But Astrakhan was not just wildness and wet. Away from the riverine delta, in the neighbouring Kalmyk Republic, stretched a desiccated terrain known as dry steppe, the home of one of the strangest of cloven-hoofed mammals, the saiga – half-antelope, half-goat – which Gerald had long hoped to see. This was not easily arranged. The saiga lived far out in the dry steppe, and to reach them took five hours on the river and seven hours over hot and bumpy dirt roads. ‘The sky was purple and green,’ Gerald recalled, ‘the sun like a fire opal, when we suddenly saw, silhouetted against it, a huge herd of saiga grazing placidly, their hooves kicking up little whirlwinds of dust as they moved. They had curiously heavy heads that looked almost too big for their bodies because of their ridiculous bulbous noses, but their horns were delicate and pale yellow like tallow. They were a magnificent sight as they moved slowly across the steppe with the coloured sky and the sinking sun as a backdrop, the young giving strange, harsh, rattling bleats to be answered in deeper tones by their mothers.’
Gerald may well have marvelled, for the story of the saiga is one of the great conservation miracles of the century. In the early years of this century they had been virtually gunned out of existence, and teetered on the very edge of extinction. Then hunting saiga was banned and they began to recover. By the time Gerald and his party set off across the steppe to see them their numbers had increased to over a million, 170,000 of them in Kalmyk alone.*
They drove on. Ahead they could see a cluster of twinkling lights. A local television company had erected a kind of mini-village for them in the middle of nowhere – a travellers’ rest in the dry steppe. There was a well-appointed kitchen, an enormous tent for the crew to sleep in, two gigantic kabitkas, or yurts, covered with wool felt and floored with gaily woven blankets and mats – one to serve as a dining room, the other as Gerald and Lee’s bedroom-cum-living-room – with separate showers and toilets, electric lighting inside and out, and the expedition’s transport, consisting of a bus, three lorries, two jeeps, an ambulance and a large biplane, drawn up in neat line abreast behind the kitchen. That evening there was a lavish meal and entertainment provided by two Kalmyk dancing girls in national costume. No wonder Gerald felt compelled to write, when the time came to say goodbye: ‘We were sorry to leave: sorry to leave our romantic and comfortable kabitka. How wonderful for the saiga to live in this scented world, to eat and move on a carpet of aromas no chemist could reproduce in any test tube and to lie at night on a sweet-smelling bed of flowers.’
Their journey now led them on a clockwise course which would take them out of the arid far south into the no less arid far north, from the oven to the fridge. Late on 16 June they arrived at Askaniya Nova in the Ukraine, among the Soviet Union’s best-known reserves, preserving one of the last areas of untouched steppe in the world and operating an internationally renowned centre for the breeding and cross-breeding of endangered animals and a unique acclimatisation programme for exotic animals such as elands, llamas, bantengs and zebras. A week later the travellers were in the sixty-year-old Berezina Reserve in White Russia, famous for its protected beavers (six hundred now in residence, a further thousand having been sent to stock other reserves) and wondrous for its profusion of woodland and meadow flowers.
On 8 July they flew off to the Soviet Arctic, passing through four time zones before reaching the land of the midnight sun. The Taimyr Peninsula, which reached 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle and ended less than a thousand miles from the North Pole, was tundra country, flat to the edge of vision, bleak, uninhabited – ‘as remote as the moon’, Gerald noted. ‘You could not tell whether it was midday or midnight.’ There were two specific target areas in this vast stretch of wet sponge, the Bikada River Reserve and the Lake Lagada Reserve. Flying in by helicopter from Khatanga, the nearest town, Gerald looked down in amazement at a landscape quite unlike any he had ever set eyes on before. The flat green-gold land was spattered with thousands of lakes and ponds of every conceivable size and shape, and in some areas the winter ice had pushed up the spongy cover of the tundra to form ridges that looked like ancient fields made by some long-vanished polar race of man. Though it was midsummer there were patches of unmelted snow everywhere.
Eventually they landed at a huddle of huts beside a swiftly flowing river, the Bikada, where they were allocated a small three-roomed house. The everlasting light was as unsettling to sleeping patterns as jetlag, but Lee solved the problem by tying a sock round her head. Outside, everything was on a miniature scale, the flowers so tiny you had to crouch down to see them, the trees only knee- or ankle-high. Through this low-level, high-latitude jungle ran the narrow highways of the lemmings, the larder-on-legs of the tundra’s population of predators – the hawks, owls and Arctic foxes. The outstanding exception to the miniature scale of this bare green land was the animal they had come mainly to see – the stocky, shaggy, lumbering musk ox.
The story of the return of the musk ox to the Arctic wilds of the USSR is an unusual one, for the creature’s extinction was not brought about by twentieth-century man, though its reintroduction was. The musk ox died out in most of Siberia some ten thousand years ago, and vanished from its last stronghold in the Taimyr around three thousand years ago. In the 1930s the Soviet authorities attempted to bring this long-gone animal back home, so to speak, by importing a few specimens from Greenland, but the scheme was interrupted by the outbreak of the war. In the early 1970s the Canadian and American governments sent sixty musk-ox from their own native stocks to Russia as a gift. Half of these animals were sent to Wrangel Island in the Polar Sea, and half to the two-million-acre reserve in the Taimyr. Here they prospered, and at the time of Gerald’s visit numbered over a hundred head, though the target figure for the region was ten thousand. The best way to find them was by helicopter.
‘Below us we saw the musk ox herd,’ Gerald wrote. ‘The oxen galloped before us, shaggy as old hearth rugs, with pale muzzles and curved horns looking like the bleached branches you find washed up on remote shorelines. As they galloped, their cream-coloured stumpy legs thumped the bare ground between the moss patches and raised a miniature dust storm.’ As the helicopter landed, the Siberian husky on board, which was known to have a way with musk ox, leapt out and gave chase, quickly overtaking them and running round and round the herd, barking wildly. ‘The musk ox then indulged in the classic musk ox manoeuvre. They formed a circle, babies in the middle, all adults with their fearsome horns pointing outward in a bristling and intimidating barrier.’ Whenever the dog got too close the leading bull of the herd would break the circle and charge, head down. ‘After much head-tossing and irritated snorting the bull would return to the circle. It was an impressive sight to see these powerful animals standing shoulder to shoulder in a circle … It would take a very brave predator to try and broach the circle to get at the young ones within.’
All this provided wonderful material for the film crew, which was just as well, for by now morale was sagging badly. It was difficult enough to shoot a thirteen-part television series at the best of times, doubly so in a country as vast and cantankerous as the Soviet Union in its declining days, and doubly doubly so when the subject-matter of the series is the rare and elusive wildlife of some of the earth’s remotest and roughest wild places. After such a long and arduous – albeit privileged and wondrous – slog from one end of the USSR to another, everyone was exhausted, and tempers were frayed. The Taimyr weather didn’t help. Lee’s diary turned into a litany of bad days: ‘Still bad weather … Very windy and cloudy, so no filming … Morning cold and windy … Everyone upset … Bad weather again, so sit around …’ At Lake Lagada the river was so low the boats got stuck, the helicopter was called away on an emergency, the wildlife was grumpy and unco-operative, the weather closed down again, the booze ran out, and Gerald blew up and stormed out of the mess tent. There were, though, a few prize moments at the end – a helicopter flight over a five-hundred-strong herd of reindeer, a forest of moving antlers; a rare sighting of a pair of red
breasted geese, the world’s most beautiful waterfowl. Lee’s last diary entries wrapped it all up:
19 July. Chopper comes and goes on reserve business, then returns with a 2 metre, 60 kilogram mammoth tusk. Banquet put on by reserve people in mess tent – much toasting and flowing vodka – Gerry and I presented with a baby mammoth tusk and tooth. Gerry to bed and I stay up – am given a beautiful mammoth leg bone. I get terribly drunk and Gerry furious at me.
20 July. Sleep till 11 and have terrible hangover. We shoot Yury in his pitfall traps and Gerry does a piece on lemmings. I go back to sleep before packing for 1600 departure. Chopper is late.
This ends this diary!
On the plane back to London, cured for all time of any lingering taste for vodka and reindeer meat, Gerald and Lee reflected on the immense journey they had just completed, during which they had visited twenty reserves scattered across a great swathe of the planet, and shot over thirty miles of film footage. ‘The conservation work being done in the Soviet Union had impressed us greatly,’ Gerald was to write of the situation as it was a few years before the break-up of the old USSR. ‘They give it an importance that few other countries in the world can boast, and though it is not perfect (no conservationist is ever satisfied), it is still of very high standard. The nature reserves are numerous and enormous, and each that we saw seemed to be impeccably run by charming and devoted people with deep interests in their jobs. All in all it was a magnificent and fascinating trip.’
By 13 August, barely three weeks after their return from the Soviet Union, Gerald and Lee had finished the final section of the book about their travels there. Gerald seemed to have undergone a slight change of heart about his enlightening but gruelling Soviet experience. He had half a mind, he told Lee, to write a sequel to How to Shoot an Amateur Naturalist. He thought of calling it ‘How to Shoot the Russians – A Steppe in the Right Direction’.
* * *
* By 1998 the Baikal seal was once again an endangered species.
* By 1998 the saiga had again become a threatened species.
THIRTY-ONE
Grand Old Man
1985–1991
Gerald Durrell was now sixty. Half a century had passed since he had first been let loose on Corfu as a boy and explored the wonders of the island’s natural world under the thoughtful eye of his friend and mentor Theo Stephanides. He had come a long way since then. Though those who knew him believed that his real age – in terms of his undimmed sense of wonder, youthful enthusiasm and effervescent sense of humour – was more like fourteen going on twenty-one, to the world at large he was now indubitably a Grand Old Man, a genial though sometimes apocalyptic prophet and guru with flowing white hair and beard, and a household name around the world.
His recent sequence of major television series had brought him to the attention of an even bigger international audience than his books, while in Britain his already large readership was increasing by leaps and bounds: before long he would enter the ranks of the ten most-borrowed non-fiction authors from public libraries around the country. Much of this was due to the perennial popularity of My Family and Other Animals, a permanent best-seller and now a set book in schools as well, albeit in a primly sanitised edition (to the disgust of some juvenile readers, one of whom wrote to the author to protest at ‘the silly man who has cut out all the rude words like breasts, bust, udder, knickers, Widdle, Puke and bloody boy’). As a result, Gerald’s material circumstances had undergone a transformation. His net annual income was to average around the £100,000 mark for virtually the remainder of his life. The revolution in his personal and professional fortunes was matched by the resurrection in his private life, for with Lee he had achieved a happiness that had long eluded him.
The rise and rise of Gerald Durrell the man was mirrored by his apotheosis in the world of conservation. The zoo he had started, which now had an animal population of more than 1200 and a human staff of over forty, was in the top league. ‘If you ask people which is the best zoo in the world,’ the Director of Dallas Zoo and former President of the American Association of Zoological Parks was to declare, ‘some say San Diego, some say Bronx. But if you ask zoo people themselves, people professionally involved with zoos, including zoo directors, they say Jersey Zoo.’
The Trust Gerald had founded, after years of struggle for recognition and funds, was now world renowned and a powerful force in conservation. Long a pioneer in the technique of captive breeding, it was now a model of its kind. In 1983 more than half of the animals, most of them rare, had produced young, an extraordinary record, while the International Training Centre was unique, spreading the method and the word across countries from China to Brazil, Mexico to Nigeria. Following the 1983 accord with the government of Madagascar, a second was signed with Mauritius in 1985, and similar agreements were to follow with the governments of India, Brazil, various countries of the Caribbean and elsewhere.
At the same time a sister Trust, the Wildlife Preservation Trust Canada, came into being to help finance survival programmes for endangered species. Gerald’s gratification at this was balanced by his increasing concern at the course being taken by the equivalent organisation south of the border, the Wildlife Preservation Trust International. American tax laws made it difficult to channel US funds to Jersey, so increasingly the WPTI was initiating and operating projects of its own. Though the Americans were undoubtedly doing tremendous work for the cause in general, as Jersey readily acknowledged, it was not how Gerald had envisaged the progress of the organisation, and the gradual parting of the ways was a source of great sadness to him.
Vision undimmed, plans unlimited, it seemed Gerald Durrell was destined to carry on the fight against the extermination of species into the twenty-first century. But as time went by he began to grow increasingly despondent – though increasingly defiant – at the state of the world. ‘The zoo has been enormously successful,’ he told a visiting reporter in the mid-1980s, ‘but not successful enough in the sense that it is such slow progress. You have to grope around for money and persuade governments and every year you read more horrible reports of what is being done to the world around us. The world is being destroyed at the speed of an Exocet and we are riding about on a bicycle. I feel despair twenty-four hours a day at the way we are treating the world and what we are piling up for ourselves. But you have to keep fighting, or what are we on earth for? I believe so much in what I am doing that I cannot let up.’ In 1987, almost as a personal crusade, Gerald joined David Attenborough to spearhead a campaign to reverse the decline in the numbers of barn owls caused by changing methods of agriculture. In 1989 he lent his name in support of the work of a new trust, the Programme for Belize, specifically set up to buy and protect tropical forest. ‘With Durrell’s name involved,’ recalled John Burton, the trust’s director, ‘Today newspaper donated £25,000. All over the world there are projects doing things that, if it were not for Durrell’s involvement, might still be just an item on the agenda of the next meeting.’
As the head of a biological institution of international esteem, Gerald Durrell was on an equal footing with the directors of heavyweight organisations such as the New York Zoo, the San Diego Zoo, the National Zoo in Washington, DC, and the Zoological Society of London. He was even sought out by kings and queens. In November 1984, shortly after he had got back from his first foray to the Soviet Union, he wrote to the McGeorges: ‘King Olav [of Norway] came to visit us the moment we got back from Russia. Ever since I married your daughter, I appear to have got more and more inextricably entangled with royalty. I will remember this King, since he giggled all the time. You try spending three and a half hours with a giggling King, and at the end of it you are a shadow of your former self.’ And in late March 1985 Fleur Cowles invited him to her flat in London to have dinner with the Queen Mother, whom he delighted with his stories and cartoons of the animals in his life.
Such royal contacts made it all the more puzzling that Gerald’s achievements never received the accolade
of a knighthood. Several representations were made on his behalf, but nothing came of them. Various theories have been put forward – that Gerald was blackballed in the London establishment by Lord Zuckerman, that he had upset a key player with one of his less temperate diatribes, that knighthoods are strictly rationed for non-UK residents – but nothing certain is known. In any case, the work went on just the same without it.
Anyone who knew Gerald in those days was struck by the impression he gave of ceaseless bustle and endeavour on all fronts – conservational, zoological, televisual, authorial, social, familial, personal – a focus of worldwide response and support at every level, from presidents and royals to children and the lonely and ailing. He was everywhere an inspiration, who over many decades had fired countless individuals to devote their lives to the cause. Among his own group he was always the master, the leader, the visionary, the light.
Though Gerald’s concern was overwhelmingly for the plight of animal life, he was also aware of the desperate condition of the deprived mass of humankind. ‘One should regard the poor and downtrodden of the earth with humility and compassion,’ he jotted in a notebook, ‘for if the rest of us, with all our privileges and advantages, find it difficult to cope with life, just think what courage and endurance they must have to survive.’ People wrote to him from everywhere – Japan, Eastern Europe, Kazakstan, Cameroon, Somerset, Texas – for many, many reasons: to commune with him, to ask favours, to suggest projects, to query strategies and technicalities, to say thank you, to wish well – young and old alike, the obscure and the famous (among them Yehudi Menuhin, Spike Milligan, Lady Bird Johnson, Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick, Desmond Morris, John Cleese, Dirk Bogarde, Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, Prince Rainier of Monaco, Frederick Forsyth and many more).
Gerald Durrell Page 72
