who had made the biggest hole in his shell could be seen quite plainly inside, as he twisted round and round, now using his front feet and now his back ones to enlarge the hole. On his nose he had the little horny ‘beak’ which baby tortoises are supposed to use to make the first breach in the shell; this later drops off. But I did not see this one use his ‘beak’ at all -the hard work was done with the front and hind legs, with frequent pauses for him to regain his strength. It took him three-quarters of an hour to break out, and then the egg split in half and he trundled off across the sand, wearing one half on top of his carapace, like a hat. When they emerged from the egg, their shells were spongy, misshapen, and extremely soft, and they were each the diameter of a two-shilling piece. However, after an hour or so a change had taken place; it was as though someone had inflated them with a bicycle pump. The shell had filled out, and instead of being flattened it was now handsomely domed and looked much harder, although it was, in actual fact, still as soft as damp cardboard. They were now so much larger than the egg that, unless I had watched them hatching myself, I would have said they could not possibly have emerged so recently from such a small prison. I noticed that their nails, when they hatched, were very long and sharp, presumably to help them break through the shell. Within a very short time, though, they had worn down to a normal length.
I had spent several hours watching this hatching process, and it was worth every minute. I had the greatest admiration for those rotund and earnest little tortoises, for breaking out of the egg was no easy matter. What amused me most, I think, was the way—after he had been using the hind feet to enlarge the hole—the tiny reptile would swivel round inside the shell, and the next moment a minute, wrinkled and rather sad little face would be poked through the hole in the shell, as if the tortoise wanted to reassure himself that the outside world was still there and still as attractive as it had been when he last looked. We were very lucky to have been able to hatch these tortoises, but what was even luckier was the fact that Ralph Thompson, who illustrated this book, happened to be staying with me at the time, and was thus able to draw the whole of the process from start to finish, which he assured me he thoroughly enjoyed, in spite of the fact that, owing to the high temperature in the reptile house, his glasses kept misting over.