Menagerie Manor

by Gerald Durrell

  ‘You’ll love them when you see them,’ I said hopefully, to which Jacquie’s answer was a derisive snort.

  ‘Well,’ she said philosophically, ‘if you have bought them, you have bought them, and I suggest you come back as quickly as possible before you spend any more money.’

  ‘I am returning tomorrow,’ I replied.

  So the following day I sent the crowned pigeons and the pheasants off by air and travelled myself by sea with my two waifs. They were very suspicious and timid, although the female was more inclined to be trusting than the male, but after a few hours of coaxing they did take titbits from my hand. I decided after much deliberation to call the male Oscar and the female Bali, since it had some vague connotation with the area of the world from which they originated. Little was I to know that this would give rise to Jeremy perpetrating a revolting pun ‘that when Oscar was wild, this made Bali high’.

  I had decided to travel by sea with them because, first of all, I never travel by air if I can possibly avoid it. I am absolutely convinced that every aeroplane pilot who flies me has just been released from Broadmoor, suffering from acute angina pectoris. Also I felt the trip would be more leisurely and would give me a chance to establish some sort of contact with my charges. As regards the latter, I was perfectly correct: Bali had begun to respond quite well and Oscar had bitten me twice by the time I arrived.

  As I anticipated, as soon as I returned to the Zoo with my two bald-headed, pot-bellied, red-haired waifs, everyone immediately fell in love with them. They were crooned over and placed in a special cage which had been prepared for them in advance, and hardly a moment of the day passed without someone or other going to peer at them and give them some delicacy. It was a month before they showed signs of recovering their self-confidence and began to realise that we were not the ogres they thought. Then their personalities blossomed forth and they very soon became two of the most popular inmates of the Zoo. I think it was their bald heads, their strange slant eyes, and their Buddha-like figures that made them so hilariously funny to watch as they indulged in the most astonishing all-in-wrestling matches that I have ever seen. Owing to the fact that their hind legs can, it seems, swivel round and round on the ball and socket joint of the hip in a completely unanatomical manner, these wrestling matches had to be seen to be believed. Gasping and giving hoarse chuckles, they would roll over and over in the straw, banging their great pot-bellies together, and so inextricably entwine their arms and legs that you began to wonder how on earth they would ever disentangle themselves. Occasionally, if Oscar became too rough, Bali would protest: a very reedy, high-pitched squeak which was barely audible and quite ridiculous from an animal of that size.

  They grew at an astonishing rate and very soon had to be moved into a new cage. Here Jeremy had designed and had had constructed for them a special piece of furniture for their edification. It was like a long iron ladder slung from the ceiling. This gave them masses of handholds and they enjoyed it thoroughly; they took so much exercise on this that their tummies soon reduced to a more normal size.

  In character they were totally different. Oscar was a real toughy; he was a terrible coward, but never lost an opportunity for creating a bit of mischief if he could. He is definitely the more intelligent of the pair and has shown his inventive genius on more than one occasion. In their cage is a recessed window; the window ledge we had boarded over to form a platform on which they could sit, and, leading up to it, an iron-runged ladder. Oscar decided (for some reason best known to himself) that it would be a good idea to remove all the boards from the window-sill. He tried standing on them and tugging, but his weight defeated his object. After considerable thought, he worked out the following method of dislodging the planks, which is one of the most intelligent things I have seen done by an ape. He found out that the top rung of the iron ladder lay some two inches below the overlap of the shelf. If he could slide something into this gap and press it downwards it would act as a lever, using the top rung of the ladder as fulcrum; and what better tool for his purpose than his stainless-steel dish? By the time we had found out that we had a tool-using ape in our midst, Oscar had prised up six of the boards and was enjoying himself hugely.

  It is unfortunate that, like many apes, Oscar and Bali have developed some rather revolting characteristics, one of which is the drinking of each other’s urine. It sounds frightful, but they are such enchanting animals and do it in such a way that you can only feel amused to see Oscar sitting up on his iron ladder urinating copiously, while Bali sits below with open mouth to receive the nectar, and then savours it with all the air of a connoisseur. She puts her head on one side, rolling the liquid round her mouth as if trying to make up her mind from which vineyard it came and in what year it was bottled. They also, unfortunately, enjoy eating their own excreta. As far as I know, these habits in apes apply only to specimens in captivity. In the wild state apes are on the move all the time and to a greater or lesser extent are arboreal, so that their urine and faeces drop to the forest floor below, and therefore they are not tempted to test their edibility. Once they start this habit in captivity, it is virtually impossible to break them of it. It does not appear to do them any harm, except, of course, that if they do happen to be infected with any internal parasites (of which you are endeavouring to cure them), they are constantly reinfecting themselves and each other by these means.

  Other new arrivals of great importance from the point of view of conservation were a pair of tuataras from New Zealand. These astonishing reptiles had at one time had a wide range but were exterminated on the mainland, and are now found only in a few scattered groups of small islands off the coast of New Zealand. They are rigidly protected by the New Zealand Government and, only occasionally, the odd specimen is exported for some zoo. On a brief visit I paid to that country, I explained to the authorities the work I was trying to do in Jersey and they – somewhat unwisely – asked me if there was any member of the New Zealand fauna which I would particularly like to have. Resisting the impulse to say ‘everything’ and thus appear greedy, I said that I was very interested in tuatara. The Minister concerned said that he was sure they could see their way to letting me have one, to which I replied that I was not interested in having one, although this seemed like looking a gift horse in the mouth. I explained that my idea was to build up breeding colonies, and it was difficult, to say the least, to form a breeding colony with one animal. Could I, perhaps, have a pair? After due deliberation, the authorities decided that they would let me have a true pair of tuatara. This was indeed a triumph, for, as far as I know, we are the only Zoo in the world to have been allowed to have a true pair of these rare reptiles.

  The climate of New Zealand is not unlike that of Jersey. Previously, when I had seen tuataras at various zoos, they had always been incarcerated in Reptile Houses in cages, the temperature of which fluctuated between 75° and 80° F. At the time this had not occurred to me as being a bad thing, but when I went to New Zealand and saw the tuataras in their wild state, I suddenly realised that the mistake the majority of European zoos had been making was to keep the tuatara as though it were a tropical reptile: this accounted for the fact that very few of these creatures kept in Europe had lived for any great length or time. Having obtained permission to have a pair of tuatara, I was quite determined that their cage must be the best possible, and that I would keep them at temperatures as near to the ones to which they were accustomed as we could manage. So when I was alerted from the Wildlife Department of New Zealand that the tuataras would be sent to me very shortly, we started work on their housing. This, in fact, resembles a rather superior greenhouse: it is 21 feet in length and 11 feet wide, with a glass roof. This roof is divided into windows, so that we can keep a constant current of air flowing through the cage and thus make sure that the temperature does not rise too much. A large quantity of earth and rockwork was then arranged and planted out, so as to resemble as closely as possible the natural habitat of the reptiles. We sank one or two pi
pes into the earth to act as burrows, should the tuataras not feel disposed to make their own, and then we waited for their arrival excitedly.

  At last the great day came and we went down to the airport to collect them. They were carefully packed in a wooden box, the air holes of which did not allow me to see if they had survived the journey, and I remained in a state of acute frustration all the way back from the airport to the Zoo. There I could lay my hand on a screwdriver and remove the lid of the box, to see how our new arrivals had fared on their travels. As we removed the last screw and I prepared myself to lift the lid off, I uttered up a brief prayer. I lifted off the lid, and there, gazing at me benignly from the depths of the container, were a pair of the most perfect tuatara I had ever beheld. In shape they resemble a lizard, though anatomically they are so different that they occupy a family all of their own. They have, in fact come down from prehistoric times virtually unchanged, and so if anything in the world can be dignified with the term prehistoric monster, the tuatara can.

  They have enormous, lustrous dark eyes and a rather pleasant expression. Along the back is a fringe of triangular spines, white and soft, rather like the frill on a Christmas cake. This is more accentuated in the male than in the female. A similar row of spines decorates the tail, but these are hard and sharp, like the spikes on the tail of a crocodile. Their bodies are a sort of pale beige, mottled with sage green and pale yellow. They are, altogether, very handsome creatures with an extremely aristocratic mien.

  Before releasing the tuataras into their new home, I wanted to be sure that the journey had not upset them too much, and that they would feed, so we left them in their travelling box over-night and put 12 dead baby rats in with them. The next day, to my delight, the box contained no trace of baby rats but a couple of rather portly and smug tuataras. It was obvious that a plane journey of thousands of miles to creatures of such ancient lineage was a mere nothing, and so we released them into their new quarters. Here, I am glad to say, they have settled down very well and have now grown so tame that they will feed from your hand. I hope that in the not too distant future we may make zoological history by breeding them, for, as far as I know, no zoo outside Australia and New Zealand had succeeded in hatching baby tuataras.

  Now that the Zoo was solvent and had acquired so many pairs of threatened species, I felt the time had come to take the next big step forward. It was essential, if we were to do the work of saving threatened species which was my aim, that we had to have outside financial assistance and that the whole operation had to be put on an intelligent scientific footing. The answer, therefore, was for the Zoo to cease being a limited company and to become a proper scientific Trust.

  On the face of it, this seems a fairly simple manoeuvre, but in practice it is infinitely more difficult. First you have to gather together a council of altruistic and intelligent people who believe in the aims of the Trust, and then launch a public appeal for funds. I shall not go into all the wearisome details of this period, which can be of no interest to anyone but myself. Suffice it to say that I managed to assemble a council of hard working and sympathetic people on the Island, who did not consider my aims so fantastic as to qualify me for a lunatic asylum, and with their help the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust came into being. We launched a public appeal for funds, and once more the people of Jersey came to my rescue, as they had done in the past with calves, or tomatoes, or snails, or earwigs. This time they came forward with their cheque books, and before long the Trust had acquired sufficient money to take over the Zoo.

  This means that after 22 years of endeavour I shall have achieved one of the things that I most desired in the world, and that is to help some of the animals that have given me so much pleasure and so much interest during my lifetime. I realise that the part we can play here is only a very small one, but if by our efforts we can prevent only a tiny proportion of threatened species from becoming extinct, and, by our efforts, interest more people in the urgent and necessary work of conservation, then our work will not have been in vain.

  FINAL DEMAND

  Dear Sir,

  Once again may we point out that your account is still overdrawn...

  I don’t know whether you, who are reading this, have read any of my other books, but if you have, or if you have only read this one with pleasure, it is the animals that have made it enjoyable for you. Whether your work is in the countryside, or whether it is in a broker’s office, or in a factory, animals – although you may not realise it – like the forests and fields in this world, are of importance to you, if only for the reason that they provide people like myself with material to write about, which entertains you. A world without birds, without forests, without animals of every shape and size, would be one that I, personally, would not care to live in and which, indeed, it would be impossible for man to live in. The rate of man’s progress and, in consequence, his rape of an incredibly beautiful planet accelerates month by month, and year by year. It is up to everyone to try to prevent the awful desecration of the world we live in, which is now taking place, and everybody can help in this in however a humble capacity. I am doing what I can in the only way that I know, and I would like your support.

  In the meantime, while there are still animals and green places left in the world, I shall do my best to visit them and write about them.

  DURRELL’S LEGACY

  By Will Masefield, Senior Mammal Keeper,

  Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust

  Ifirst read this book when I was about twelve years old, and it would be a neat and convenient lie to say that from that moment on I was determined to work in a zoo; I wasn’t. What it did for me, however, was foster an interest in the conservation of the planet’s wildlife and wild places.

  Zoos nowadays are under some considerable scrutiny (this, of course, is a very healthy thing), and ‘conservation’ may in many cases be a convenient buzzword. The Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust (Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust was renamed in 1999 to honour its founder, and is now informally known as ‘Durrell’) doesn’t just talk about conservation; it goes out and does it. Field centres in sensitive areas around the world – focusing on fragile island and insular ecosystems – act as satellites to this headquarters in the Channel Islands, where trainees from all over the world come to absorb ideas and acquire techniques. I would not be working for the Trust today if real-life conservation were not its priority.

  A lot has changed since Menagerie Manor was written. Animals are no longer purchased from dealers or taken from the wild, unless they are being brought into conservation care as part of an emergency rescue procedure, as happened in 1999 when the Montserrat orioles and mountain chickens (not actually chickens at all, but outrageously large frogs which have the fatal disadvantage of tasting delicious with hot pepper sauce) were put at serious risk by volcanic eruptions and hunting. The presence of endangered animals at the Trust headquarters in Jersey is not a tourist gimmick, but serves to foster an understanding of their plight in our visitors and to hone our understanding of what these animals need to survive and thrive, so that we can share this knowledge with our colleagues working with them in the wild.

  Animal welfare is, of course, a massive issue. We recognise that there is, and always will be, room for improvement. This recognition is essential, and is perhaps not as common amongst the world’s zoological organisations as it should be. Although the rate of change at Durrell is gratifyingly fast, there are also a great many things that remain constant. I came to the mammal department of the Trust in 1998 and, although Mr Durrell had passed away three years previously, N’Pongo the gorilla was still here. I don’t know what had happened in the interim, but when I first met the ‘small black professor’ N’Pongo, he had metamorphosed into a cantankerous old lady of 42, mother of eight and grandmother of about three dozen!

  Many of the same old faces still haunt the grounds too. Shep Mallet can still be seen, from time to time, walking around the place. John Hartley left his post as Intern
ational Programme Director in 2003 and Jeremy Mallinson, having been Zoo Director for nearly forty years, retired in 2002. It is a great pleasure to see him around Jersey or stalking around the grounds, like a rather dapper crane in a panama hat, propelled by stilt-like legs and preceded by a famously impressive beak. He harbours a particular fondness for the lion tamarins, and if they were only aware of the great strides that Jeremy has made for their conservation in Brazil, it would be churlish of them not to return the sentiment.

  The orchestra of noises that greets us when we walk down the back slope to Les Augrès Manor every morning must be similar to that experienced by Mr Durrell all those years ago, when Trumpy used to wake him up at his window. There may be a smaller brass section, an expanded woodwind contingent and some changes in strings and percussion, but the symphony is as outrageous and as cacophonous as ever it was, with the ring-tailed lemurs contributing their plaintive cries and the ruffed lemurs – out of time and out of tune – imbuing the whole performance with nerve-jangling discordance.

  Another constant is the Trust’s adherence to the vision and philosophy of its founder. From the outset, Gerald Durrell had ideas about working with species that other zoos simply weren’t interested in, by virtue of being too dull, too brown or too bloody difficult to deal with. He championed the underdogs of the animal kingdom, and became instrumental in breaking zoo philosophy out of the Victorian manacles which, I am afraid to say, still chafe and retard the reputations and progress of many (but not all) zoos around the world today.

  Gerald Durrell had the affront, bravery and vision not to pander to people’s preconceptions of what a zoo should be (full of lions, elephants, giraffes and penguins) and the many loyal members of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust today are living proof that people are only too happy to embrace animal parks dedicated to conservation rather than just exhibition.