Gerald Durrell: Menagerie Manor

Outside, the clank of a bucket, the burst of whistling heralds the approach of Shep, curly-haired and with a most disarming grin. His real name is John Mallet, but his friends called him Shepton Mallet—the name of a town near Bath—which, in turn, degenerated into Shep. You walk up the broad main drive with him, past the long twelve-foot-high granite wall ablaze with the flowering rock plants, and down to the sunken water-meadow, where the swans and ducks swim eagerly to welcome him as he empties out the bucket of food at the edge of the water. Having ascertained from Shep that none of his bird charges have sickened or died or laid eggs during the night, you continue on your tour.

The bird house is aburst with song and movement. Birds of every shape and colour squabble, eat, flutter, and sing, so that the whole thing resembles a market or a fairground alight with bright colours. Here a toucan cocks a knowing eye at you and clatters his huge beak with a sound like a rattle; here a black-faced love-bird, looking as though he had just come from a minstrel show, waddles across to his water dish and proceeds to bathe himself with such vigour that all the other occupants of the cage receive the benefit of his bathwater; a pair of tiny, fragile diamond doves are dancing what appears to be a minuet together, turning round and round, bowing and changing places, calling in their soft, ringing voices some sort of endearments.

You pass slowly down the house to the big cage at the end where the touracos now live. The male, Peety, I hand reared while in West Africa. He peers at you from one of the higher perches and then, if you call to him, he will fly down in a graceful swoop, land on the perch nearest to you, and start to peck eagerly at your fingers. Then he will throw back his head, his throat swelling, and give his loud, husky cry: “Caroo… Caroo… Caroo…coo…coo…coo… “ Touracos are really among the most beautiful of birds. Peety’s tail and wings are a deep metallic blue, while his breast, head, and neck are a rich green, the feathering so fine and shining that it looks like spun glass. When he flies, you can see the undersides of his wings, which flash a glorious magenta red. This red is caused by a substance in the feathers called turacin, and it is possible to wash it out of the feathers. If you place a touraco’s wing feather in a glass of plain water, presently you will find the water tinged with pink, as though a few crystals of permanganate of potash had been dissolved in it. Having dutifully listened to Peety and his wife sing a duet together, you now make your way out of the bird house.

Dodging the exuberant welcome of the chimpanzees, who prove their interest in your well-being by hurling bits of fruit—and other less desirable substances—with unerring accuracy through the wire of their cage, you walk to the reptile house. Here in a pleasant temperature of eighty degrees the reptiles doze. Snakes regard you calmly with lidless eyes, frogs gulp as though just about to succumb to a bout of sobs, and lizards lie draped over rocks and tree trunks, exquisitely languid and sure of themselves. In the cage which contains the Fernand’s skinks that I had caught in the Cameroons, you can dig your hands into the damp, warm soil at the bottom and haul them out of their subterranean burrow, writhing and biting indignantly. They had recently shed their skins, and so they look as though they have been newly varnished. You admire their red, yellow, and white markings on the glossy black background, and then let them slide through your fingers and watch as they burrow like bulldozers into the earth. John Hartley appears, tall and lanky, bearing two trays of chopped fruit and vegetables for the giant tortoises. The previous night had been a good feeding one, he tells you. The boa constrictors had had two guinea-pigs each, while the big reticulated python had engulfed a very large rabbit, and lies there bloated and lethargic to prove it. The horned toads, looking more than ever like bizarre pottery figures, had stuffed themselves on baby chickens, and the smaller snakes were busily digesting white rats or mice, according to their size.

Round the back of the house are some more of the monkey collection that have just been let out into their outdoor cages: Frisky, the mandrill, massive and multi-coloured as a technicoloured sunset, picks over a huge pile of fruit and vegetables, grunting and gurgling to himself; further along, Tarquin, the cherry-crowned mangabey, with his grey fur, mahogany-coloured skullcap, and white eyelids, goes care­fully through the fur of his wife, while she lies on the floor of the cage as though dead. Periodically he finds a delectable fragment of salt in her fur and pops it into his mouth. One is reminded of the small boy who had witnessed this operation with fascinated eyes and had then shouted, “Hi, Mum, come and see this monkey eating the other one.”

Up in their paddock the tapirs, Claudius and Claudette, portly, Roman-nosed, and benign, play with Willie, the black and white cat, who guards the aviaries nearby from the rats. Willie lies on his back and pats gently at the whiffling, rubbery noses of the tapirs as they sniff and nuzzle him. Eventually tiring of the game, he rises and starts to move off, whereupon one of the tapirs reaches forward and tenderly engulfs Willie’s tail in its mouth and pulls him back, so that he continues the game. In the walled garden the lions, butter-fat and angry-eyed, lie in the sun, while near them the cheetahs are languidly asprawl amid the buttercups, merging with the flowers so perfectly that they become almost invisible.

At ten o’clock the gates open and the first coachloads of people arrive. As they come flooding into the grounds, everyone has to be on alert, not, as you may think, to ensure that the animals do not hurt the people, but to ensure that the people do not hurt the animals. If an animal is asleep, they want to throw stones at it or prod it with sticks to make it move. We have found visitors endeavouring to give the chimpanzees lighted cigarettes and razor-blades; monkeys have been given lipsticks which, of course, they thought was some exotic fruit and devoured accordingly, only to develop acute colic. One pleasant individual (whom we did not catch, unfortunately) pushed a long cellophane packet full of aspirins into the chinchilla cage. For some obscure reason one chinchilla decided that this was the food it had been waiting for all its life, and ate most of it before we came on the scene; it died the next day. The uncivilized behaviour of some human beings in a zoo has to be seen to be believed.

Now, there might be any one of fifty jobs to do. Perhaps you go to the workshop where Les, with his bruiser’s face and bright eyes, is busy on some repair work or other. Les is one of those people who are God’s gift to a zoo, for no job defeats him and his integrity is incredible. He is like a one-man building firm, for he can do anything from welding to dovetailing, from cementing to electrical maintenance. You discuss with him the new line of cages you are planning, their size and shape, and whether they should have swing-doors, or whether sliding doors would be more convenient.

Having thrashed out this problem, you remember that one of the giant tortoises has to have an injection. On your way to deliver this, you pass an excited crowd of north-country people round the mandrill cage, watching Frisky as he stalks up and down, grunting to himself, presenting now his vivid, savagely beautiful face, and now his multi-coloured rear to their eyes. “Ee,” says one woman, “you can’t tell front from back!”

Lunch-time comes, and so far the day has progressed smoothly. As you sit down to eat, you wonder if there will be a crisis during the afternoon: will the ladies’ lavatories overflow, or, worse still, will it start to rain and thus put off all the people who are intending to visit the zoo? Lunch over, you see that the sky is, to your relief, still a sparkling blue. You decide to go down and look at the penguin pond, for which you have certain ideas of improvement.