The Aye-Aye and I

  GERALD DURRELL

  The Aye-aye and I

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Foreword by Lee Durrell

  A Word in Advance

  1. The Vanishing Lake

  2. A Flood of Lemurs

  3. An Interlude with Yniphora

  4. Jumping Rats and Kapidolo

  5. The Hunt Begins

  6. Crystal Country and Beyond

  7. Verity the Vespertine

  8. The Soothsayer’s Apprentices

  9. The Arrival of the Aye-aye

  10. The Flight of the Magic Finger

  Afterword by Tim Wright

  Acknowledgements

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE AYE-AYE AND I

  Gerald Durrell was born in Jamshedpur, India, in 1925. He returned to England in 1928 before settling on the island of Corfu with his family. In 1945 he joined the staff of Whipsnade Park as a student keeper, and in 1947 he led his first animal-collecting expedition to the Cameroons. He later undertook numerous further expeditions, visiting Paraguay, Argentina, Sierra Leone, Mexico, Mauritius, Assam and Madagascar. His first television programme, Two in the Bush, which documented his travels to New Zealand, Australia and Malaya, was made in 1962; he went on to make seventy programmes about his trips around the world. In 1959 he founded the Jersey Zoological Park, and in 1963 he founded the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. He was awarded the OBE in 1982. Encouraged to write about his life’s work by his novelist brother Lawrence, Durrell published his first book, The Overloaded Ark, in 1953. It soon became a bestseller and he went on to write thirty-six other titles, including My Family and Other Animals, The Bafut Beagles, Encounters with Animals, The Drunken Forest, A Zoo in My Luggage, The Whispering Land, Menagerie Manor, The Amateur Naturalist and The Aye-Aye and I. Gerald Durrell died in 1995.

  For Lee

  who has put up with me,

  is putting up with me

  and, hopefully,

  will go on putting up with me

  until she has to put me down

  Foreword

  by Lee Durrell

  The Aye-aye and I was a hugely significant book for Gerry and me in many ways. There was the amazing expedition to Madagascar itself, the subject of the book, and the conservation ideas and activities that the expedition generated were boundless. Add the friendships established and the coincidences and milestones that occurred, and the book truly represents a big chunk of our lives.

  First of all, Madagascar already had a special meaning for us. I had experienced this extraordinary country as a student well before I knew about Gerald Durrell. In fact, I had been reading Gerry’s brother, Lawrence Durrell, just before I left for Madagascar to begin my PhD research. But I discovered some of Gerry’s books on a chance visit to a mission library in a remote part of the south about a year later, and I was hooked!

  Gerry, well travelled as he was, had never been to Madagascar, although it is known as a naturalist’s paradise. When we decided to get married, the Great Red Island was at the top of our list of places to visit, and I had the privilege of introducing Gerry to it in the late seventies.

  I hardly need refer here to the expedition itself, as you will have the delightful experience of reading about it in this book. Suffice it to say, it was an exceptional mix of elation and frustration, beautiful landscapes and enchanting animals, nightmares of bureaucracy and worries about health, not only the animals’ but also our own – a true life adventure!

  The conservation impacts of the expedition were far-reaching and, of course, ongoing – conservation is a long-term endeavour. They are neatly summarised in the Afterword by Tim Wright, Senior Mammal Keeper at Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. There is, however, a person we met whilst on the expedition who deserves particular mention. Joanna Durbin was a young PhD student who had studied zoology, but who now wanted to study the people in the areas where endangered species live. Gerry took to her immediately, elevating her to the status of ‘boom-boom lady’, his description of women who get things done. Joanna eventually became the Trust’s Madagascar Programme Director and pioneered our work in community conservation.

  There were many milestones passed on the Madagascar trip. It was Gerry’s last animal-collecting expedition. He was jocular about his aches and pains, but he never got much better, and aside from a cruise up the west coast of South America about two years later, this was to be his final major journey. He reports in the book that while we were in Madagascar, his brother Larry passed away, and although he spends few words on it, the loss weighed heavily on him. Larry had been the first to encourage him to put pen to paper and to champion him as a writer.

  Indeed, The Aye-aye and I was Gerry’s last book. Rereading it, however, I feel that it is as fresh and vibrant, funny and poignant as any of his writings. And fortunately, Gerry’s eloquence about the natural world and its plight is still as fervent, persuasive and relevant to the world today.

  A Word in Advance

  In the gloom it came along the branches towards me, its round, hypnotic eyes blazing, its spoon-like ears turning to and fro independently like radar dishes, its white whiskers twitching and moving like sensors; its black hands, with their thin, attenuated fingers, the third seeming prodigiously elongated, tapping delicately on the branches as it moved along, like those of a pianist playing a complicated piece by Chopin. It looked like a Walt Disney witch’s black cat with a touch of ET thrown in for good measure. If ever a flying saucer came from Mars, you felt that this is what would emerge from it. It was Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky come to life, whiffling through its tulgey wood.

  It lowered itself onto my shoulder, gazed into my face with its huge, hypnotic eyes and ran slender fingers through my beard and hair as gently as any barber. In its underslung jaw, I could see giant chisel-like teeth, teeth which grow constantly, and I sat quite still. It uttered a small, snorting noise like ‘humph’ and descended to my lap. Here, it inspected my walking stick. Its black fingers played along its length as if the stick were a flute. Then it leant forward and, with alarming accuracy, almost bisected my stick with two bites from its enormous teeth. To its obvious chagrin, it found no beetle larvae there and so it returned to my shoulder. Again, it combed my beard and hair, gentle as a baby breeze.

  Then, to my alarm, it discovered my ear. ‘Here,’ it seemed to say to itself, ‘must lurk a beetle larva of royal proportions and of the utmost succulence.’ It fondled my ear as a gourmet fondles a menu and then, with great care, it inserted its thin finger. I resigned myself to deafness – move over, Beethoven, I said to myself, here I come. To my astonishment, I could hardly feel the finger as it searched my ear like a radar probe for hidden delicacies. Finding my ear bereft of tasty and fragrant grubs, it uttered another faint ‘humph’ of annoyance and climbed up into the branches again.

  I had had my first encounter with an aye-aye and I decided that this was one of the most incredible creatures I had ever been privileged to meet. Since it needed help, help it we must. To allow such an astonishing and complex creature to become extinct was as unthinkable as burning a Rembrandt, turning the Sistine Chapel into a disco, or pulling down the Acropolis to make way for a Hilton. Yet the aye-aye, this strange creature that has attained near-mythical status on the island of Madagascar, is in danger of vanishing. It is a magical animal, not only biologically speaking, but in the minds of the Malagasy people amongst whom it lives and, unfortunately, perishes.

  When this strange beast was first described in 1782, it had such an anatomical jumble of various qualities that for many years scientists could not make up their minds what it was. Obviously, it was not a common or garden lemur and was thought, for a time, to be a rodent, because of its massive teeth. Finally, it was de
cided that an aye-aye was an aye-aye, one of the lemurs, but a unique inhabitant of the planet, like no other creature. It was dignified with a family of its own and christened with the euphonious name of Daubentonia madagascariensis.

  Madagascar is an island filled with magic and many taboos, or fadys as they are called, which vary from place to place, so it is not surprising that such a weird product of evolution as the aye-aye should be credited with magical powers that vary from village to village, from tribe to tribe. In places, if it is found near a village, it is thought to be a harbinger of death and so must be killed. If it is a small one, then an infant in the village might die. If it is a large, whitish animal, a pale-skinned adult will be in danger and if it is a dark animal, a dark-complexioned human will be in danger.

  In other parts of the island, if a villager finds and kills an aye-aye near his house, he thoughtfully removes the bad luck from himself by putting the corpse in his neighbour’s back garden. The neighbour, finding this somewhat doubtful gift, makes haste to put it in his neighbour’s back garden. So the aye-aye corpse progresses through the village until thrown out onto the road to the alarm of passers-by. It is an aye-aye chain letter: pass this on, or something awful will befall you. In other areas, the animal is killed, its hands and feet bound in raffia and it is hung at the entrance to the village until the corpse starts to rot, when it is fed to the dogs. In other places, its slim third finger is dried and used by the village sorcerer as a magic charm for good or for evil. So the aye-aye, through a quirk of evolution, has become possessed of a magic finger.

  As the Malagasy people continue with their relentless and suicidal policy of ‘slash and burn’ agriculture, cutting down the forests which are the lifeblood of the island, the aye-aye and many other unique creatures are threatened with extinction. At one time, the aye-aye was thought to be extinct, but then it was found that this curious animal was still clinging on in isolated pockets, nearly all of which were threatened by forest destruction.

  The aye-aye had used its magic to become a survivor of a sort. As its natural habitat diminished, it took to invading what man had replaced it with – coconut plantations, sugar-cane groves and orchards of cloves. With its huge teeth, it trepanned the green coconuts, drank the juice and extracted the jelly-like, unripe fruit by using its thin middle finger like a hook. It disembowelled the sugar cane, leaving the stems looking like some strange, medieval musical instrument. It bisected the clove trees in search of beetle grubs. If you are a villager whose whole livelihood depends on, perhaps, five coconut trees, a tiny patch of sugar cane and half a dozen clove trees, then the aye-aye becomes not a magical menace but a creature that can ruin your income for ever. Therefore, you kill it or starve.

  As forest decimation continues unabated, these isolated pockets of aye-aye, leading a bandit-like existence, are doomed. It is to be hoped that new, more intelligent agricultural methods will be soon introduced to replace the destruction. In the meantime, for the sake of the aye-aye, some must be established in captivity to maintain the species: if they vanish in the wild, we will have at least some animals to return to the natural habitat (if, of course, their natural habitat still exists). At present, there are eight aye-aye at Duke University’s Primate Center in the USA, and one at Vincennes Zoo in Paris. It was essential that more were brought into captivity to build up viable breeding colonies. So the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust decided to undertake a rescue expedition to accomplish just that.

  This, then, is the tale of our hunt for the beast with the magical finger, and the adventures we had. It is also the story of the giant jumping rats and flat-tailed tortoises of Morandava, and the gentle lemurs from the reed beds of the vanishing lake. I hope, as well, that it gives a fair portrait of one of the most fascinating islands in the world.

  Chapter One

  The Vanishing Lake

  I once described Madagascar as looking like a badly presented omelette, lying in the Indian Ocean off Africa’s eastern flank, from which it was wrenched millions of years ago. Like all the best omelettes, well or badly presented, it is stuffed with goodies. The fourth largest island in the world, ninety per cent of its flora and fauna is found nowhere else. Africa is home to one species of pot-bellied baobab tree; Madagascar boasts seven. Madagascar is home to two-thirds of all the world’s chameleons, from ones the size of a matchstick to ones almost as long as your arm. And so it goes on, until you become bewildered by the rich biological bounty of the island. It is a treasure trove and, if the mysterious forests are left intact and explored carefully, new and astonishing species are still to be found. Inhabited by wonderful, friendly people, it is a beautiful country, stretching its languid thousand-mile length in blue waters teeming with fish and multicoloured coral reefs. Its forests encompass everything from thick tropical to montane, to dry deciduous forest, to spiny forest as prickly as a hedgehog, and to pygmy forests only six inches high. It has lemurs as big as a four-year-old child and others that are small enough to fit into a coffee cup. It has woodlice the size of golf balls and moths the size of Regency fans. When you go on an expedition such as ours, it behoves you to keep your objectives sternly in mind, lest you be distracted and led astray by the fascinations that envelop you.

  The huge island is really a mini-continent of its own, with a climate that varies from wet tropical in the east, to cool Mediterranean in the highlands, to the baking heat of the desert-like spiny forest in the south. When it was first inhabited by man is still a mystery to the anthropologists: the Malagasy have straight hair and a language which has Malayan-Polynesian similarities. Arguments as to how they appeared in Madagascar are rife. Did they come Kontiki-wise on rafts or boats from the Malaysian region, or did they come land-wise along the coast of Africa? Nobody is sure, but it provides anthropologists with a splendid field for argument and fierce debate, as they pursue evidence as diverse as language, weaving and looms, music and musical instruments, the exhumation of the dead and many other things. It is guessed that Madagascar was first colonized by Homo sapiens in AD 500 and, as usual, it spelt doom for the fauna.

  Ancestral lemurs were present fifty million years ago and had evolved into many strange forms, including one the size of a calf. There was also the heaviest bird in the world, the gigantic ostrich-like Aepyornis, which, it is supposed, was the inspiration for Sinbad’s Roc legend, a bird which swooped on elephants and carried them off for food. Although enormous, the Aepyornis was incapable of treating elephants in this cavalier fashion – even baby elephants – since, like the ostrich, it could not fly. It is thought that this original faunal bounty, probably as tame as most creatures unfamiliar with man, was ruthlessly hunted and that the clearance of land for crops and pasture destroyed the animals’ forest homes. Within a comparatively short space of time, all the giant lemurs and the Aepyornis disappeared. In the case of this giant bird, man was particularly short-sighted, for if it had been domesticated, just one of its huge eggs would have provided an omelette aux fines herbes for every hut in a largish village.

  The Arabs, of course, knew all about Madagascar and, indeed, established settlements in 1300. Then, in 1500, those indefatigable explorers the Portuguese, under Diego Dias, ‘found’ Madagascar (which had never been lost) on their way to discover a route to the Spice Islands, but Dias’s attempt to start a base on the island met with failure. In the fifteenth century, the tribes began to coalesce, first with the emergence of the Sakalava kingdom in the west. In the early sixteenth century, the east of the island was a hotbed of piracy on a grand scale, with all the usual blood-letting, plank-walking and swaggering and where rape and pillage took the form of entertainment. (Now, of course, we can watch it on television.) In spite of this, the peoples of the east were briefly united under a man whose father had been a pirate. The late sixteenth century saw the rise of the Menna kingdom in the central highlands, first under a king whose name, believe it or not, was Andrianampoinimerina, which made lockjaw among his subjects almost inevitable.

  Now,
the missionaries began to creep in. They had a fairly patchy time, one way and another, under a variety of kings and queens with names as long as comets’ tails, until Queen Ranavalona II was baptized in 1869. In 1895, the French established the island as a protectorate and introduced (among many other things) the shaking of hands, kissing on both cheeks and inordinate loquaciousness. A year later, Madagascar became a French colony and, in a typical colonial gesture of gratitude, Queen Ranavalona III was banished to Algiers, where she eventually died. The monarchy was disbanded, but the Queen’s remains were returned to Madagascar in 1938.

  In 1960 the island achieved full independence. Although the government was anti-West in the 1970s, of late it has displayed a much more lenient attitude to countries who have more wherewithal than the Marxist-Leninist ones.

  Antananarivo was looking her best: quaint, red-brick, upright Malagasy houses with wooden balconies standing shoulder to shoulder with modern office blocks in a fine higgledy-piggledy jumble with potholed streets running through them. Lac Anosy, the big central lake, was dark as jet and the petals from the hundreds of jacaranda trees planted round its rim provided a blue carpet through which the traffic bustled. Both cars and people were decorated with blue petals as they hurried along the lake’s edge. In the distance, huge green trees were spangled with what seemed to be giant white blooms, until one of these ‘flowers’ took off in slow, graceful flight and you realised the trees held a colony of a thousand pairs of cattle egrets and great egrets, the birds taking wing to fly over the city to the rice paddies beyond in search of fish and frogs.

  As is usual on any animal-collecting expedition, we were overwhelmed by the contradictory information that well-wishers poured into our bewildered ears, in this case in a mixture of Malagasy, French and a sort of English.