‘He’s a strong little fella,’ I commented, as casually as I could. ‘I think I might need some assistance.’ I left the room in search of a nurse, and found Louise, our head nurse, seeing to one of the in-patients.
‘Any chance of a hand microchipping an … animal?’ I asked, deliberately omitting to identify the exact species I was referring to. I had to keep the element of surprise – the look on her face would be priceless, I thought.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll just be a moment, when I’ve finished with Poppy.’
‘Thanks, I’m in the end consulting room.’
It was only a few moments before Louise knocked on the door and came in. Her reaction was better than I could have wished. When she laid eyes on Arnie her whole body immediately convulsed backwards in fear, shock and disbelief. I think she would have yelled out an expletive, but her professionalism converted it into ‘Oh goodness, not quite what I was expecting.’
‘Louise,’ I said, allowing her a moment to regain her composure. ‘This is Mr Smith, and this is Arnie, a nine-banded armadillo. The microchip goes in his left thigh, and so I need some help extending his leg out from underneath his armour. He’s pretty strong, so can you hold the leg while Mr Smith holds Arnie’s body, so I can prep it and then implant the microchip?’
Stepping over to the table, she tentatively reached out to touch Arnie on the back. As her tactile senses adjusted from the fur she was accustomed to handling, to the unusual texture of leathery shell, and her emotions to the lack of any affectionate response from her human-to-animal contact, she relaxed into the situation and her professionalism took over.
The procedure was quickly and effectively performed, and after assuring myself that the skin glue had set, and scanning the left hind thigh to ensure the chip was in place, Mr Smith returned Arnie to the cat box, thanked us both gratefully and headed out of the door.
As the door closed behind him, Louise caught my eye.
‘In ten years, that is definitely the weirdest animal I have ever seen in here,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the warning!’
‘I was a bit surprised too,’ I admitted. ‘I thought it was going to be a cat.’
‘I have one question, though. North Devon isn’t exactly overrun with armadillos, so if it goes missing, it’s not exactly going to be hard to track down, is it? So why go to all the trouble of getting it microchipped?’
Although I knew there were good reasons, I had to admit Louise had a point.
‘Anyway,’ she continued. ‘How did you know to put the microchip into the back left thigh?’
‘You call yourself a veterinary nurse and you didn’t know that?’ I replied with a grin, taking advantage that I’d closed the window on the computer, hiding the evidence of my Google search. ‘I thought it was common knowledge.’
Armadillos: fast facts
Dasypus novemcinctus: The nine-banded armadillo
Distribution: North, Central and South America.
Description: Nocturnal mammal. Twenty different species.
Names: The young are called ‘pups’; a group of armadillos is called a ‘fez’.
Life span: Up to 20 years.
Habitat: Armadillos live in burrows, ideally suited to a warm, rainy environment such as rainforest, but they adapt to scrubland, open prairies or grassland. They have a poor amount of fat so can’t cope in cold or dry environments, where they lose heat and water easily.
Diet: Armadillos are insectivores, feeding chiefly on ants, termites and worms, which they lap up with their sticky tongue.
Gestation: 122 days, but implantation is delayed for between 3 and 4 months after mating.
Weight: 85 g at birth, reaching 2.5–6.5 kg as adults.
Growth: They wean at 3 months, are sexually mature at 1 year, and breed annually.
Anatomy: Covering the back, sides, head, tail, and outside surfaces of the legs is an armoured shell composed of bony dermal scutes, covered by non-overlapping, keratinized scales connected by flexible bands of skin.
Body temperature: 30–35 °C.
Interesting fact: If sufficiently frightened, armadillos can jump 4 feet straight in the air. They can also cross rivers by either floating across them by inflating their intestines, or else by diving to the bottom of the river bed, and running across, because they can hold their breath for up to 6 minutes.
Predators: Many, including alligators, raptors and bears, but the cougar is the most common.
Conservation: The nine-banded armadillo is classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as being of least concern. Its bigger cousin, the giant armadillo, however, which inhabits the grasslands, forest and wetlands of South America, is classified as vulnerable. On the critical role being discovered about this previously mysterious species, as an ecosystem engineer and advocate of biodiversity through the continual production and abandonment of their burrows, see: www.rzss.org.uk/conservation/our-projects/project-search/field-work/giant-armadillo-conservation-project.
2
GIRAFFE
‘Wildlife is something which man cannot construct. Once it is gone, it is gone forever. Man can rebuild a pyramid, but he can’t rebuild ecology, or a giraffe.’
Joy Adamson
I stepped out of my lodge into the darkness of a brisk African morning. It was 5.30 a.m. on Saturday 9 August; sunrise wasn’t for another hour. The chill of the morning embraced me and with that, the last memory of my cosy handcrafted African bed evaporated. Eight days before I would have been about to wake for work as a vet in the Cotswold town of Cheltenham, but for August my home was the Ngonigoni game reserve just outside Nelspruit in the South African province of Mpumalanga. I was assisting Dr Cobus Raath and his team at Wildlife Vets, a practice specializing in the capture, relocation, clinical treatment, research and education of African wildlife, for a month.
Unlike many African countries, South Africa has established a vibrant game farming industry. Wildlife is not just government property, restricted to the National Parks, but can be traded by private game reserve owners. Integral to this industry is the ability to safely catch, load, transport and release these animals. Every step requires veterinary supervision, so life is busy for Cobus’s team at Wildlife Vets.
I headed down for breakfast. It was too early to enjoy the daily spectacle of the farm’s giraffes, zebras, wildebeest, blesboks and impalas all grazing on the feeding ground a mere 100 metres from where we dined. The early start was mandatory due to the 8 a.m. rendezvous at a game reserve two hours north of us in Hoedspruit, a town on the Western border of Kruger National Park. There was a buzz around the breakfast table: today we had three adult male giraffes to catch and transport. Such are the perils of giraffe capture that there are only a few companies in the whole of South Africa with the experience, knowledge and expertize to do it. The hypertensive effect of the drugs used in immobilization can pose a life-threatening risk to an animal whose unique anatomical adaptations already require a vastly higher blood pressure than any other mammal. The complications of the respiratory depressive effect of the drugs used are enhanced by the fact that there is a large volume of dead space created by a giraffe’s immensely long trachea. As well as this, their height can result in serious injury if allowed to fall to the ground unguided.
As I sipped my coffee the clatter of the convoy could be heard leaving from the workshop at the top of the farm: one HGV lorry, a truck with the giraffe trailer in tow, and Derik’s pickup. That was our prompt; we piled into the minibus and set off to join the procession. The logistics of every single capture are astonishing; permits, five vehicles, one helicopter and a fifteen-strong team were today’s requirement.