Problems of Hairy Frogs, Tortoises, and Other Beasts

 

 

Catching your animals is generally, but not always, the easiest part of a collecting trip. Once you have caught them, your job is to keep them alive and well in captivity, and this is not always so easy. Animals react in various ways to captivity, and you will even get individuals of the same species that seem to have totally different outlooks. Sometimes they will differ in quite small things and other times their reactions will be so dissimilar that you would think they might be two separate species.

I once bought two baby drills from a hunter. Drills are those large, gray-colored baboons with pink behinds that you can see in most zoological gardens. These two babies settled down very well but they differed in a lot of small habits. For example, when they were given bananas, one of them would carefully peel the fruit and eat it, throwing away the skin, while the other would peel his bananas just as carefully, eat the skin, and throw away the fruit.

With the monkey collection one of the most important items of their diet was the milk that they got every night. This was dried milk that I would mix up in a big kerosene tin full of hot water; then I would stir in several calcium tablets and a number of spoonfuls of malt and cod liver oil 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 straight-forward 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 anteaters, 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 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 anteater that will eat only ants, as there is no zoo that would be able to supply them.

My scaly anteater 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 anteaters, it had an extremely restricted diet in the wild state, feeding only upon the big brown fresh-water crabs which were so plentiful. 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 would 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 he was used to. 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. Thus for several weeks 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 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, turning 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 animals were wanted, I called his attention to these tortoises and to the fact that ever since I had got them, some two or three weeks previously, they had refused to eat anything. Whereupon he promptly turned around and assured me I was giving the tortoises all the wrong things to eat and that they did not eat fruit or leaves. He insisted they lived on a species of tiny white forest mushrooms which grew on dead tree trunks in the forest. To be perfectly honest I did not believe him, although I did not say so. I thought this was just another way of saying that the creatures lived on palm nuts.

However, another week passed and still my tortoises had eaten nothing, so in desperation I sent two small boys out into the forest with a basket and instructed them to brinj| me as many of these small white mushrooms as they could find. When they returned, I emptied the basketful of mushrooms into the tortoises’ pen and stood by to watch. I do not think that I have ever seen tortoises move so fast toward food. They scuttled across the compound and within a very few minutes were chewing happily away at the mushrooms with the juice running down their chins. Strangely enough, once they had been fed on mushrooms, they started eating the other food as well, and before many weeks had passed had completely given up eating mushrooms altogether and much preferred a nice ripe mango.

As my collection grew, it became quite a problem to maintain a good supply of food for so many animals with such varied likes and dislikes. Meat, fruit, eggs, and chickens I obtained from the local market but there were other things that I had to have.

For example, all the birds, most of the monkeys, and such things as the Galagos and some of the forest rats, adored grasshoppers and locusts, and in order to keep them in good health it was necessary to have a constant supply of these delicacies for them. As you cannot buy grasshoppers and locusts in even a West African market, my own special team of grasshopper capturers had to be organized. This consisted of ten small boys who had quick eyes and could run very fast.

I supplied each of them with a large cigarette tin and a butterfly net, and twice a day they would go off and capture as many grasshoppers and locusts as they could with the nets, push them into the cigarette tin and bring them back to camp. They were paid not by the amount of time they spent on the job, but by the number of grasshoppers they procured. The average payment was five grasshoppers to the penny, and some of these little boys, who were quicker than the others and more agile, could earn as much as three or four shillings a day.

The native name for grasshoppers is “Pampalo, ” and this team of little boys became known to me as the “Pampalo Catchers, ” so if an animal was looking sick, or a newly caught one arrived and was in need of some delicacy to soothe his ruffled feelings after capture, I would shout out for the Pampalo Catchers and they would all set off into the grass fields to bring in a fresh supply of insects.

To supply all the birds I had with insects was even more of a problem, as the majority of them were too small to be able to cope with the big prickly grasshoppers. The thing they liked best was a sort of white baby termite, or white ant, and I had to employ another team of boys to get these for me. There are several different sorts of white ant found in West Africa, but the one that I found most useful was known as the “Mushroom” termite. In cool glades among the big forest trees they built the most peculiar nests out of gray mud. These nests looked exactly like giant toadstools, standing about two feet high. The interior of such a nest was like a honeycomb, filled with tiny passages and little cells in which the worker termites and the baby termites lived. My team of termite hunters would go off into the forest in the early morning and return in the evening with three or four nests each, perched on their heads.

These nests I stored in a cool, dark place, and when it was feeding time for the birds I would spread a big canvas sheet on the ground and carefully split open the nests with a chopper. Then I would shake them and from the inside would pour a stream of termites both large and small, which I would shovel into pots and push hastily into the bird cages before the termites crawled out. All the birds realized the necessity for speed, and no sooner had the door closed behind my hands than they would be perched on the edge of the tin pecking away for dear life.

Quite apart from this problem of feeding so many different kinds of animals when collected, there was the job of caging them correctly. Each kind of animal had to have its own special sort of cage, and it had to be designed and built with very great care. It had to be made so that it was cool while in the tropics and yet kept the animals warm when the ship drew nearer to England. As an added precaution, I used to make a curtain of sacking for each cage which I could lower over the bars in front, so that if there was a cold wind blowing, or it was raining, the animal inside would be protected.

Then there was the problem of size. Sometimes quite a small creature would need a very large cage to keep it healthy. Sometimes quite a large animal would have to be kept in quite a small cage for the same reason. For instance, the Galagos had to have ample space to allow them to leap about and run around and around, as in the wild state they are constantly on the move, and keeping them in small cages would prevent them from getting the right amount of exercise.

On the other hand, some beautiful, spotted antelopes which I collected, called Water Chevrotains, had to be kept in long narrow boxes which did not allow them to turn around. The sides of these boxes had to be padded with sackings stuffed with cotton-wool. The reason for this was the extreme nervousness of these animals, and when the cage was rattling and bumping along in the lorry, or being hoisted on or off a steamer, the antelopes were liable to get very frightened. If the cage had been square they would have run around inside it and eventually lost their balance and fallen and probably broken their very slender, fragile legs. In the long narrow cage, however, they could brace themselves against the padded sides when there was any movement, and so there was no chance of their falling down and breaking a limb. The padded sides, of course, were to prevent them from being rubbed sore against the woodwork.

Strangely enough, another creature that had to have a padded box was a fantastic kind of frog I caught, called the Hairy Frog. These chocolate-colored amphibians had the rear end of their bodies and their fat thighs covered with a thick growth of what looked exactly like hair. In reality, it was long, slender filaments of skin. All frogs to a certain extent breathe through their skins, as well as with the aid of their lungs. That is why it is necessary to keep a frog in a moist condition, otherwise his skin will dry up and he will suffocate. Hairy frogs live in very fast-running mountain streams and spend most of their time submerged below the water. Therefore, they do not use their lungs for breathing quite as much as the normal frog will do, and in consequence they need a considerably greater area of skin to enable them to breathe under water. So they have evolved the “hairs.”

These strange frogs created quite a problem in housing. Most frogs you keep in a shallow box until such time as you are going to get on the ship, when you place each one of them inside a cheesecloth bag and hang it on the side of a big box. They sit in these bags quite happily till you reach England. They do not want much food on the voyage; as long as they are wet two or three times a day they are perfectly satisfied. The hairy frogs possess, as well as the strange decoration on their rears, another peculiar feature. In the fleshy toes of their hind feet they have long, sharp claws very like the claws of a cat, which, moreover, they can pull back into the sheath as a cat can. Now, if you put hairy frogs inside the usual cheesecloth bag they would try to hop; their claws would come out of the sheath and get stuck in the cloth, and within a very short time your frogs would be twisted in the most dreadful knot in the bottom of the bag. I decided, therefore, that the frogs would have to travel in a box.

Now another problem made itself apparent. The box had to be extremely shallow, otherwise the frogs, when frightened, would jump wildly into the air and hit their heads on the wire top. Consequently, I put all the hairy frogs in a shallow wooden box with holes bored in the bottom so that when I watered them the liquid would run out. Since they could not jump, the hairy frogs developed a new habit: whenever they were frightened, they would rush into a corner and try to burrow into the woodwork. After a couple of days of this they had worn all the skin off their noses and upper lips.

This was an extremely dangerous thing to happen to a frog, for these rubbed spots can quickly develop into a great sore which will, if it is not treated, eventually eat away the nose and upper lip. Treatment for any sort of wound on a frog is made doubly difficult by the fact that you are forced to keep the beast moist, and, of course, a cut or a sore that is moist will take three times as long to heal. So I not only had to design a new cage for the hairy frogs, but I also had to think of some way of healing their noses without causing them any discomfort.

I built them a large shallow box, and the whole of the inside was covered with thin sheet material stuffed with cotton-wool, so that the walls, floor, and ceiling of the box were quilted – as though they were covered with an eiderdown. I put the hairy frogs in this, and instead of watering them three times a day, as usual, I only watered them once a day. I found this was very successful, for the cotton-wool inside the padding soaked up the water which kept the interior of the box reasonably moist, without actually letting the frogs become too wet. Eventually, the sores on their noses healed up perfectly and they traveled safely to England inside their padded boxes where they could do no damage to themselves, for if they jumped or burrowed they only met the soft surface of the cotton-wool padding.

 

 

 

Chapter Eight

 

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