It is always a relief when a reptile starts to feed itself, for if it refuses food for a certain length of time it has to be force-fed, and that is a tricky and unpleasant job. Many of the constricting snakes refuse food on their arrival, and have to be force-fed until they have settled down, but it is not an operation one relishes, since, with their fragile jaws and teeth, it is very easy to break something and thus set up an infection in the mouth. I think the worst force-feeding job we ever had was with a pair of young gavials, or gharials. These are Asiatic members of the crocodile family, and in the wild state feed on fish. Instead of the strong, rather blunt jaws of the alligators and crocodiles, the gavial’s jaws are long and slender, resembling a beak more than anything. Both the jaws and the teeth are fragile, the teeth especially so, for they appear to fall out if you look at them. In consequence, when our two young gavials arrived and steadfastly refused all food, including live fish in their pond, our hearts sank, as we realized we would have to force-feed them. The process was tedious, protracted and difficult, and had to be done once a week for a year before the gavials would feed on their own. First, you take a firm grip on the back of the creature’s neck and his tail. Then you lift him out of the tank and place him on a convenient flat surface. Whoever is helping you then slides a flat, smooth piece of wood between the jaws at the back of the mouth, immediately behind the last teeth. When the jaws are prised a little apart, you slightly release your grip on the reptile’s neck and slide your hand forward, push your thumb and forefinger between the jaws, and hold them apart. This is generally much easier than it sounds. The other person then arms himself with a long, slender stick and a plateful of raw meat chunks or raw fish. He impales a piece of meat or fish on the end of the stick, inserts it into the reptile’s mouth, and pushes it towards the back of the throat. This is the tricky part, for in all members of the crocodile family the throat is closed by a flap of skin; this arrangement allows the creature to open its mouth beneath the surface without swallowing vast quantities of water. The food has to be pushed past this flap of skin and well down into the throat. Then you massage the throat until you feel the food slide down into the stomach. As I say, it is a tedious task, as much for the gavial as for you.

By and large, the creatures that seem to cause the least trouble in the reptile house are the amphibians. They usually feed well, and they do not seem to suffer from the awful variety of cankers, sores, and parasites that snakes and lizards contract, though I must admit they can come up with one or two choice complaints of their own on occasion, just to enliven things for you. The pipa toads were a good example of this. These extraordinary creatures come from British Guiana, and look, quite frankly, like nothing on earth. Their bodies are almost rectangular, with a leg at each corner, so to speak, and a pointed bit between the front legs that indicates where the head is supposed to be. The whole affair is very flattened and a dark blackish brown colour, so the creature looks as though it had met with a nasty accident some considerable time ago and has been gently decomposing ever since. The most extraordinary thing about these weird beasts is their breeding habits, for the pipa toads carry their young in pockets. During the breeding season the skin on the female’s back becomes thickened, soft, and spongy, and then she is ready for mating. The male clasps her, and as soon as she is ready to lay she protrudes a long ovipositor which curves up onto her back, underneath the male’s stomach. As the eggs appear, he fertilizes them and presses them into the spongy skin of the back. They sink in until only a small proportion of the egg is above the surface. This exposed portion of egg hardens. So inside their individual pockets the tadpoles undergo their entire meta­morphosis until they change into tiny replicas of their parents. When they are ready to hatch, the hardened top of the shell comes loose, and the tiny toads push it back and climb out, looking rather like someone getting out of a bubble car.

I had once been fortunate enough to witness the hatching of some baby pipa toads, and I was anxious to see if we could breed them in the zoo. So I ordered a pair from a dealer, and on their arrival installed them in the reptile house. We kept them in a large aquarium full of water, for, unlike other toads, pipas are entirely aquatic. They settled down very well, and were soon devouring monstrous earthworms by the score. All we had to do now, I thought, was wait for them to breed. One morning Shep came to me and said that one of the pipas had apparently bruised itself on the stomach, though he could not see how this had happened. I examined the toad and discovered that what appeared to be a bruise was something which looked like a gigantic blood blister. It was difficult to know what to do. If the toads has not been aquatic and had had dry skin, I would have anointed the area with penicillin. Within twenty-four hours both pipas were dead, their bodies covered with the red blisters, which were full of blood and mucus. I sent them away for post-mortem, and the report came back that they were suffering from an obscure disease called ‘red-leg’. I had a strong feeling that this had something to do with the water in which they had been kept: it was ordinary tap water but rather acid. So I purchased another pair of pipas, and this time we kept them in pond water only. This has, so far, proved successful, and at the time of writing both toads are flourishing. With a bit of luck, I might get around to breeding pipa toads yet, unless they can think up something new to frustrate me.

Another amphibian with almost equally fascinating breeding habits as the pipa is the little pouched frog. We had five of these delightful, tubby little frogs, handsomely marked in green and black, which were brought to us from Ecuador. They did very well, eating prodigiously, but they showed no signs of wanting to breed. So we moved them into a bigger tank, where they had more land and water space, and this did the trick. Out of the breeding season, the female’s pouch, which is on her lower back, is scarcely noticeable. If you look closely you can see a faint line down the skin, with a slightly puckered edge, as if at one time the skin had been torn and healed up rather badly. However, when the breeding season comes round, the slit becomes much more obvious. The frogs begin to sing to each other, and presently you will see the females going off into quiet corners and indulging in a very curious action. They manage, by great contortion, to get one hind leg at a time up over their backs, insert the toes into their pouches and proceed to stretch the skin. When the pouch is stretched to their satisfaction, they are ready to breed. The method by which they put the eggs into the pouch is still a mystery to me, for unfortunately I missed the actual egg-laying. The next thing we knew was that the female had a bulging pouchful of spawn which protruded from her back and made her look as though she had been disembowelled. The female carries the eggs around until she knows, by some means or other, that the tadpoles are ready to hatch, whereupon she goes and sits in the water. The tadpoles wriggle free of the gelatine-like spawn and swim off on their own, the mother taking no further interest in them. We found that the tadpoles did very well on strips of raw meat and white worms—the tiny worms that fish fanciers breed as food. When they grew their legs and came out on land, we fed them on fruit flies and tiny earthworms, until they were old enough to graduate to house-flies and bluebottles.

Amphibians are much easier to breed than reptiles, for with them you do not have to worry about the moisture. Reptiles lay eggs with a parchment-like shell which is either soft or hard. If the temperature of the cage is not right, and if the moisture content of the air is too great or not enough, the contents of the egg will either dry up or become mildewed. Although we have had some successes with hatching reptile eggs, the chances against are always ninety to one. One success we did achieve, of which we were rather proud, was in hatching some Greek tortoise eggs. The Greek tortoise is probably one of the commonest pets, and it invariably lays eggs with monotonous regularity, but these very seldom hatch. Thinking that this batch of eggs was going to be just as successful as all the others had been, Shep did not worry over-much about them. He buried them in the sand at the bottom of one of the cages which had what he thought was a suitable temperature. Week after week passed, and eventually he forgot all about them. He was, therefore, considerably astonished one morning to find a baby tortoise perambulating about the cage. He called me and we dug up the rest of the eggs. Out of the six, four were in the process of hatching. In one egg the baby was almost out, but in the other three the babies had only just started to breach the shell.