The Ark's Anniversary
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By Gerald Durrell
My Family and Other Animals
A Zoo in My Luggage
Birds, Beats and Relatives
Garden of the Gods
The Overloaded Ark
The Talking Parcel
The Mockery Bird
The Donkey Rustlers
Catch me A Colobus
Beasts In My Belfry
The New Noah
The Drunken Forest
The Whispering Land
Rosy is My Relative
Two in the Bush
Three Singles to Adventure
The Ark’s Anniversary
Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons
Menagerie Manor
The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium
The Bafut Beagles
Marrying off Mother and Other Stories
The Aye-Aye And I
Fillets of Plaice
Ark on the Move
Encounters with Animals
The Stationary Ark
Gerald Durrell
THE ARK’S ANNIVERSARY
This book is for
Thomas Lovejoy
with whose help, humour and hard work
we have achieved much
Contents
Foreword by H.R.H. The Princess Royal
Author’s Note
A Word in Advance
1. The Emergence of the Manor
2. Trail of the Begging Bowl
3. Complicated Conservation
4. The Jigsaw Strategy
5. Return to the Wild
6. A Festival of Animals
A Message from the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust
Foreword by H.R.H. The Princess Royal
My association with the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust began, as it has done for thousands of others, on a train with a book written by its founder, Gerald Durrell. He has the ability, shared with few other authors, to extravasate a spontaneous explosion of mirth that surprises the reader as much as it does the unsuspecting travelling companion. To eat one’s sandwich while reading Mr. Durrell is to court still greater embarrassment.
I realize now that he uses his own exclusive brand of anthropomorphism to build relationships – and therefore, inevitably, bonds – between his reader and other animal species. I also recognize that he employs this singular gift to reach a multiple audience, a strategy he continues to harness to great effect in other ways.
I have now visited the J.W.P.T. several times and while each is memorable in its own way, none stands out as being more significant than that of the Trust’s 21st and the Zoo’s 25th joint anniversary in 1984, when I was asked to open the International Training Centre for the Conservation and Captive Breeding of Endangered Species.
You will read that, via graduates of this Training centre, the Trust’s influence and activity is spreading across the globe on a scale wholly disproportionate to its modest headquarters in the Channel Islands. I believe that it behoves all of us, as guardians of the living world we have inherited, to see that we pass on this priceless inheritance to the next generation. In order to do that, however, we must understand why it is necessary and how to do it. One of the most exciting developments, growing out of a realization that captive breeding can, of itself, create an opportunity for learning, is the adaptation of the breeding centre to provide a focus for public education.
I am delighted that The Princess Royal Pavilion in Jersey will provide one such opportunity, so that over 350,000 visitors to our headquarters each year can be taught the philosophy behind the Trust’s objectives. Of at least equal significance is the first zoo Educator’s Course which will teach zoo staff from developing countries how well maintained animal collections can be utilized to impart the principles of wildlife conservation.
Once again Gerald Durrell and his small team seem to have found a way to reach an international audience of barely estimable numbers.
To say that one person, or indeed one organization, cannot do it all, is a truism. But I feel bound to suggest that if everyone and every biologically based institution did as much as Mr. Durrell and his Trust to help stitch and darn our planet’s threadbare ecology, there might be fewer holes in our natural defences than there are today.
All Gerald Durrell’s books are worth waiting for. This one is no exception and will, I hope, serve to convince many more people that where there is a will and a well thought out way, the impossible becomes commonplace and even miracles don’t take quite so long.
Author’s Note
Most authors complain of too little material. In this book I complain of too much, for I have been forced, by the exigencies of space, to leave out much that I would have loved to include. However, it has taught me the truth of the old adage that you cannot get a quart into a pint pot.
As the Trust has grown and prospered and now has supportive sister organizations both in the United States and in Canada, we have come to use the word ‘Trust’ as an all-encompassing description since, though separated by oceans and vast distances, our work, our objectives and our aspirations are the same. Therefore when I use the word ‘Trust’ in this book it covers not only the work of Jersey but of the USA and Canada as well.
A Word in Advance
I do not think it possible for many people at the age of six to be able to predict their future with any accuracy. However, at that age I felt confident enough to inform my mother that I intended to have my own zoo and moreover, I added magnanimously, I would give her a cottage in the grounds to live in. If my mother had been an American parent, she would probably have rushed me to the nearest psychiatrist; however, being fairly phlegmatic, she merely said she thought that it would be lovely and promptly forgot all about it. She should have been warned since, from the age of two, I had been filling matchboxes and my pockets with a wide variety of the smaller fauna that came my way, so the progress from a matchbox to a zoo could have been predicted. It is nice to record though that, before she died, I had fulfilled my promise and taken her to live in my zoo, not in a cottage but in a manor house.
Looking out of the windows of my first-floor flat in Les Augres Manor is an unpredictable operation and would give any psychiatrist pause for thought. From the living-room windows, for example, you are suddenly transfixed – while in the middle of pouring out a refill of pink gin for your guest – by the sight of the Przewalski horses running their variation of the Derby around their paddock, and you watch them breathless, wondering which muscular, pinky-brown animal is going to win. Meanwhile, with no explanation for your sudden inhospitable immobility, your guest is left, as it were, unquenched.
In the dining room worse befalls. Your carving is brought to a halt in mid-joint because you have let your gaze stray out of the window and have caught sight of the crowned cranes doing their courtship dance. Their la
nky legs are thrown out at the most unanatomical angles as they pirouette around like bedraggled, failed ballet dancers, leaping high in the air, dextrously juggling twigs as love tokens and uttering loud, rattling, bugle-like cries.
Modesty prevents me from relating what can be seen from the bathroom window when the Serval cats are loudly and apparently agonizingly in season, moaning their hearts out, screaming with love and lust. However, worse – far worse – befalls you in the kitchen should you lift your eyes from the stove and let them wander. You are confronted by a large cage full of Celebes apes, black and shiny as jet, with rubicund pink behinds shaped exactly like the hearts on valentine cards, and all of them indulging in an orgy which even the most avant-garde Roman would have considered both flamboyant and too near the knuckle. Close contemplation of such a spectacle can lead to disaster, such as irretrievably burning lunch for eight people as they arrive to partake of it. This happened to me on one occasion and I discovered that even friends of long standing do not take kindly to boiled eggs when they have been churning up their gastric juices in expectation of a five-course gourmet meal.
There are even worse things. One morning I was entertaining a coterie of extremely ancient and wobbly octogenarian conservationists, who were making steady inroads into my sweet sherry I was just about to suggest (while they had what wits they possessed still about them) that we sallied forth to look at the animals, when I glanced out of the window and saw, to my horror, slouching through the forecourt among the spring flowers, Giles, our biggest, most hirsute and potentially lethal Orangutan. He looked like a gigantic walking hearthrug of orange and blond hair and he had that lurching side-to-side movement thought to be the prerogative of sailors who have spent many years on the bosom of the ocean and an equal number of years on the rum. I was trapped and for the next hour I had to ply my geriatric acquaintances with more and more sweet sherry and they got progressively more and more inebriated. At last the happy news came that Giles had been darted and returned to his rightful quarters, and I could get rid of my by now extremely convivial conservationists. But my blood ran cold at the thought of what would have happened if I had ushered them (all the worse for the application of the Demon Drink) out of the front door at the precise moment when Giles came shambling into the forecourt.
But why take on a zoo? – relatives and friends have asked me plaintively, and not a biscuit factory, or a market garden, or a farm, or something safe and respectable?
The first answer was that I never wanted to be safe and respectable; I could not imagine anything duller. Second, I did not think that the ambition to own one’s own zoo was so outrageously eccentric that it warranted all your nearest and dearest looking at you as if you were ripe and ready to be fitted for your first – and probably last – straitjacket. To me the thing was perfectly straightforward. I was deeply interested in all creatures that lived with me on the planet and wanted them at close quarters so that I could watch them and learn about and from them. What simpler way of accomplishing this than to found my own zoo?
In those palmy days, of course, I had no conception of the amount of money and hard work that would have to be put into such a project before the dream could become a reality, nor did I have any idea of the importance of zoos and what, ideally, they should be. Selfishly, I regarded a zoo as being a large collection of exotic animals gathered in one spot for my personal edification, nothing more. But as I grew older and nearer to my ambition I worked in zoos and collected animals around the world for them and I began to view them in a somewhat different light from the uncritical one I had until then adopted.
What I had in mind was an almost completely new concept of the motivation of a zoological garden. Its first major objective should be to act as an adjunct to the whole conservation movement by the setting up of viable breeding colonies of those endangered species whose numbers had dropped so drastically that they could no longer cope with the hazards of life in the wild. This should in no way be misconstrued (as it has been by some conservationists) as an action which merely confined these animals to captivity. The idea was that the captive colonies should be set up merely as a safeguard against extinction, while at the same time the most stringent efforts should be made to preserve the wild habitat and wild populations of the species concerned and to release back to the wild captive-bred animals when their habitat had been made safe. This, it seemed to me, was a zoo’s major raison d’être.
Second, a zoo should help establish breeding colonies of the species in their countries of origin and train people from those countries in captive breeding and reintroduction techniques.
Third, a zoo should promote studies to learn more about the animals themselves, both in the wild and in captivity, and through this knowledge find better and more rapid ways of helping them to avoid vanishing from our world.
Last but definitely not least, a zoo should promote conservation education both in the country where it is found and in the country from which its endangered species emanate, and generally where such education is most urgently needed.
I discovered to my dismay that a very high percentage of zoos were bad. They were bad because they had no real motivation and were run simply as showplaces. Any motivation there was consisted of trying to obtain ‘box-office’ animals to enhance the gate receipts. The animals were badly fed and badly caged for the most part, and the breeding results (if any) were poor and happened more by accident than by design. Very little scientific study was done on this vast array of species about which practically nothing was known and the attempts to educate the zoo-going public were pathetic at best.
I have written elsewhere (The Stationary Ark) that when Florence Nightingale was faced with the appalling hospitals of her day she did not suggest closing them all down. Knowing that they had an important part to play, she suggested that they were made better. I am in no way comparing myself with that redoubtable woman, but the same sort of situation existed (and exists still) with zoos. I felt the fact that – as institutions – they had fallen into disrepute was entirely their own fault. I believed that zoos could be important if they were run properly, excellent institutions for scientific research and education, but – above all in this day and age – centres of captive breeding to assist in the saving of endangered species.
So, quite simply, I wanted a zoo run on these lines, lines I thought every zoo should follow. I was not at all sure if it would work, but then the Wright brothers did not know if they could fly until they took to the air. So we tried, and now – years later, after a lot of hard work and many mistakes – we have proved that it can work. That is why this book is called The Ark’s Anniversary, for we recently celebrated our twenty-fifth birthday. And this is the story of some of the many things, which happened to us during our years of growing up.
The Emergence of the Manor
At the age of twenty-one I inherited £3000, a princely sum but not sufficient to start a zoo. So I decided to become an animal collector for zoos. It was a short-lived career; because I discovered that what most dealers did was to cram twenty creatures into a cage designed for one and increase the price on the survivors. If they all survived, well and good. I could not indulge in this sort of slave traffic, so my cages were spacious and my animals well cared for: so I lost all my money. However, the experience proved invaluable. It gave me a wide schooling in the keeping of animals in the tropics, their illnesses and their quirks. It taught me that zoos were not all that I had thought them to be.
Then, penniless, at my elder brother’s insistence I started to write. I was lucky. My first book was what they now call a smash hit and I have been lucky that all my subsequent books have been equally popular. With this change in my fortunes, my thoughts turned zoo wards again. Borrowing £25,000 (against as yet unwritten master-pieces) from my kindly and long-suffering publisher, I decided to try to set up on the south coast of England, only to find that a succession of Labour governments had enmeshed the
country in such a Kafka-like miasma of bureaucracy that the average citizen was bound immobile by red tape and it was impossible to get quite simple things agreed to by local government, let alone something as bizarre as a zoo. So, with introductions from my publisher, I went to Jersey – small, beautiful and self-governing – and within a few hours of landing I had found Les Augres Manor, and within forty-eight hours I had received the go-ahead. However, I had not rushed into the whole thing with ill-considered enthusiasm and without taking advice. I approached everyone I knew in what might loosely be called the biological zoo world whom I knew approved of the idea of captive breeding. The first was James Fisher, great ornithologist and ardent zoo man. He helped by telling me I was mad.
‘You’re mad, dear boy,’ he said, staring at me from under his mop of iron-grey hair, looking like an extremely worried Old English sheepdog, ‘quite mad. I must really advise you against the Channel Islands.’
He helped himself lavishly to my gin.
‘But why, James?’ I asked.
‘Too far away. End of the world,’ he explained, waving a dismissive hand. ‘Who the hell d’you think is going to come to some remote bloody island in the English Channel to see your setup? The whole thing’s lunatic. I wouldn’t come that far to drink your gin. That’s a measure of how silly I think your scheme is. Ruination staring you in the face. You might just as well set up on Easter Island.’
This was blunt but not encouraging.
I went to see Jean Delacour at his famous bird collection in Clères. Jean was the most incredible aviculturist and ornithologist, who had travelled extensively, gathering birds, describing new species, writing massive and comprehensive tomes on the ornithology of remote parts of the world. In both world wars his enormously valuable collection of birds had been overrun and destroyed by the Germans. When the last war ended, instead of giving up, as most people would have done, Jean started his collection for the third time from scratch at Clères.