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GOLDEN BATS AND PINK PIGEONS
Gerald Durrell, 1977
Chapter 1
MACABEE AND THE DODO TREE
When you are venturing into a new area of the world for the
first time, it is essential – especially if you are an animal collector – that
you do two things. One is to get as many personal introductions as you can to
people on the spot; the second to amass as much information as possible, no matter
how esoteric or apparently useless, about the place that you are going to. One
of the ways you accomplish this latter is by contacting the London Embassy or
High Commission of the country concerned. In many cases, this yields excellent results
and you are inundated with maps and vividly coloured literature containing many
interesting facts and much missing information. In other cases, the response is
not quite so uplifting. I am, for example, still waiting for all the
information promised me by a charming Malay gentleman in the London High
Commission when I was going to that country. My trip there was eight years ago.
However, the response you get from the Embassy or High Commission generally
gives you some sort of a clue as to the general attitude prevailing towards
life in the country concerned.
…………..
The
Mascarene Islands, of which Mauritius is the second largest, lie embedded in
the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. Forty miles by twenty, Mauritius gleams
in a million tropical greens, from the greens of dragon wing and emerald, to
delicate dawn greens and the creamy greens of bamboo shoot. All this is
encrusted with a rainbow of flowers from the great trees that flame like magic
bonfires of fragile violet-shaped magenta blooms, lying like a thousand shed butterfly
wings among the grass, which itself can be green or yellow, or as pink as the sunset.
In the dawn of the world, Mauritius was formed – when the great
volcano pustules were still bursting and spilling out fire and lava. In a
series of cataclysmic convulsions, the island was wrenched from the sea bed and
lifted skywards, the hot rocks glowing and melting so that cyclone and tidal
wave, hot wind and great rains, moulded and fretted it, and tremendous earth shudders
shook it and lifted it into strange mountain ranges, churning the tender rocks
as a chef whips egg whites until they become stiff and form weird peaks when
lifted up on a fork tip. So the strange-shaped mountains of Mauritius grew; miniature
mountains all under 3,000 feet, but as distinctive, unique and Daliesque, as if
carefully designed for a stage backdrop. A multitude of coral polyps, as
numerous as stars, then formed a protecting roof round it and contained the
lagoon, which encircled the island as a moat encircles a fortress.
Gradually, as the earth formed, seeds arrived, either sea or
air-borne, to send their roots into the volcanic soil, now soft and rich,
watered by many bright rivers. Following, came birds and bats carried by errant
winds, tortoises and lizards like shipwrecked mariners on rafts of branches and
creepers from other lands. These settled and prospered and gradually, over millions
of years, their progeny evolved along their own lines, unique to the islands.
So the Dodo came into being; and the big, black, flightless parrot.
The tortoises grew larger and larger until they were the size of an armchair
and weighed over two thousand pounds, and the lizards vied with each other in
evolving strange shapes and rainbow colours. There being no major predators
except an owl and a small kestrel, the creatures evolved without defence. The
Dodo became flightless, fat and waddling, nesting on the ground in safety, as
did the parrot. There was nothing to harass the slow, antediluvian life of the
tortoise; only the quick, glittering lizards and the golden-eyed geckos needed
to fear the hawk and the owl.
There, on this speck of volcanic soil in the middle of a
vast sea, a complete, unique and peaceful world was created slowly and
carefully. It waited there for hundreds of thousands of years for an
annihilating invasion of voracious animals for which it was totally unprepared,
a cohort of rapacious beasts led by the worst predator in the world, Homo
sapiens. With man, of course, came all his familiars: the dog, the rat, the pig,
and, in this instance, probably one of the worst predators next to man, the
monkey.
In an incredibly short space of time, a number of unique species
had vanished – the Dodo; the giant, black, flightless parrot; the giant
Mauritian tortoise, rapidly followed by the Rodrigues tortoise; and that
strange bird, the Solitaire. The dugong, which used to throng the reefs,
vanished and all that was left of a unique and harmless fauna was a handful of
birds and lizards. These, together with what is left of the native forest, face
enormous pressures. Not only is
Mauritius one of the most densely populated parts of the globe, but as well as
dogs, cats, rats and monkeys, a number of other things have been introduced in
that dangerous, unthinking way that man has.
There are, for example, 20 introduced species of bird, which
include the ever-present house sparrow and the swaggering, dominating mynah.
There is the sleek and deadly mongoose and less damaging but still out of
place, the hedgehog-like tenrec from Madagascar. Then there are the introduced
plants and trees, so that the native vegetation is jostled and strangled by
Chinese guava, wild raspberries, privet and a host of other things. In the face
of all this, the indigenous flora and fauna of Mauritius can be said to be
hanging on to its existence by its finger nails.
