Birds, Beasts and Relatives (Corfu Trilogy #2)

by Gerald Durrell

The Sacred Beetle and Others by Jean Henri Fabre.

https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Beetle-Others-Classic-Reprint/dp/1330426967/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1502819454&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Sacred+Beetle+and+Others+by+Jean+Henri+Fabre.

It was about this time that George introduced me to someone who was going to become immediately the most important person in my life, Dr Theodore Stephanides.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Dr+Theodore+Stephanides&newwindow=1&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjosuHq5tnVAhVGNSYKHXozDeoQsAQILg&biw=1098&bih=488 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Stephanides

aquiline

Like an eagle

scops owls

https://www.owlpages.com/owls/species.php?s=510

tube-worms,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_tube_worm

bristle-worms;

pipefish,

Standing high on his toes, like a spider in a hurry, he scuttled a foot or so away from where I had put him and then froze. He sat like this for a long time, so long in fact that I was just deciding that he was going to remain immobile for the rest of the morning, recovering from the shock of capture, when he suddenly extended a long, delicate claw and very daintily, almost shyly, proceeded to pluck a tiny piece of seaweed that was growing on a near-by rock. He put the seaweed to his mouth and I could see him mumbling at it.

I found another spider-crab. For him I built a special small pool with a sandy floor, completely devoid of weed. I put him in and he settled down quite happily.

Making the best of a bad job, he had decorated the top of his shell with a number of the ingredients that I had left for him. He looked extremely gaudy and had an air of carnival about him. Striped top-shells had been pasted on, interspersed with bits of coral, and up near his head he was wearing two beadlet anemones, like an extremely saucy bonnet with ribbons.

verminous

There were blood-red starfish and purple, brittle starfish, their long, slender, spiky arms forever coiling and uncoiling. These had to be lifted in the net with the utmost delicacy, for the slightest shock and they would, with gay abandon, shed all their arms lavishly.

squills.

I once saw a mantis stalk and finally launch himself at a large swallow-tail which was sitting in the sun gently moving its wings and meditating. At the last minute, however, the mantis missed its footing and instead of catching the swallow-tail by the body, as it had intended to do, caught it by one wing. The swallow-tail came out of its trance with a start and flapped its wings so vigorously that it succeeded in lifting the forequarters of the mantis off the leaves. A few more vigorous flappings and, to the mantis’ annoyance, the swallow-tail flew lopsidedly away with a large section missing from one wing. The mantis philosophically sat down and ate the piece of wing that it had retained in its claws.

Scattered among the rocks, you would find holes that had been driven into the hard ground, each the size of a half-crown or larger. They were silk-lined and with a web spread to a three-inch circle around the mouth of the burrow. These were the lairs of the tarantulas, great, fat, chocolate-coloured spiders with fawn-and-cinnamon markings. With their legs spread out, they covered an area perhaps the size of a coffee saucer and their bodies were about the size of half a small walnut. They were immensely powerful spiders, quick and cruel in their hunting, and displaying a remarkable sort of inimical intelligence.

I suddenly realized what the tarantula appeared to be after, for under the delicate fountain of white grass there was a lark’s nest. It had four eggs in it and one of them had just hatched, and the tiny, pink, downy offspring was still struggling feebly in the remains of the shell. Before I could do anything sensible to save it, the tarantula had marched up over the edge of the nest. He loomed there for a moment, monstrous and terrifying, and then swiftly he drew the quivering baby to him and sank his long, curved mandibles into its back. The baby gave two minute, almost inaudible squeaks and opened its mouth wide as it writhed briefly in the hairy embrace of the spider. The poison took effect and it went rigid for a brief moment and then hung limply. The spider waited, immobile, till he was certain the poison had done its work, and then he turned and marched off, the baby hanging limply from his jaws.

that particular pair of larks did not succeed in rearing a single young one that year.

Normally, I knew, in the height of the summer, these snails would aestivate. They would attach themselves to a convenient branch, construct a thin, paperlike front door over the mouth of the shell, and then retreat deep into its convolutions in order to husband the moisture in their bodies from the fierce heat of the sun. This freak storm had obviously awakened them and made them feel gay and romantic. As I watched them they glided up to each other until their horns touched. Then they paused and gazed long and earnestly into each other’s eyes. One of them then shifted his position slightly so that he could glide alongside the other one. When he was alongside, something happened that made me doubt the evidence of my own eyes. From his side, and almost simultaneously from the side of the other snail, there shot what appeared to be two minute, fragile white darts, each attached to a slender white cord. The dart from snail one pierced the side of snail two and disappeared, and the dart from snail two performed a similar function on snail one. So, there they were, side by side attached to each other by the two little white cords. And there they sat like two curious sailing ships roped together. This was amazing enough, but stranger things were to follow. The cords gradually appeared to get shorter and shorter and drew the two snails together. Peering at them so closely that my nose was almost touching them, I came to the incredulous conclusion that each snail, by some incredibl...

I said I thought it was one of the most remarkable things I had ever seen. ‘Yes, indeed. Extremely curious,’ said Theodore, and then added a bomb-shell that took my breath away. ‘Once they are alongside, the … um … male half of one snail mates with the, um … female half of the other snail and … um, vice versa, as it were.’ It took me a moment or so to absorb this astonishing information. Was I correct in assuming, I inquired cautiously, that each snail was both male and female? ‘Um. Yes,’ said Theodore, ‘hermaphrodite.’

Running along her back was the broad black cross that denotes so proudly that her race carried Christ into Jerusalem (and has since continued to be one of the most maligned domestic animals ever), and round each great shining eye she had a neat white circle which denoted that she came from the village of Gastouri.

Elvers.’

‘The whole, um … history of the eel,’ said Theodore, putting his collecting box on the ground and seating himself on a convenient rock, ‘is very curious. You see, at certain times the adult eels leave the ponds or rivers where they have been living and, er … make their way down to the sea. All the European eels do this and so do the North American eels. Where they went to was, for a long time, a mystery. The only thing, um … you know … scientists knew was that they never came back, but that eventually these baby eels would return and repopulate the same rivers and streams. It was not until after quite a number of years that people discovered what really happened.’ He paused and scratched his beard thoughtfully. ‘All the eels made their way down to the sea and then swam through the. Mediterranean, across the Atlantic, until they reached the Sargasso Sea, which is, as you know, off the northeastern coast of South America. The … um … North American eels, of course, didn’t have so far to travel, but they made their way to the same place. Here they mated, laid their eggs, and died. The eel larva, when it hatches out, is a very curious, um … you know … leaf-shaped creature and transparent, so unlike the adult eel that for a long time it was classified in a separate genus. Well, these larvae make their way slowly backwards to the place where their parents have come from and by the time they reach the Mediterranean or the North American shore, they look like these.’

Now the China-mark is interesting because it is one of the few moths that have aquatic larvae. The larvae live under water until they are … um … ready to pupate. The interesting thing about this particular species is that they have, er … um … you know, two forms of female. The male, of course, is fully winged and flies about when it hatches and er … so does one of the females. But the other female when it hatches out has, um … no wings and continues to live under the water, using its legs to swim with.’

I asked what rotifers were and peered into the little bottle through the magnifying glass at the twitching, wriggling creatures, as Theodore told me. ‘The early naturalists used to call them wheel-animalcules, because of their curious limbs, you know. They wave them about in a very curious fashion, so that they almost look like, um … you know, um … er … like the wheels of a watch. When you next come to see me I’ll put some of these under the microscope for you. They are really extraordinarily beautiful creatures. These are, of course, all females.’

‘Another curious thing about them,’ Theodore continued, happily piling miracle upon miracle, ‘is that at certain times, er … you know, if it is a hot summer or something like that and the pond is liable to dry up, they go down to the bottom and form a sort of hard shell round themselves. It’s a sort of suspended animation, for the pond can dry up for, er … um … let us say seven or eight years, and they will just lie there in the dust. But as soon as the first rain falls and fills the pond, they come to life again.

As I watched, a rotund and earnest cyclops, carrying two large and apparently heavy sacks containing pink eggs, swam in a series of breathless jerks too close to the writhing arms of the hydra. In a moment it was engulfed. It gave a couple of violent twitches before it was stung to death. I knew, if you watched long enough, you could watch the cyclops being slowly and steadily engulfed and passing, in the shape of a bulge, down the column of the hydra.

‘In Greek,’ Theodore said, munching his sandwich methodically, ‘the name for collared dove is dekaoctur – “eighteener,” you know. The story goes that when Christ was … um … carrying the cross to Calvary, a Roman soldier, seeing that He was exhausted, took pity on Him. By the side of the road there was an old woman selling … um … you know … milk, and so the Roman soldier went to her and asked her how much a cupful would cost. She replied that it would cost eighteen coins. But the soldier had only seventeen. He … er … you know … pleaded with the woman to let him have a cupful of milk for Christ for seventeen coins, but the woman avariciously held out for eighteen. So, when Christ was crucified, the old woman was turned into a turtle dove and condemned to go about for the rest of her days repeating dekaocto, dekaocto – “eighteen, eighteen.” If ever she agrees to say deka-epta, seventeen, she will regain her human form. If, out of obstinacy, she says deka-ennaea, nineteen, the world will come to an end.’

‘Goats do more damage to the countryside than practically anything else.’

cushion starfish,

sea-horse.

One of the sea-horses, obviously an old specimen since he was nearly black, had a very well-developed paunch. This I merely attributed to age; then I noticed one morning there was a line along the paunch, almost as though it had been slit with a razor blade. I was watching this and wondering whether the sea-horses had been fighting and if so what they used as a weapon (for they seemed so defenceless), when to my complete and utter astonishment the slit opened a little wider and out swam a minute and fragile replica of the sea-horse. I could hardly believe my eyes, but as soon as the first baby was clear of the pouch and hanging in the clear water, another one joined it and then another and another until there were twenty microscopic sea-horses floating round their giant parent like a little cloud of smoke.

At first I thought that Theodore was pulling my leg, but he went on to explain that when the female laid the eggs and they had been fertilized by the male, they were taken into this special brood-pouch by the male and there they matured and hatched, so what I had thought was a proud mother was in reality a proud father.

Once we found a whole acre of sea-bed covered with a great swarm of sea-hares, their royal-purple, egg-shaped bodies with a neat pleated frill along the edge and two strange protuberances on the head looking, in fact, extraordinarily like the long ears of a hare. There were hundreds of them gliding over the rocks and across the sand, all heading towards the south of the island. They did not touch each other or display any interest in each other, so I assumed it was not a mating gathering, but some form of migration.

heliotrope

perspicacity,

rumbustious,

spade-footed toads

They all glowed with a pinky-red gleam in the fire-light, glinting and winking like tiger beetles.

It was on a hillside overlooking a great flat area marked out like a gigantic chess-board by irrigation ditches, which I knew as the fields. They were in fact the old Venetian salt-pans used long ago for collecting the brine that floated into the channels from the big salt-water lake on whose shores they lay. The lake had long since silted up and the channels, now flooded by fresh water from the hills, provided a grid-work of lush fields.

wildflowers; the pink of pyramid orchids, yellow of crocus, tall pale spikes of the asphodels, the blue eyes of the grape hyacinths peering at you from the grass, and the wine-dipped anemones that bowed in the slightest breeze.

newly arrived birds: the hoopoes, salmon-pink and black with surprised crests, probed their long, curved beaks at the soft earth between the clumps of emerald grass; goldfinches, chiming and wheezing, danced merrily from twig to twig, their plumage glowing gold and scarlet and black.

slow-worms,

I visualized myself walking proudly through the olive groves, preceded by the dogs, Ulysses, and my two magpies, and trotting at my heels, four tame hedgehogs, all of which I would have taught to do tricks.

I explained that female hedgehogs could not, without suffering the most refined torture, give birth to babies covered with hard spines, and so they were born with these little rubbery white spikes which could be bent between the fingers as easily as a feather. Later, as they grew, the spines would darken and harden.

carunculated

Among the grasses the skippers, like little brown furry aeroplanes, would skim and purr,

Oleander hawk-moths, green and silver, would zoom into the room suddenly, from nowhere, and in a frenzy of love, dive at the lamp, hitting it with such force that the glass shattered.

Death’s-head hawk-moths, mottled ginger and black, with the macabre skull and cross-bones embroidered on the plush fur of their thoraxes, would come tumbling down the chimney to lie fluttering and twitching in the grate, squeaking like mice.

we watched, entranced, two hedgehogs, drunk as lords on the fallen and semi-fermented grapes they had eaten from under the vines, staggering in circles, snapping at each other belligerently, uttering high-pitched screams and hiccups.

convolvulus.