Gerald Durrell: Menagerie Manor

But these are all the more normal types of food. In a zoo you can use many very unusual items of diet, and in acquiring these we were again helped by the local people. There was one elderly lady who used to ride up to the zoo once or twice a week on an antediluvian bicycle and spend the afternoon talking to the animals. Whenever she saw me she would back me into a corner and for half an hour or so tell me what tricks her favourite animals had been up to that day. She was, I discovered, a lavatory attendant in St Helier. One day I happened to meet her when I had been out collecting some acorns for the squirrels. She watched entranced while the squirrels sat up on their hind legs, twirling the acorns round and round in their paws as they chewed them. She then told me that she knew of a great many churchyards in which fine oak trees grew, and vowed that she would herself bring some acorns for the squirrels at the end of the week. Sure enough, she appeared on the next Sunday pedalling strenuously up to the zoo on her ancient bicycle, the front basket of which was filled to the brim with plump acorns, and there was another large carrier bagful strapped—some­what insecurely—to the back of her vehicle. Thereafter, she used to bring us a supply of acorns every week, until the squirrels became quite blase about them and even started to store them in their beds.

Another item for which we are always grateful is what could be loosely called ‘live food’, that is to say, earwigs, wood-lice, grasshoppers, moths, and snails. Here a great many people come to our rescue, and they turn up at the zoo with jam-jars full of woodlice and other creatures, and biscuit-tins full of snails, of which they are, of course, only too glad to see the last. The earwigs, woodlice, and so on are fed to the smaller reptiles, the amphibians, and some of the birds. The snails we feed to the larger lizards, who scrunch them up with avidity, eating shell and all as a rule.

In order to pad out the collection of animals that I had brought back from West Africa and South America, we had, of course, to acquire from different sources several other creatures. The most amusing of these was, undoubtedly, the bird I mentioned before, Trumpy, the trumpeter. Not only had he appointed himself the zoo’s clown but also the zoo’s settler-in. As soon as we got a new creature, Trumpy managed to hear of it, and would come bouncing along, cackling to himself, to settle it in. He would then spend twenty-four hours standing by the cage (or preferably in it, if he could) until he thought that the new arrival was firmly established, whereupon he would bounce back to his special beat in the mammal house. Sometimes Trumpy’s settling efforts were on the risky side, but he seemed to be too dim-witted to realize the danger. When Juan and Jauntier, the white-collared peccaries, were first released into their paddock, Trumpy was there to settle them in. The pigs did not seem to mind in the slightest, so Trumpy did his twenty-four hour stint and departed. But later on, when Juan and Juanita had just had their first litter, and had brought them out into the paddock for the first time, Trumpy flew gaily over the fence to settle in the babies. Now, Juan and Juanita had not minded this for themselves, but they thought that Trumpy’s efforts on behalf of their piglets held some hidden menace. They converged on Trumpy (who was standing on one leg and eyeing the piglets benignly), their fur bristling, their tusks clattering like castanets. Trumpy woke out of his trance with a start, and only a skilful bit of dodging and a wild leap saved him. It was the last time he attempted to go into the peccary paddock. When we dammed up the little stream in the sunken water-meadow and constructed a small lake for the black-necked and coscoroba swans I had brought back from South America, Trumpy was there to supervise the work, and when the swans were eventually released he insisted, in spite of all our entreaties, in standing up to his ankles in water for twenty-four hours to settle them in. It did not appear to have any effect on the swans, but Trumpy enjoyed it.

Another new acquisition was the fine young male mandrill, Frisky. With his blue and red behind, and his blue and red nose, Frisky was a fine sight. If you went near his cage he would peer at you with his bright, amber-coloured eyes, lift his eyebrows up and down as if in astonishment, and then, uttering throaty little grunts, turn round and present his backside to you, peering over his shoulder to see what effect his sunset rear was achieving. Frisky was, of course, exceedingly inquisitive, like all members of his family, and one bright spring day this was his undoing. We were having the tops of the monkey cages repainted in a pleasant shade of mushroom, and Frisky had been watching this operation with keen interest. He was obviously under the impression that the paint pot contained some delicious substance, probably like milk, which would repay investigation. He had not had a chance to find out, however, for the painter, in the most selfish and boorish manner, had kept the paint pot close beside him. But patience is always rewarded, and after a few hours Frisky had his chance. The painter left the pot unguarded while he went to fetch something, and Frisky seized the opportunity. He pushed his arm through the wire, grabbed the edge of the pot, and pulled. The next moment he was spluttering and choking under a waterfall of mushroom-coloured paint, and almost instantly, he discovered, he had turned into a mushroom-coloured mandrill. There was really not much that we could do, for you cannot take a half-grown mandrill out of its cage and wash it as though it were a poodle. However, when the paint had dried as hard as armour on his fur, he looked so miserable that we decided to put him into the cage next door, which contained a female baboon and two female drills, in the hope that they would clean him. When Frisky was let in with them, they viewed him with alarm, and it was some time before they plucked up enough courage to approach him. When they did, however, and found out what was the matter with him, they gathered round enthusiastically and set about the task of giving Frisky a wash and brush-up. The trouble was that the paint had dried so hard on the fur that the three females had to use a great deal of force, and so, although at the end of two days they had removed all the paint, they had also removed a vast amount of Frisky’s fur with it. Now, instead of a mushroom-coloured mandrill, we had a partially bald and slightly shamefaced-looking one.

Another newcomer was our lion, who went under the time-honoured name of Leo. He was one of the famous Dublin Zoo lions, and was probably about the fiftieth gen­eration born in captivity. On his arrival he was only about the size of a small dog, and so he was housed in a cage in the mammal house, but he grew at such a pace that it was soon imperative that we find him more spacious quarters. We had just finished construction on a large cage for the chimpanzees, and decided we would put Leo in that until we could get around to building him a cage of his own. So Leo was transferred, and settled down very happily. I was glad to see, when his mane started to develop, that he was going to be a blond lion, for in my experience the lions with blond manes, as opposed to dark ones, have always nice, if slightly imbecile, characters. This theory has been amply born out by Leo’s behaviour. He had in his cage a large log as a plaything, and a big black rubber bucket in which he received his water ration. This bucket fascinated him, and after he had drunk his fill he would upset the remains of the water and then pat the bucket with his great paws, making it roll round the cage so that he could stalk it and pounce on it. One day I was in the grounds when a lady stopped me to inquire whether we had acquired Leo from a circus. Slightly puzzled, I said, “No,” and asked her why she should think so. “Because,” she replied, “he was doing such clever tricks.” I discovered that he had, by some extraordinary means, managed to wedge the rubber bucket on his head, and was walking round and round the cage proudly, wearing it like a hat.