‘Herpa... er... Herper...’ he said, and looked desperately at the policeman for help. The policeman leant over his shoulder and glanced at the word that was confusing his colleague, with the amused air of one for whom The Times crossword puzzle is child’s play, then his eyes alighted on ‘herpetologist’ and he became less confident.
‘Herp... herp...’ he said, dolefully and unhelpfully.
‘Herpa... herper...’ said the immigration man.
‘Herp... herp... herp...’ said the policeman.
It began to sound like one of the lesser-known, and more incomprehensible German operas.
‘Herpetologist,’ I said, briskly.
‘Ah, yes,’ said the Immigration Officer, wisely.
‘What is that?’ asked the policeman, more bluntly.
‘It means someone who studies snakes,’ I explained.
He gazed at the word, fascinated.
‘You have come here to study snakes?’ asked the policeman, at last, with the air of one humouring a dangerous lunatic.
‘Here, there are no snakes,’ said his colleague, speaking with the authority of one who would never let a snake wriggle through Immigration if he could help it.
‘Well, no, we’ve come here to catch bats,’ I said, incautiously.
They stared at me, disbelievingly.
‘Bats?’ asked the policeman.
‘Bats is not snakes,’ said the Immigration Officer, with the air of Charles Darwin giving the fruits of his life’s researches to the world.
‘No, I know,’ I said, ‘but we have come here at the invitation of the Commissioner, Mr Hazeltine, to catch bats.’ I felt sure that Mr Hazeltine, whom I had never met, would forgive me this innocent falsehood. Both the policeman and the immigration man nearly stood to attention at the mention of the Commissioner’s name.
‘You know Mr Hazeltine?’ asked the immigration man.
‘He asked us to come,’ I said, simply.
The immigration man knew when he was beaten. He laboriously and carefully spelt out ‘Herpetologist’, stamped John’s passport and smiled at us with evident relief. We shook hands with him and the helpful policeman, and as we did so, they wished us a happy stay in Rodrigues. I wondered why it was necessary to burden a simple, straightforward and happy island people with a bureaucracy that was so out of place and so futile in such a setting.
We got into the hotel jeep and were driven along the winding roads, through an eroded and desiccated landscape. Here and there the edges of the road were green and there were pockets of dusty trees and bushes around ramshackle, corrugated iron huts. The driver assured us that, after its recent rainfall, the island was green. I wondered, looking at the dry and dusty landscape under the fierce sun, what it had looked like before.
Eventually, the jeep edged its way down the one main street of Port Mathurin, the metropolis of Rodrigues. This was edged with a scrappy collection of wooden and corrugated iron houses and shops, but its length was as bright as a flower bed with the inhabitants of the port dressed in their bright clothes, busy about their shopping. A little outside the port, the jeep came to a standstill and there, on the crest of the hill above us, was the hotel. It was a low structure with a broad, steeply-pitched roof covering a deep, shady verandah that surrounded the building. This verandah was approached by wide steps and had complicated, wrought iron railings, painted white, running round its length. On the verandah were scattered tables and long cane chairs. The hotel, perched on the hilltop, commanded a view of the whole of Port Mathurin and the reef some three miles away. It resembled nothing so much as a rather exaggerated film set for a Somerset Maugham story, and this atmosphere was enhanced by the steep path leading up to it, flanked by hibiscus bushes covered with large magenta and orange flowers, that looked like paper cutouts, and a herd of slightly grubby, but most attentive and welcoming pigs that were holding a convention under and around the hotel itself.
Once we had established ourselves and made contact with Mr Hazeltine, the Commissioner, who lived in an imposing old residence, surrounded by massive trees loaded with epiphytes within a walled garden and whose gate was guarded by a belligerent-looking cannon, we contacted Mr Marie, the Head of the Forestry Department, and he offered to drive us out to view the bats. According to him, the bat colony resided in the valley of Cascade Pigeon, some three miles away from
Port Mathurin. He thought that there might be two or three odd specimens living a solitary existence in other parts of the island, but he was sure that the bulk of the colony was in this valley. So we piled into his Land-Rover and, together with young Jean Claude Rabaude, a Forest worker, who was also a keen amateur naturalist and who had helped Anthony Cheke on his expedition, we drove out to the valley.
When we got there, we parked the jeep and made our way down the rocky, slippery slope, along a path that resembled nothing so much as a stream bed. Presently, about halfway to the bottom of the valley, we came on to a rocky promontory that commanded a view up the valley slope to the left. Here the trees were fairly low, some twenty feet in height, but in their midst grew a number of very large mango trees. It was these tall trees, with their broad, glossy, shade-giving leaves, that constituted the roosting area for the bats.
At first glance through the binoculars it appeared that each mango tree had produced a strange crop of furry fruit, chocolate brown and golden red, but as the bats yawned and stretched, you could see the leather, umbrella-like wings were dark chocolate brown, while the fur on the bodies and heads ranged from bright, glittering yellow, like spun gold, to a deep fox red. They were, without doubt, the most colourful and handsome fruit bats I had ever seen. They had rounded heads with small, neat ears and short, somewhat blunt muzzles that made them look like pomeranians. The bulk of the colony hung in these three mango trees, and solitary individuals roosted in the smaller trees around.
Having located the colony, we had to try to assess its numbers with some degree of accuracy. As many bats were roosting deep in the shady mango trees, they were not always visible and as, periodically, one or more bats would fly from one mango tree to another, or simply flap their way in a leisurely fashion across the hillside and back again, the count presented problems. First of all, the five of us counted the colony from where we stood, and we took a number mid-way between all our estimates. We felt this was fairly haphazard, since a lot of bats were on the move, but even so we were encouraged by the fact that two of us had counted more than the number that Anthony Cheke had estimated two years previously.
According to Jean Claude, who was convinced that the colony had increased substantially since Cheke’s day, the best time for counting — that is, when the bats were the stillest — was first thing in the morning when they had just arrived back from their night feed, and at noon when the sun was hottest. As it was only eleven o dock, we decided to wait until noon and count again. In the meantime, we looked round for a suitable spot in which to set up the net, should we decide to catch any bats.
It was John who found the perfect glade, a clearing facing down towards the valley, surrounded by big trees which were ideal for slinging the nets from, and which provided us with maximum shelter from the sun. In the torrid quiet of noon, we counted the bats again. They were very still now, with only the occasional movement when they spread their dark wings and flapped them to keep cool. We counted over one hundred. Greatly elated, but determined to be cautious, I sent John round to the other side of the valley with Jean Claude to do another count. Then, to make finally sure, we counted them flying from the roost that night and again the next morning. Our final estimate was that the colony consisted of between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and thirty individuals, certainly not an impressive number but heartening, nevertheless, as it meant that the colony had increased by some thirty-five specimens since Cheke counted them.