In Which I Acquire a Fish with Four Eyes

 

 

When I was in Guiana, I was very anxious to obtain some of the beautiful kinds of hummingbirds which are to be found there. After some time, I happened to contact a hunter who was particularly good at catching these minute birds, and about once a fortnight he would bring me a small cage with five or six inside, fluttering their wings so rapidly that it sounded more like a cageful of bees. I had always been told that hummingbirds were extremely difficult to look after, and was, therefore, very worried about the first four I acquired.

In the wild state they feed on the nectar from flowers, hovering in front of the blooms and sticking their long, fine beaks inside, lapping up the substance with their fragile tongues. In captivity, of course, they have to be taught to drink a mixture of honey and water with a small amount of beef extract and a prepared milk food for babies mixed with it. This mixture, in the heat of the tropics, goes sour very quickly, and for this reason the hummingbirds have to be fed three times a day. The job was, of course, to teach them to feed out of a little glass pot, for they were used to getting their meals from a highly colored flower, and did not realize at first that the pots contained the nourishment they needed.

When they first arrived, I removed each one very carefully from the cage, and holding it in my hand, dipped its beak into a pot of honey and water, time and time again, until eventually it stuck its tongue out, tasted the mixture and then began to suck it up greedily. When it had had a good feed, I put it in its new cage with one of the pots of food inside, and then plucked a scarlet hibiscus flower and placed it inside the pot on the surface of the honey.

The hummingbird, which was about the size of a bumblebee, sat on its perch and preened itself and uttered tiny little chirrups in a self-satisfied sort of way. Then it took off from the perch and purred around and around the cage like a helicopter, its wings moving so fast that they were just simply a dim blur over its back. Eventually, as it was flying round, it caught sight of the hibiscus flower lying in the pot, and swooped down and pushed its beak towards the bloom. When it had sucked all the nectar out of the flower, it continued stabbing with its beak and soon stuck it between the petals and into the honey beneath, and started to drink rapidly, still hovering in mid-air. Within twenty-four hours it had learned by this means that the little glass pot hung on the wall of its cage contained a copious supply of the sweet honey, and from then onward I did not have to bother to give it a signpost in the shape of a flower. These tiny birds settled down very happily, and in two days they had become so tame that when I put my hand inside the cage with the pot of food, they would not wait for me to hang it on the wire but would fly down and drink it as I was putting it in, occasionally perching on my fingers for a rest and to preen their glittering feathers.

 

 

There was generally something exciting happening at our base camp in Georgetown. You never knew at what hour of the day or night someone would arrive with some new specimens. It might be a man carrying a monkey on his shoulder or a little boy with a wicker cage full of birds, or it might be one of the professional hunters turning up, after a week’s journeying into the interior, with a large horse-drawn cart piled high with cages full of different creatures.

I remember one day a very old Indian walked into the garden, carrying a raffia basket which he handed to me very courteously. I asked him what was inside it and he told me that it contained rats. Well, now, it is perfectly safe to take the lid off a basketful of rats, as, generally, they will simply crouch on the bottom and not attempt to move. I removed the lid of the basket and found that it was not full of rats but full of marmosets, who leaped out with great speed and agility and fled in all directions. After a hectic chase that lasted about half an hour we managed to round them all up and get them into a cage. But it taught me to be more cautious about opening the baskets of specimens that were brought in.

These little marmosets were about the size of a rat with a long, bushy tail and intelligent little black faces. Their fur was a deep black color and their paws were a bright orange-red. We kept them in a large cage where they had plenty of room to scuttle about, and gave them a box with a hole in it to serve as their bedroom. Every evening they would all come down and sit by the door, chattering and squeaking, waiting for their supper. They would drink a potful of milk and then have five grasshoppers each, and, after crunching up the very last morsel, off they would troop in a line, the oldest one leading, and solemnly climb into their box and all curl up in a solid ball at the bottom. How they were able to sleep like this without suffocating, I have no idea, but apparently marmosets sleep in colonies in the wild state as well as in captivity.

 

 

One day, a tall Negro walked into the garden and trotting alongside him on a long string was a most extraordinary-looking animal. It was similar to a gigantic guinea pig covered with great white blotches. It had large dark eyes and a mass of white whiskers. It was, in fact, a paca and a near relation of the guinea pig and also of the capybara. When we had agreed on the price that I was to pay for this animal, I asked the Negro if it was tame, whereupon he picked it up, stroked it and talked to it and assured me that he had had it since it was a tiny baby, and that a more gentle creature you could not wish to find. At that particular time I had received a large consignment of animals and was, therefore, short of cages. But since the paca was tame, I thought I would simply just tie him up to a nearby stump. I did this and gave him some vegetables to eat, and promptly forgot all about him.

Some time later I was walking down the line of cages, taking out the water pots to wash them, when quite suddenly I heard a snarl that would have done credit to a tiger, and something flung itself at my leg and buried its teeth in my shin. Needless to say, I leaped in the air and dropped all the water pots which I had been so carefully collecting. It was, of course, the paca which had attacked me, though why he should have done so I cannot imagine, for he seemed perfectly tame when he arrived. My trousers were torn and my leg was bleeding. I was extremely angry with the animal, and for the next week he was quite unapproachable; if anything went near him he would dash at it, gnashing his teeth and uttering his ferocious snarling grunt. Just as suddenly as his bad temper had flared up, and for no apparent reason, so he became tame all over again and would allow you to scratch him behind the ears and tickle his tummy while he lay on his side. His behavior alternated in this manner all the time he was with me, and whenever I approached his cage it was with the uncertainty of not knowing whether he was going to greet me with signs of affection or a savage bite from his large sharp teeth.

 

 

One of the most extraordinary specimens that we were brought while in Georgetown was a small fish, some four or five inches long. A dear old Negro woman came to us with about five of them in an old tin kettle. When I bought them, I tipped them out into a large bowl, and I realized at once that there was something peculiar about them, but for a few seconds I could not place what it was. Then suddenly I noticed that there was something very strange about the fish’s eyes. I took one out of the bowl and put it in a glass jar so that I could examine it more conveniently, and then I saw what it was that had puzzled me: the fish had four eyes.

Its eyes were large, and situated so that they bulged above the surface of its head, rather like a hippo’s eyes. Each eyeball was neatly divided into two, with one eye on top of the other. I discovered that this fish spends its life swimming along the surface of the sea, so one set of eyes looks downward and keeps a watch for any large fish that may make an attack, while the other pair keeps a lookout along the surface of the water for food, and above in case of attack by a fish-eating bird. It was certainly one of the most amazing defences I have ever seen in an animal, and certainly one of the most extraordinary fishes.

Guiana seems to go in for amazing forms of life. There one of the most peculiar birds in the world is to be found, the hoatzin, or, as it is called in Guianese, the Stinking Anna, because of its strong musky scent. This strange bird has a “thumb” on its wing, armed with a hooked claw. A baby hoatzin, a few hours after hatching, can scramble out of its nest and crawl about in the trees like a monkey, using its thumb to get a grip on the twigs. The nests are built in thorn bushes overhanging water, and a few hours after hatching, the babies think nothing, if any danger threatens, of dropping ten feet into the water where they swim and dive like fish. When the danger has passed, they use their thumbs to climb the tree and get back into the nest. The hoatzin is the only bird in the world able to do this, and the babies make a weird sight swinging among the thorns, or plopping into the water like little men clad in furry bathing-suits.

 

 

 

Chapter Fourteen

 

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