Gerald Durrell: Menagerie Manor

In the reptile house, snakes that have been lethargic all day now slide round their cages, bright-eyed, eager, their tongues flicking as they explore every nook and cranny for food. The geckos, with enormous golden eyes, hang upside-down on the roof of their cage, or else with infinite caution stalk a dishful of writhing meal-worms. The tiny yellow and black corroboree frogs (striped like bulls’-eyes and the size of a cigarette butt) periodically burst into song; thin, reedy piping that has a metallic quality about it, as if someone were tapping a stone with a tiny hammer. Then they relapse into silence and gaze mournfully at the ever-circling crowd of fruit flies that live in their cage and form part of their diet.

Outside, the lions, the dingoes, and the fox are quiet; the owls keep up their questioning cries. There is a sudden chorus of hysterical screams from the chimpanzees’ bedroom, and you know that they are quarrelling over who should have the straw.

In the mammal house the gorillas are now asleep, lying side by side on their shelf, pillowing their heads on their arms. They screw up their eyes in your flashlight beam and utter faint growls, indignant that you should disturb them. Next door, the orang-utans, locked passionately in each other’s arms, snore so loudly that it seems as though the very floor vibrates. In all the cages there is deep, relaxed breathing from sleeping monkeys, and the only sound apart from this is the steady patter of claws as the nine-banded armadillo, who always seems to suffer from insomnia, trots about his cage, making and remaking his bed, carefully gathering all the straw into one corner, smoothing it down, lying on it to test its comfort, then deciding that the corner is not suitable for a bedroom, removing all the bedding to the opposite end of the cage, and starting all over again.

Upstairs, the flying squirrels gaze at you with enormous liquid eyes, squatting fatly on their haunches, while stuffing food into their mouths with their delicate little hands. Most of the parrots are asleep, but Suku, the African grey, is incurably inquisitive, and as you pass never fails to pull his head out from under his wing to see what you are doing. As you make your departure, he shuffles his feathers—a whispering, silken noise -and then in a deep, rather bronchial voice says, “Good night, Suku” to himself in tones of great affection.

As you lie in bed, watching through the window the moon disentangling itself from the tree silhouettes, you hear the dingoes starting again their plaintive, flute-like chorus, and then the lions cough into action. Soon it will be dawn and the chorus of birds will take over and make the cold air of the morning ring with song.

Dear Mr Durrell,

I would like to join one of your expeditions. Here are my qualifications and faults:

36 years old, single, good health, a sport, understand children and animals, except snakes; devoted, reliable, excellent; young in character. My hobbies are playing the flute, photography, and writing stories. My nerves are not too steady; am disagreeable if anybody insults my country or my religion (Catholic). In the event of my accompanying you, it would be everything paid—on the other hand if you are a snob and you don’t mean what you write, I regret to say I do not wish to know you. Hoping to hear from you soon…

I soon found, to my relief, that Jersey appeared to have taken us to its heart. The kindness that has been shown to us during the five years of our existence is tremendous, both from officials and from the islanders themselves. After all, when living on an island eight miles by twelve you may be pardoned for having certain qualms when someone wants to start a zoo and import a lot of apparently dangerous animals. You have vivid mental pictures of an escaped tiger stalking your pedigree herd of Jersey cows, of flocks of huge, savage deer browsing happily through your fields of daffodils, and gigantic eagles and vultures swooping down on your defenceless chickens. I have no doubt that a lot of people thought this, especially our nearest neighbours to the manor, but nevertheless they welcomed us without displaying any symptoms of unease.

In a zoo of five or six hundred animals the variety and quantity of food they consume are staggering. It is one thing that must not be stinted if they are to be kept healthy and happy; and, above all, the food must be not only plentiful but good. Cleanliness and good food go a very long way to cutting down disease. A creature that is well-fed and kept in clean surroundings has, in my opinion, an eighty per cent better chance of escaping disease, or if it contracts a disease, of recovering. Unfortunately, a great many people (including, I am afraid, some zoos) still suffer from the extraordinary delusion that anything edible but not fit for human consumption is ideal for animals. When you consider that most animals in the wild state—unless they are natural carrion feeders—always eat the freshest of food, such as fresh fruit and freshly killed meat—it is scarcely to be wondered at when they sicken and die if fed on a diet that is ‘not fit for human consumption’. Of course, in all zoos a lot of such food is fed, but in most cases there is nothing at all wrong with it. For example, a grocer opens a crate of bananas and finds that many of the fruit have black specks or blotches on the skin. There is nothing wrong with the fruit, but his customers demand yellow bananas, and will not buy discoloured ones. If a zoo did not buy it, the fruit would be wasted. Sometimes the grocer has fruit or vegetables which have reached that point of ripeness where after another twenty-four hours in the shop the whole lot will have to be thrown away. In that case they are sold to a zoo that can use them up rapidly.

Some time ago a grocer telephoned us, inquiring whether we would like some peaches. He explained that his deep­freeze had gone wrong and that it contained some South African peaches which had gone black just round the seed. There was absolutely nothing wrong with them, he assured us, but they were unsaleable. We said we would be delighted to have them, thinking that a couple of crates of peaches would be a treat for some of the animals. A few hours later, a huge lorry rolled into the grounds, stacked high with boxes. There must have been up to thirty or forty, and the financial loss this represented to the grocer must have been staggering. They were some of the largest and most succulent peaches I have ever seen; we tipped cratefuls of them into the cages, and the animals had a field day. Within half an hour all the monkeys were dripping peach juice and could hardly move; several members of the staff, too, were surreptitiously wiping juice off their chins. There was, as I say, nothing wrong with the peaches: they were just unsaleable. But it might happen that someone else, in the most kindly way, would bring us a whole lorry load of completely rotten and mildewed peaches, and be hurt and puzzled when we refused them on the grounds that they were unfit for animal consumption. One of the biggest killers in a zoo is that rather nebulous thing called enteritis, an infection of the stomach. This in itself can cause an animal’s death, but even if it is only a mild attack it can weaken the creature and thus open the door to pneumonia or some other deadly complaint. Bad fruit can cause enteritis quicker than most things; thus care must be taken over the quality fed to the animals.

As soon as the people of Jersey knew what our require­ments were in the matter of food, they rallied round in the most extraordinarily generous way. Take the question of calves, for instance. In Jersey most of the bull calves are slaughtered at birth, and until we arrived they were simply buried, for they were too small to be marketable. We discovered this quite by accident, when a farmer telephoned us and asked rather doubtfully, if a dead calf was any use to us. We said we would be delighted to have it, and when he brought it round he asked us if we would like any more. It was then that we found out there was this wonderful source of fresh meat: meat which—from the animal point of view—could not have been more natural, for not only was it freshly killed (sometimes still warm), but it also included the hearts, livers, and other internal organs which were so good for them. Gradually, the news spread among the farmers; before long—at certain times of the year—we were receiving as many as sixteen calves a day, and farmers were travelling from one end of the island to the other, delivering them to us. Others, not to be outdone, offered us tomatoes and apples, and would bring whole lorry loads round, or let us go to collect as many as we would take away. One man telephoned to say he had a ‘few’ sunflowers, the heads of which were now ripe—would we like them? As usual we said yes, and he turned up in a small open truck piled high with gigantic sunflower heads, so that the whole thing looked like a sun chariot. The heads were not fully ripe, which meant that the kernel of each seed was soft and milky; we simply cut up the heads as if they were plum cakes and put big slices in with such creatures as the squirrels, mongooses, and birds. They all went crazy over the soft seeds and simply gorged themselves.