Catch Me a Colobus (9781447214120) by Durrell Gerald

Author:Durrell, Gerald [Durrell, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447214120
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-12-01T06:00:00+00:00

7. Keep Me a Colobus

Sirs,

We will be grateful if you can attend our dance tonight which will be at 9.00 p.m. prompt. The dance is for our sister Regina who joined the police force and is now out. It is just a sendoff dance. You are all invited to this dance.

Awaiting for an immediate reply.

The address is

J.B. Musa Bambawo

M.C. J.P. Musa

As I had suspected, catching the Colobus was one thing, keeping them alive was quite another. The chief difficulty was not that they did not settle down to captivity; they were almost resigned to it immediately. The difficulty lay in feeding them. In the wild state they live in the uppermost branches of the trees and feed almost exclusively on leaves, moss and other coarse green matter and, I rather suspect, the occasional bird’s egg or lizard forms part of their diet. In consequence, the stomach, instead of being a simple sac as in other monkeys, has developed into a succession of dual lobes to extract the greatest possible nourishment from this rather un-nutritive bulk of food. In many ways these resemble the stomachs of the hooved animals that chew the cud. Often, in the Colobus, the stomach is so large that a quarter of the animal’s weight can be attributed to it and whatever it contains.

To begin with we could feed them with the natural foods that we obtained from the forest around us, and they ate ravenously. But this, I suspect, was something to do with the shock of capture because, within twenty-four hours, their appetites had trailed away to almost nothing. We began to get worried indeed. In desperation, we went down to the market in Bambawo, at the bottom of the hill, and bought large quantities of the green-stuffs that the Africans grow to make their stews and food with. There were several different varieties of this – some resembled spinach, some a rather large-leafed clover – and we tried these on the Colobus. To begin with they displayed no interest at all, then they started feeding, in a rather desultory fashion. And then, as though they had decided to accept their fate, all the Black-and-white ones started feeding quite normally on the green-stuff that we got from the market, but the Red-and-black ones continued to eat just sufficient to keep themselves alive. They were so totally different in character that you wouldn’t have thought that they were both Colobus. The Black-and-whites were alert and lively and soon tamed down so that they would take food from your hand. The Red-and-blacks, on the contrary were sullen and morose and seemed to withdraw into themselves in what could only be described as a fit of sulks.

The two things that worried me most were, firstly, that we were shortly due to go back to Freetown to catch the boat home, and secondly, that we had, in some way, to teach the Colobus to eat something other than their natural food – something which we could supply them with on the voyage, like apples, carrots, and so on.

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