White-eared
Marmoset
During the daytime the douracoulis’ place in these fruit trees was taken by the white-eared marmosets. These delightful squirrel-like monkeys are small enough to fit into a teacup, and they travel through the trees in big groups, searching for fruit, spiders, tree frogs and birds’ eggs, if they can find them. Marmosets generally have twins, and the curious thing is that the mother does not bother much with them. As soon as they are bom, she hands them over to the father, and he carries them clinging to him, one on each hip. He licks them clean, combs their fur with his claws, and only hands them over to their mother at feeding time. This is quite the opposite to normal monkey behavior. If you get them young enough, marmosets make very good pets. For eight years I had one called Pavlo and he was never shut in, but allowed to run all over the house and garden. His favorite perch was on the fence between our house and the next one, where he would sit in the sun and make faces at the big white cat that lived next door. The cat, naturally, thought that he was some sort of queer rat, and that it was her duty to kill him. but she was old and very fat, whereas Pavlo was young and agile, and she never really had a chance. She would stalk Pavlo carefully, and then, when she got close to him, she would rush along the fence, looking like a fat. white and rather wobbly tightrope walker. But Pavlo always saw her in time, and he would dive into a thick mass of creepers that grew on the fence, and hide there, still making faces at the poor cat, while she tried, without success, to squeeze her fat body between the creepers and catch him.
Another tiny member of the monkey family that makes a good pet, if you get one young enough, is the bushbaby. There are many different kinds of bushbaby found in Africa, ranging from ones the size of a cat, down to the demidoff's bushbaby, two of which can fit comfortably into a teacup. I remember, when I was collecting animals in West Africa, my hunters took me to a certain place where they said the Demidolfs lived. It was a wood, in the middle of great rolling grassfields, and the trees, though very thick and thorny, were not very tall. I waited at one side of the wood, while the Africans went round to the other side and started to make a noise, shouting and banging on tins. Nothing happened for a long time, and then suddenly the trees in front of me were full of bushbabies. There must have been twenty or thirty of them—mothers, fathers and babies. Some of the babies were only about the size of a walnut. They moved through the branches as silently as cats, and took huge leaps from branch to branch which were quite amazing. One baby I was watching suddenly found a large locust sitting on one of the branches, and. his eyes wide with excitement, he leaped on it and grabbed it in his little pink hands. Now, the locust was almost as big as the bushbaby, and as soon as he felt himself grabbed he kicked out with his powerful hind legs, and both he and the bushbaby fell off the branch. But the bushbaby managed to grab another branch with his hind legs, and, hanging upside down like a circus performer, he very soon polished off the locust.
At the moment we have one of the moholi bushbabies—which are considerably bigger than the Demidoffs—living in our house. He was bora in the zoo, and as soon as he was old enough we took him away from the parents, and kept him in our drawing room. Every evening, about seven o'clock, he wakes up and starts hopping around the room, investigating everything, for he is extremely curious and does not seem to be a bit afraid of anything new. The first time he saw the tea tray he jumped straight on top of the teapot, and of course burned his feet. Now he gives the teapot a wide berth, but he knows that there is milk on the tray, and he approaches very carefully to try to steal a drink from the milk jug, keeping a careful eye on the teapot meanwhile, to make sure it does not suddenly attack him. His jumping ability, like all bushbabies, is quite extraordinary, i have seen him sitting on the hearth rug in front of the fire, and the next moment he is on the mantelpiece, and a second after that on the bookcase six feet away, and all done so quickly that you can hardly follow it with your eye. He seems to be able to land on any sort of a surface,
and to get a grip where I am sure no other animal would find one.
We let him have the run of the drawing room when we go to bed, and in the morning every single picture is hanging crookedly on the walls, showing that he has jumped from one picture frame to another. I do not know of any other animal that can land on a picture frame.
Now we come to three very curious little animals which do not look as though they belong to the monkey family at all. They are the slender loris and the slow loris, from Asia, and the potto from Africa. It is very interesting to note that although these little animals live so far apart in the world, they are very similar in a number of ways, and have adapted themselves to a similar way of iife. The slender loris is, as you can see from the picture, very well named, with his long thin legs and baby. He is a night animal, and lives up in the trees. His enormous, owl-like eyes enable him to see very well at night when he stalks through the branches searching for his prey, which ranges from cockroaches, birds’ eggs and birds, to various wild fruits. During the day he sleeps on a branch, curled up in a ball, his head tucked down between his front legs. If you wake him up, he pulls his head up very slowly and glares at you, uttering a faint hissing noise, and then moves slowly down the branch. You get the impression that he is a very slow-moving animal; but watch him at night, and you will see his long, slender legs moving at high speed; the creature can gallop through the branches of the trees like a miniature racehorse. The slow loris (who is much bigger than the slender loris, and looks just like a cuddly teddy bear) can also move very fast at night, so “slow” is certainly not the right name for him. In the daytime he curls up on a branch, like the slender loris, and puts his head between his front legs. If you disturb him, he lifts his head and blinks at you sleepily, uttering a low, bearlike growl, just to let you know that he does not like having his slumbers disturbed. The third member of this trio, the potto, is very similar to the lorises in looks and habits. He too lives up in the trees and only comes out at night, sleeping all day in the same position that the lorises adopt, though I have seen some pottos go to sleep hanging under the branch. How they manage to do this without letting go of the branch when they go to sleep, and falling down, is a mystery. Now, if you look at the photographs of these three animals you will see that they have very similar hands and feet, which they have developed specially for climbing; the grip they can get on the branches is terrific. In the case of the potto, he has even got the
Slender Loris
forefinger of each hand reduced to a tiny stump, so that with his second finger and thumb he has a much wider and stronger grip on the branches. He has also got a special method of protecting himself against his enemies. With the lorises, if they meet an enemy, all they can do is to run away, or else bite. But the potto has a much more clever idea. The bones on the back of his neck—the vertebrae —protrude in a little series of spikes, rather like a saw blade. When an enemy meets him up in the treetops and rushes along the branch at him, the potto simply ducks his head between his front legs and holds on tightly. The enemy tries to grab him by the back of the neck, and gets the mouthful of sharp spikes for his pains.
Now we leave the monkey family and come to another large group of animals, the meat-eating animals. One of the chief members of this group is, of course, the lion. Our lion is called Leo, and he is nearly two years old. He is just starting to get his mane, which is a very pale straw color, and I think he is going to be a blond lion, which I am pleased about, because I think that blond lions are more handsome than the ones with brown or black manes. Leo is still very tame with those he knows, and he will come up to the wire of his cage and let you scratch his back and chin, while he purrs as loudly as a hundred domestic cats put together.