Books: Fauna in the Attic

TWO IN THE BUSH by Gerald Durrell. 255 pages. Viking. $4.95.

A reader does not get far into this book before beginning to suspect that it is a put-on. Who ever heard of the long-nosed bandicoot? Or the brolgas, which break into a wild, wing-flapping dance at the sound of a bell? How about the racquet-tailed drongo, and the mudskipper, a hippopotamus-shaped fish that likes to skitter across mud flats and climb mangrove roots? Or the mallee fowl, which assiduously builds an incubator for its eggs and keeps the temperature inside at a steady 95°, come rain or shine? Curious specimens these, but Naturalist Gerald Durrell is only reporting what he sees, and reporting it with grace and an infectious sense of wonderment.

Durrell (rhymes with squirrel) is as fascinated by queer animals as his brother Lawrence (The Alexandria Quartet) is by queer people. In previous books, he has sought them out in such odd corners as backwoods Uruguay and Sierra Leone. This time he journeys to the “attic of the world”—Australia—where, owing to the early destruction of the land bridge to Asia, the island continent became an asylum for the primitive marsupials and monotremes. There, an odd sort of evolution took place: instead of the great herds of hoofed animals that developed on other continents, Australia produced kangaroos and wallabies; in place of squirrels there are platypuses and phalangers. The wombat is Australia’s equivalent of the badger, and predatory beasts are represented by the Tasmanian wolf, a doglike marsupial.

Durrell made side trips to Malaysia and New Zealand, but the dramatic high point of the book is his meticulously observed birth of a kangaroo in southeastern Australia: it emerges as a pinkish, gleaming blob no longer than the first joint of a man’s little finger, and is deposited on the mother’s tail. Practically an embryo, the baby must drag itself blindly up through the fur on its mother’s stomach and crawl into the marsupial pouch. Throughout, the mother kangaroo remains indifferent to the baby’s struggles. This, says Durrell, is “the equivalent of a blind man, with both legs broken, crawling through a thick forest to the top of Mount Everest.”