Bringing Up Baby - Gerald Durrell
Gerald Durrell is a British zoologist born in Jamshedpur, India. He gaine international stature among conservationists for his pioneering role in preserving and breeding endangere species by housing them in zoos, with the intention of eventually returning them to the wild. He is also a prolific author who write more than amusing and informative books about the animal kingdom and his own adventures.
With the help of an inheritance and a loan he foun in the island of Jersey, the Jersey Zoological Park in 1959 and the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust in 1963. Durrell encourage by his novelist brother Lawrence to write about his passion for nature and his extensive travels. Among his best known books are The Overloaded Ark (1953), Three English to Adventure (1954), My Family and Other Animals (1956), A Zoo in My Luggage (1960), from which the given extract is take, and Birds, Beasts and Relatives (1969).
'Bringing up Baby' is the humorous and heart-warming account of how Durrell and his wife brought up the squirrel Small. The affectionate description of Small's antics and her constant need for attention speaks volumes of Durrell's love for animals, and his understanding of their habits. But of all the irritating and frustrating tasks that you have to undertake during a collecting trip, the hand-rearing of baby animals is undoubtedly the worst. To begin with, they ware generally stupid over take a bottle and there is nothing quite so unattractive as struggling with a baby animals in a sea of ​​lukewarm milk. Secondly, they have to be keep warm, especially at night, and this means you have to get up several times during the night to replenish hot-water bottles.
After a hard day's work, to drag yourself out of bed at three in the morning to fill hot-water bottles is an occupation that soon loses its charm. Thirdly, all of baby animals have extremely delicate stomachs and you must watch them like a hawk to make sure that the milk you are giving them is not too rich or too weak, if too rich, they can develop intestinal problems which may lead to nephritis, "which will probably kill them, and if too weak, it can lead to loss of weight and condition, which leaves the animal open to all sorts of fatal complaints.
Contrary to my gloomy prognostications, "the baby black-eared squirrel. Squill-lill Small prove an exemplary 12 baby. During the day she lay twitching in a bed of cotton-wool balance on a hot-water bottle in the bottom of a deep biscuit-tin; At night the tin was place by our beds under the rays of a Tilley infra-red heater. Within the first twenty-four hours she had learne when to expect her feeds and if we were as much as five minutes late she would trill and chuck incessantly until we arrived with the food. Then came the day when Small's eyes open for the first time and she could take a look at her foster parents and the world in general. This, however, presented a new problem. We happen that day to be a bit late with her food.
We had rather dawdle "over our own lunch, deep in a discussion about some problem or other, and we had. I regret to say, forgotten all about Small. Suddenly I heard a faint scuffling behind me and, turning round, I saw Small squatting in the doorway of the dining-room looking, to say the least, extremely indignant. As soon as she saw us she went off like an alarm clock and hurrying across the floor hauled herself, panting, up Jacquie's chair and then leapt to her shoulder, where she sat flicking her tail up and down and shouting indignantly into Jacquie's ear.
Now this, for a baby squirrel, is quite a feat." To begin with, as I say, her eyes have only just opened. Yet she have succeeded in climbing out of her tin and finding her way out of our bedroom she had made her way down the full length of the verandah, running the gauntlet of any number of cages filled with potentially dangerous beasts, and eventually located us in the dining-room which was at the extreme end of the verandah. Needless to say, she got her due of praise and what was more important from her point of view, she got her lunch.
As soon as Small's eyes opened she grow rapidly and soon develop into one of the loveliest squirrels I have ever seen. Her orange head and neat, black-rimmed ears nicely set off her large dark eyes, and her fat body develop a rich moss green tinge against which the two lines of white spots that decorate her sides stand out like cats-eyes on a dark road. But her tail was her best feature. Long and thick green above and vivid orange below, it is a beautiful sight. She like to sit with it curve over her back, the tip actually hanging over her nose, and then she would flick it gently in an undulating movement so that the whole thing look like a candle flame in a draught.
Even when she is quite grown-up. Small slept in her biscuit-tin by my bed. She awoke early in the morning and, uttering her loud cry, she leape from the tin on to one of our beds and crawle under the bed-clothes with us. Having spent ten minutes or so investigating our semi-comatose bodies, she jump to the floor and went to explore the verandah. From these expeditions she would frequently return with some treasure she had found and store it somewhere in our beds, getting most indignant if we hurled the offering out on to the floor This continue for some months, until the day when I decide that Small would have to occupy a cage like the rest of the animals; I awoke one morning in excruciating agony to find her trying to stuff a peanut into my ear. Having found such a delicacy on the verandah she obviously thought that simply to cache it in my bed was not safe enough, but my ear provid an ideal hiding-place.
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