We had a pair of slender lorises of which we were inordinately proud. These creatures look rather like drug addicts that have seen better days. Clad in light grey fur, they have enormously long and thin limbs and body; strange, almost human, hands; and large, lustrous brown eyes, each surrounded by a circle of dark fur, so that the animal appears as though it is recovering either from some ghastly debauchery or an unsuccessful boxing tournament. They have a reputation for being extremely difficult and delicate to keep in captivity, which, by and large, seems to be true. This is why we were so proud of our pair, as we had kept them for four years, and this was a record. By careful experiment and observation, we had worked out a diet which seemed to suit them perfectly. It was a diet that would not have satisfied any other creature but a slender loris, consisting as it did of banana, meal-worms, and milk, but nevertheless on this monotonous fare they lived and thrived.
As I say, we were very proud that our pair did so well, and you can imagine our excitement when were realized that the female was pregnant: this was indeed going to be an event, the first time a slender loris had been bred in captivity, to the best of my knowledge. But now we were faced with the father problem, as always; and, as always, we teetered. Should we remove him or not? At last, after much deliberation, we decided not to do so, for they were a very devoted couple. The great day came, and a fine, healthy youngster was born. We put up screens round the cage so that the parents would not be disturbed by visitors to the zoo, gave them extra titbits, and watched anxiously to make sure the father behaved himself.
All went well for three days, during which time the parents kept close together as usual, and the baby clung to its mother’s fur with the tenacity and determination of a drowning man clasping a straw. Then, on the fourth morning, all our hopes were shattered. The baby was lying dead at the bottom of the cage, and the mother had been blinded in one eye by a savage bite on the side of her face. To this day we do not know what happened, but I can only presume that the male wanted to mate with the female, and she, with the baby clinging to her, was not willing, and so the father turned on her. It was a bitter blow, but it taught us one thing: should we ever succeed in breeding slender lorises again, the father will be removed from the cage as soon as the baby is born.
In the case of some animals, of course, removing the father would be the worst thing you could do. Take the marmosets, for instance. Here the male takes the babies over the moment they are born, cleans them, has them clinging to the body, and hands them over to the mother only at feeding time. I had wanted to observe this strange process for a long time, and thus I was very pleased when one of our cotton-eared marmosets became pregnant. My only fear was that she would give birth to the baby when I happened to be away, but early one morning Jeremy burst into my bedroom with the news that he thought the marmoset was about to give birth. After hastily flinging on some clothes, I rushed down to the mammal house. There I found the parents to be both unperturbed, clinging to the wire of their cage and chittering hopefully at any human who passed. It was quite obvious from the female’s condition that she would give birth fairly soon, but she seemed infinitely less worried by the imminence of this event than I. I got a chair and sat down to watch. I stared at the female marmoset, and she stared at me, while in the corner of the cage her husband—with typical male callousness—sat staffing himself on grapes with meal-worms, and took not the slightest notice of his wife.
Three hours later there was absolutely no change, except that the male marmoset had finished all the grapes and meal-worms. By then my secretary had arrived and, as I had a lot of letters to answer, I made her bring a chair and sit down beside me in front of the marmoset cage while I dictated. I think the visitors to the zoo that day must have thought it slightly eccentric that a man should be dictating letters while keeping his eyes fixed hypnotically on a cageful of marmosets. Then, about midday, someone arrived whom I had to see. I was away from the cage for approximately ten minutes, and on my return the father marmoset was busy washing two tiny scraps of fur that were clinging to him vigorously. I could quite cheerfully have strangled the female marmoset; after all my patient waiting, she went and gave birth during the short period I happened to be away.
Still, I could watch the father looking after the babies, and I had to be content with that. He handled the twins with great care and devotion, generally carrying them slung one on each hip, like a couple of panniers on a donkey. His fur was so thick and the babies so small that most of the time they were completely hidden; then, suddenly, from the depths of his fur, a tiny face the size of a large hazelnut would appear, and two bright eyes would regard you gravely. At feeding time the father would go and hang on the wire close alongside the mother, and the babies would pass from one to the other. Then, their thirst quenched, they would scramble back onto father again. The father was extremely proud of his babies, and was always working himself up into a state of panic over their welfare. As the twins grew older, they became more venturesome, and would leave the safety of their father’s fur to make excursions along the nearby branches, while their parents eyed them with pride as well as a little anxiety. If you approached too near the cage when the twins were on one of their voyages of exploration, the father would get wildly agitated, convinced that you had evil designs on his precious offspring. His fur would stand on end, like an angry cat’s, and he would chitter loud and shrill instructions to the twins, which were generally ignored as they grew older. This would reduce him to an even worse state of mind and, screaming with rage and fear, he would dive through the branches, grab the twins, and sling them into place, one on each hip; then, muttering dark things to himself -presumably about the disobedience of the modern generation—he would potter off to have a light snack to restore his nerves, casting dark glances at you over his shoulder. Watching the marmoset family was an enchanting experience, more like watching a troupe of strange little fur-covered leprechauns than monkeys.
Naturally, the biggest thrill comes when you succeed in breeding some creature which you know from the start is going to be extremely difficult. During my visit to West Africa 1 had managed to acquire some Fernand’s skinks, probably one of the most beautiful of the lizard family, for their big, heavy bodies were covered with a mosaic work of highly polished scales in lemon yellow, black, white, and vivid cherry red. By the time the zoo in Jersey was established I had only two of these magnificent creatures left, but they were fine, healthy specimens, and they settled down well in the reptile house. Sexing most reptiles is well-nigh impossible, so I did not know if these skinks were a true pair or not, but I did know that, even if by some remote chance they were, the chances of breeding them were a million to one. The reason for this was that reptiles, by and large, lay the most difficult eggs to hatch in captivity. Tortoises, for example, lay hard-shelled eggs which they bury in earth or sand. But, as I have already mentioned, if you do not get the temperature and humidity just right in the cage, the eggs will either become mildewed or dry up. A lot of lizards, on the other hand, lay eggs with a soft, parchment-like shell, which makes matters a bit more difficult, for they are even more sensitive to moisture and temperature.
Knowing all this, I viewed with mixed feelings the clutch of a dozen eggs which the female Fernand’s skink laid one morning in the earth at the bottom of her cage. They were white, oval eggs, each about the size of a sugared almond, and the female (as happens among some of the skinks) stood guard over them and would attack your hand quite fearlessly should you put it near the eggs. Among most lizards the female walks off, having laid her batch, and forgets all about it; in the case of some of the skinks, however, the female guards the nest, and lying on top of the soil in which the eggs are buried, urinates over the nest at intervals to maintain the right moisture content in order to keep the delicate shells from shrivelling up in the heat. Our female skink appeared to know what she was doing, and so all we could do was sit back and await developments, without any great hope that the eggs would hatch. As week after week passed, our hopes sank lower and lower, until, eventually, I dug down to the nest, expecting to find every egg shrivelled up. To my surprise, however, I found that only four eggs had done so; the rest were still plump and soft, though discoloured, of course. I removed the four shriveled ones and carefully opened one with a scalpel. I found a dead but well-developed embryo. This was encouraging, for it proved at least that the eggs were fertile. So we sat back to wait again.