Mick Hartley

The day we arrived in Florence they were clearing the summer’s growth of vegetation from the banks of the Arno. From a couple of blocks away it smelled pleasant enough, like slightly tangy new-mown grass, but the nearer you got the worse it stank. It also drove hordes of insects off to look for other habitation, like for instance hotel rooms. And it made it a great deal easier to see larger more distinctive river bank dwellers. The next morning, walking into the centre along the river, we spotted something swimming below us, close to the bank. “Oh look, an otter.” Bit of a surprise, that, in the middle of a city. It was no otter though. I got my binoculars out and saw…a bloody great rat. When it clambered out on to the bank to pat its whiskers I recognised it – a coypu, aka a nutria.

It wasn’t alone. Our last afternoon, walking back to the hotel, I counted seven of them within about 100 yards, just on our side of the river. That’s a lot of giant South American rats to be wandering brazenly around on the banks of the river running through one of Europe’s major historic cities and tourist destinations. Don’t the Italians know about it? Or don’t they care? They do have a reputation for not seeing what they don’t want to see. I watched as a coypu swam just two to three yards in front of the sole angler on the river, but he was looking down at his bait box or something, and missed it. Then it climbed out just two yards from him, but he was looking the other way.

But of course they know about them. Anyway, why should the angler have been bothered? Despite the initial visceral reaction on seeing the thin tail and whiskers (is our dislike of rats hard-wired?), coypu are nowhere near as nasty as rats. They’re strict vegetarians, for a start. After the first shock I admit that I quite looked forward to checking them out on the way back from a hard day studying Renaissance masterpieces. They seemed rather good-natured, as far as one can tell these things about animals. Anyway, they didn’t lurk in sewers or scuttle about unsettingly, but sat washing themselves with a quiet dignity before plomping back into the water. The only health hazard they pose, as far as I could ascertain, is nutria itch. To compensate, though, there’s nutria anus balm.

Some little known facts about coypu:

* The females have their nipples on their backs, so the young can feed in the water. This strikes me, as well as being vaguely distasteful, as something which could with profit be seized on by the creationists. Rather like the evolution of the eye, you can’t help wondering how it could happen. Did one mutant female have her nipples slightly to the side, which gave her a tiny reproductory advantage over her normal teats-on-the-belly sisters, and then another mutation moved them round a bit further, and so on? It’s so implausible.

* Their front teeth are orange. I don’t know why, but like to think it’s a sexual selection thing: females go for the males with the most orange teeth, so they’re on a peacock’s tail kind of feedback which somewhere down the line will result in coypu with huge unmanageable but bright fluorescent orange front teeth.

* The Zephyrs, a minor league baseball team from Louisiana, have a nutria mascot called Boudreaux.

Coypus also, apparently, taste good.

Anyway, that’s what I did on my holidays. I saw the coypus of Florence.