Fauna and Family. Gerald Durrell

swallowtail butterfly. No mean feat, since the swallowtail rarely sits still for long and their flight is erratic and unpredictable. Moreover the lizard caught the butterfly on the wing, leaping some sixteen inches off the ground to do so. Presently, having finished my lunch, I loaded up the boat and, getting my canine crew on board, commenced to row home so that I could settle my blennies in their aquarium. Reaching the villa, I placed the male blenny, together with his pot, in the center of the larger of my aquariums and then carefully introduced the two females. Although I watched them for the rest of the afternoon, they did nothing spectacular. The male merely lay, gulping and pouting, in the entrance of his pot, and the females lay, gulping and pouting, at either end of the aquarium.

      The following morning when I got up, I found, to my intense annoyance, that the blennies must have been active at dawn, for a number of eggs had been laid on the roof of the pot. Which female was responsible for this I did not know, but the male was a very protective and resolute father, attacking my finger ferociously when I picked up the pot to look at the eggs.

      Determined not to miss any of the drama, I rushed and got my breakfast and ate it squatting in front of the aquarium, my gaze fixed on the blennies. The family, who had hitherto regarded my fish as the least of potential troublemakers among my pets, began to have doubts about the blennies, for as the morning wore on I would importune each passing member of the household to bring me an orange, or a drink of water, or to sharpen my pencil for me, for I was whiling away the time drawing the blennies in my diary. My lunch was served to me at the aquarium, and as the long, hot afternoon wore on, I began to feel sleepy. The dogs, long since bored with a vigil they could not understand, had gone off into the olive groves and left me and the blennies to our own devices.

      The male blenny was deep in his pot, scarcely visible. One of the females had wedged herself behind some small rocks, while the other sat gulping on the sand. Occupying the aquarium with the fish were two small spider crabs, each encrusted with weeds, and one wearing a small, pink sea anemone like a rakish bonnet on his head. It was this crab who really precipitated the whole romance of the blennies. He was wandering about the floor of the aquarium, delicately popping bits of debris into his mouth with his claws, like a finicky spinster eating cucumber sandwiches, and he happened to wander up to the entrance of the pot. Immediately the male blenny emerged, glowing with iridescent colors, ready for battle. He swooped down onto the spider crab and bit at it viciously time after time. The crab, after a few ineffectual attempts to ward off the fish with its claws, meekly gave in and turned tail and scuttled off. This left the blenny, glowing virtuously, as the victor, and he sat just outside his pot looking rather smug. Now a very unexpected thing happened. The female on the sand had had her attention attracted by the fight with the crab and now she swam over and stopped some four or five inches away from the male. At the sight of her, he became very excited and his coloring seemed to glow all the more. Then, to my astonishment, he attacked the female. He dashed at her and bit at her head, at the same time curving his body like a bow and giving her blows with his tail. I watched this behavior in amazement until I suddenly realized that throughout this beating and buffeting the female was completely passive and made no attempt at retaliation. What I was witnessing was not an unprovoked attack, but a rather belligerent courtship display. As I watched I saw that, with slaps from his tail and bites at the female’s head, the male blenny was in fact herding her towards his pot as a sheep dog herds sheep. Realizing that once they entered the pot I should lose sight of them, I dashed into the house and came back with an instrument I normally used for examining birds’ nests. It was a bamboo pole with a small mirror set at an angle on the end. If there was a bird’s nest out of reach, you could use the mirror on the end as a sort of periscope to enable you to examine the eggs or fledglings. Now I used it in the same way, but upside down. By the time I got back, the blennies were just disappearing into the pot. With great caution, so as not to disturb them, I lowered the mirror on the bamboo into the water and maneuvered it until it was at the entrance of the pot. When I had jiggled it into position, I found not only that I got a very good view of the interior of the pot but that the sunlight reflected off the mirror lit up the inside beautifully.

      To begin with, the two fish stayed quite close together and there was a lot of fin waving but nothing much else. The male’s attacks on the female, now she was safely in the pot, ceased, and he seemed more conciliatory towards her. After about ten minutes the female moved from the position alongside him and then proceeded to lay a small cluster of transparent eggs, which stuck to the smooth side of the pot like frog spawn. This done, she moved and the male took up his position over the eggs. Unfortunately, the female got between me and him, so I could not see him actually fertilize the eggs, but it was obvious that that was what he was doing. Then the female, feeling that her part of the procedure was over, swam out of the pot and across the aquarium, displaying no further interest in the eggs. The male, however, spent some time fussing around them and then came to lie in the mouth of the pot on guard.

      I waited eagerly for the baby blennies to appear, but there must have been something wrong with the aeration of the water, for only two of the eggs hatched. One of the diminutive babies was, to my horror, eaten by his own mother, before my very eyes. Not wishing to have a double case of infanticide on my conscience, and lacking aquarium space, I put the baby in a jar and rowed down the coast to the bay where I had caught his parents. Here I released him with my blessing, in the clear tepid water ringed with golden broom, where I hoped that he would rear many multicolored offspring of his own.

      THREE DAYS LATER the count appeared. He was tall and slender, with tightly curled hair as golden as a silkworm’s cocoon, shining with oil, a delicately curled moustache of a similar hue, and slightly protuberant eyes of a very pale and unpleasant green. He alarmed Mother by arriving with a huge wardrobe trunk, and she was convinced that he had come to stay for the summer. But we soon found that the count found himself so attractive he felt it necessary to change his clothes about eight times a day to do justice to himself. His clothes were such elegant confections, beautifully hand-stitched and of such exquisite materials, that Margo was torn between envy at the count’s wardrobe and disgust at his effeminacy. Combined with this narcissistic preoccupation with himself, the count had other equally objectionable characteristics. He drenched himself in a scent so thick it was almost visible and he had only to spend a second in a room to permeate the whole atmosphere, while the cushions he leaned against and the chairs he sat in reeked for days afterwards. His English was limited, but this did not prevent him from expounding on any subject with a sort of sneering dogmatism that made everyone’s hackles rise. His philosophy, if any, could be summed up in the phrase “We do it better in France,” which he used repeatedly about everything. He had such a thoroughly Gallic interest in the edibility of everything he came in contact with that one could have been pardoned for thinking him the reincarnation of a goat.

      He arrived, unfortunately, in time for lunch, and by the end of the meal, without really trying, he had succeeded in alienating everybody including the dogs. It was in its way quite a tour de force to be able to irritate and insult five people of such different character with such ease and, apparently, without even being aware of doing it, inside two hours of arrival at a new locale. During the course of lunch, he said, having just eaten a soufflé as delicate as a cloud in which were embedded the pale pink bodies of freshly caught shrimps, that it was quite obvious that Mother’s chef was not French. Having discovered that Mother was the chef, he showed no embarrassment but merely said that she would then be glad of his presence for it would enable him to give her some guidance in the culinary arts. Leaving her speechless with rage at his audacity, he turned his attention to Larry, to whom he vouchsafed the information that the only good writers were French. At the mention of Shakespeare, he merely shrugged; “le petit poseur,” he said. To Leslie he offered the information that anyone who was interested in hunting must assuredly have the instincts of a criminal and, in any case, it was well known that the French produced the best guns, swords and other weapons of offense. To Margo he gave the advice that it was a woman’s job to keep beautiful for men and, in particular, not to be greedy and eat too many things that would ruin the figure. As Margo was suffering from a certain amount of puppy fat at that time and was on a rigid diet in consequence, this information was not at all well received. He merely condemned himself in my eyes by calling the dogs village curs and comparing them unfavorably to his selection of Labradors, setters, retrievers and spaniels, all French-bred, of