Then, one morning, I was down in the reptile house, seeing about some matter, and as I passed the skinks’ cage I happened to glance inside. As usual, the cage looked empty, as the parent skinks spent a lot of their time buried in the soil at the bottom. I was just about to turn away when a movement among the dry leaves and moss attracted my attention. I peered more closely and suddenly, from around the edge of a large leaf, I saw a minute pink and black head peering at me. I could hardly believe my eyes, and stood stock still and stared as this tiny replica of the parents slowly crept out from behind the leaf. It was about an inch and a half long, with all the rich colouring of the adult, but so slender, fragile, and glossy that it resembled one of those ornamental brooches that women wear on the lapels of their coats.
I decided that, if one had hatched, there might be others, and I wanted to remove them as quickly as possible for, although the female had been an exemplary mother till now, it was quite possible that either she or the male might eat the youngsters. We prepared a small aquarium and very carefully caught the baby skink and put him into it. Then we set to work and stripped the skinks’ cage. This was a prolonged job, for each leaf, each piece of wood, each tuft of grass had to be checked and double-checked, to make sure there was no baby skink curled up in it. When the last leaf had been examined, we had four baby Fernand’s skinks running around in the aquarium. When you consider the chances of any of the eggs hatching at all, to have four out of twelve was, I thought, no mean feat. The only thing that marred our delight at this event was that the baby skinks had decided to hatch at the beginning of the winter, and as they could feed only off minute things the job of finding them enough food was going to be difficult. Tiny meal-worms were, of course, our standby, but all our friends with gardens rallied round, and would come up to the zoo once or twice a week, bearing biscuit tins full of woodlice, earwigs, tiny snails, and other morsels that gave the babies the so necessary variety in diet. Thus the tiny reptiles thrived and grew. At the time of writing, they are about six inches long, and as handsome as their parents. I hope it will not be long before they start laying eggs, so that we can try to rear a second generation in captivity.
There are, of course, some animals which could only with the greatest difficulty be prevented from breeding in captivity, and among these are the coatimundis. These little South American animals are about the size of a small dog, with long, ringed tails which they generally carry pointing straight up in the air. They have short, rather bowed legs, which give them a bear-like rolling gait; and long, rubbery, tip-tilted noses which are forever whiffling to and fro, investigating every nook and cranny in search of food. They come in two colours: a brindled greenish brown, and a rich chestnut. Martha and Mathias, the pair I had brought back from Argentina, were of the brindled kind.
As soon as these two had settled down in their new cage in the zoo they started to breed with great enthusiasm. We noticed some interesting facts about this which are worth recording. Normally, Mathias was the dominant one. It was he who went round the cage periodically ‘marking’ with his scent gland so that everyone would know it was his territory. He led Martha rather a dog’s life, pinching all the best bits of food until we were forced to feed them separately. This Victorian male attitude was apparent only when Martha was not pregnant. As soon as she had conceived, the tables were turned. She was now the dominant one, and made poor Mathias’ life hell, attacking him without provocation, driving him away from the food, and generally behaving in a very shrewish fashion. It was only by watching to see which was the dominant one at the moment that we could tell, in the early stages, whether Martha was expecting a litter or not.
Martha’s first litter consisted of four babies, and she was proud of them, and proved to be a very good mother indeed. We were not sure what Mathias’ reactions to the youngsters were going to be, so we had constructed a special shut-off for him, from which he could see and smell the babies without being able to sink his teeth into them, should he be so inclined. It turned out later that Mathias was just as full of pride in them as Martha, but in the early stages we were not taking any risks. Then the great day came when Martha considered the babies old enough to be shown to the world, so she led them out of her den and into the outside cage for a few hours a day. Baby coatis are, in many ways, the most enchanting of young animals. They appear to be all head and nose—high-domed, intellectual-looking foreheads, and noses that are, if anything, twice as rubbery and inquisitive as the adults’. Also, they are natural clowns, forever tumbling about, or sitting on their bottoms in the most human fashion, their hands on their knees. All this, combined with their ridiculous rolling, flat-footed walk, made them quite irresistible. They would play follow-the-leader up the branches in their cage, and when the leader had reached the highest point he would suddenly go into reverse, barging into the one behind who, in his turn, was forced to back into the one behind him, and so on, until they were all descending the branch backwards, trilling and twittering to each other musically. Then they would climb up into the branches and do daring trapeze acts, hanging by their hind paws, or one forepaw, swinging to and fro, trying their best to knock each other off. Although they often fell from quite considerable heights onto the cement floor, they seemed as resilient as India rubber and never hurt themselves.
When they grew a little older and discovered they could squeeze through the wire mesh of the cage, they would escape and play about just inside the barrier rail. Martha would keep an anxious eye on them during these excursions, and should any real or imaginary danger threaten they would come scampering back at her alarm cry, and, panting excitedly, squeeze their fat bodies through the wire mesh and into the safety of the cage. As they grew bolder, they took to playing further and further afield. If there were only a few visitors about, they would go and have wrestling matches on the main drive that sloped down past their cage. In many ways this was a nuisance, for at least twenty times a day some kindly and well-intentioned visitor would come panting up to us with the news that some of our animals were out, and we would have to explain the whole coati set-up.
It was while the babies were playing on the back drive one day that they received a fright which had a salutary effect on them. They had gradually been going further and further from the safety of their cage, and their mother had been growing increasingly anxious. The babies had just learned how to somersault, and were in no mood to listen to their mother’s warnings. It was when they had reached a point quite far from their cage that Jeremy drove down the back drive in the zoo van. Martha uttered her warning cry, and the babies, stopping their game, suddenly saw they were about to be attacked by an enormous roaring monster that was between them and the safety of their home. Panic-stricken, they turned and ran. They galloped flat-footedly down past the baboon cage, past the chimp cage, past the bear cage, without finding anywhere to hide from the monster that pursued them. Suddenly they saw a haven of safety, and the four of them dived for it. The fact that the ladies’ lavatory happened to be empty at that moment was entirely fortuitous. Jeremy, cursing all coatis, slammed on his brakes and got out. He glanced round surreptitiously to make sure there were no female visitors around, and then dived into the ladies’ in pursuit of the babies. Inside, they were nowhere to be seen, and he was just beginning to wonder where on earth they had got to when muffled squeaks from inside one of the cubicles attracted him. He discovered that all four babies had squeezed under the door of one of these compartments. What annoyed Jeremy most of all, though, was that he had to put a penny in the door to get them out.