The Drunken Forest by Gerald Durrell

Author:Gerald Durrell [Durrell, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bello
Published: 2011-11-29T22:00:00+00:00

Terrible Toads and a Bushel of Birds

By the time we had been in the Chaco two months, our collection had reached such proportions that it took us all our time to cope with it. Our day would begin just before dawn, when Paula would surge into the bedroom with the tea. The reason we arose at such an ungodly hour was not, I regret to state, because we liked early rising, but simply that we found it paid to get the heavier work done before the sun got too high and the temperature shot up.

Our first job was the cleaning out – a long, tedious, and messy business that generally took us a couple of hours. The length of time taken over a cage depended entirely on the occupant: if it was bad-tempered, a longer time was needed in order to avoid being bitten or pecked; and if it was playful, a lot of time was wasted trying to persuade it that the cleaning out was not a game designed for its benefit. Most of the specimens very soon learnt the routine and would stand patiently to one side while half the cage was cleaned out, and then they would skip over into the clean section while the other half was dealt with. After the cleaning out was done and all cages had received a fresh bed of dry leaves or sawdust, we could start preparing the food. First of all came the fruit, which had to be peeled or cut up. Now, this sounds a fairly straightforward job, and it would have been so if we could have prepared the fruit in exactly the same way for every member of the collection, but, unfortunately, it was not quite as easy as that. Some birds, for example, liked their banana split lengthwise, put on a hook and hung on the wire front of their cage; others liked their bananas cut up into small pieces, just the right size to swallow. Some would not touch their mango unless it was mixed into a slush with bread and milk, while others demanded (before they would touch anything else) that they should have a slice of over-ripe pawpaw with the seeds left in. Remove the seeds and they would not touch it, although they did not eat the seeds but merely plucked them out of the soft orange flesh and scattered them about the cage. So preparing the fruit was a long job that required a good memory for the animals’ likes and dislikes.

After the fruit, the next big task was the meat. We used fourteen pounds a day: a sort of gigantic mixed grill that was composed of heart, liver, brain, and steak, all of which had to be chopped or minced into an acceptable form. Preparing fourteen pounds of meat when the temperature is over a hundred in the shade is no joke, and, in order to try to facilitate this operation, I had purchased in Asunción a gigantic mincing machine.

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