Dear Mr Durrell,
We have so much enjoyed watching your programme Catch Me A Colobus, that we would like to send you our congratulations, and best wishes for the future.
You remind me very much of a friend I had in York about twelve-years ago, were you ever called John Mitchell? I should be interested to know . . .
Naturally, when you come back from a trip of any length, you find an enormous backlog of work to catch up with. Although I had been kept informed of the zoo’s progress in my absence there were a hundred and one things I had to do. I had to find out what all my committees had been up to, for a start, and I was faced with a desk that was piled almost a foot high in letters that had to be answered. Fortunately, I found that things had been going very well indeed. Our Trust membership had leapt up, so we now had some two thousand five hundred members dotted about in various parts of the world, and this income, in addition to what the zoo earned from its gate money, would enable us to go ahead with some of our long-cherished plans.
To my infinite relief, all the Sierra Leone animals had settled down very well. The leopards, who were, of course, undergoing six months’ quarantine on the zoo’s premises, were injected against feline enteritis, to which they took grave exception. And the Colobus, now that they were in more spacious cages which gave them room to leap and to swing, were eating avidly a number of things that they would not take on board ship. We even experimented by giving them bamboo and holly. To our delight they took both of these and ate them very well, so now we knew that we could at least supply them with some green-stuff during the winter months. We had divided them into two groups. The Sod, with the three adult females, was in one cage, and the young male and two females of approximately his own age were kept in a separate cage. We felt it was better to keep the colonies apart because The Sod’s temper was never good at the best of times and if we mixed them all together he might do some mortal damage to the young male. As The Sod himself was getting on in years we had no means of knowing how long he would be with us and we did not want our young male, the only other male we had, to be killed or injured.
After the first couple of days, when I was busy in the zoo making sure that all the animals were settling down well and seeing all the new additions that had been done to the cages and so on, I became completely deskbound, answering mail and attending committee meetings. It was, of course, in the middle of one of these committee meetings that Sheena, our adult female chimpanzee, decided to give birth. Sheena had been pregnant for so long that I had almost forgotten about it. The gestation period for a chimpanzee is the same as for a human, and nine months is a long time to wait for a happy event. In the early stages of her pregnancy Sheena had suffered tremendously from retention of liquid which made her hands, feet and face all puffy and, presumably, extremely painful. This is a thing frequently found among pregnant human mothers and so, by consulting our doctor – which we always did, in conjunction with our veterinary surgeons, when the apes had anything wrong with them – we managed to get her to take some pills which reduced this condition considerably. Eventually it disappeared. Apart from the fact that her intake of liquid had increased from two pints to fourteen pints a day, there was no indication that the happy event was imminent. I was in the middle of a management committee meeting, where we were discussing what new cages needed to be built, what new animals should be acquired, and similar weighty subjects, when suddenly the door of my office burst open unceremoniously and Jacquie rushed in.
‘Quick!’ she shouted to me, to the astonishment of the assembled company. ‘Sheena’s going to pop!’
She then disappeared at a run towards the mammal house, and I leapt up, scattering papers in all directions, and followed her. Needless to say, this behaviour completely mystified my poor committee for they did not know that in our zoo parlance to ‘pop’ meant to give birth, and as I’d never seen a chimpanzee give birth I was determined not to miss it. I raced across the courtyard into the mammal house and skidded to a panting halt in front of Sheena’s cage. She was sitting on the shelf with her back towards us, straining, and the very tip of the baby’s head could just be seen. Presently, she got up and started building a nest of straw, occasionally pausing to strain slightly but displaying no apparent discomfort. The area of the baby’s head that we could see protruding was approximately the area of a goose’s egg. She would occasionally reach round behind her and touch the baby’s head with her fingers, but she still displayed no real symptoms of distress.
After half an hour of desultory nest-building, with occasional pauses for straining and wandering up and down her platform, Sheena suddenly took up a position facing us, her legs astride, and using only her left hand for support. She seemed, at this point, to be straining with much more vigour, and then – with astonishing rapidity – she suddenly put her right hand behind her and the next instant had whipped the baby round to the front so that it was lying in the palms of both her hands. This whole action was done so quickly that it would have been almost impossible to photograph. The baby lay back in Sheena’s hands, its head lolling slightly to one side. What interested me most was the fact that the expression on Sheena’s face was one of absolute incredulity. She had presumably thought that what she was producing was something in the nature of an exceptionally large piece of excreta, and yet, instead of what she had expected, there lay a tiny replica of herself in her cupped hands.
At this point the baby uttered a scream that was so loud and sharp that, if we had not been watching carefully, we would have thought that it had come from Sheena. Sheena’s reaction was immediate. She clasped the baby violently to her breast, covering it with both hands. From the moment of birth to this gesture it could not have been more than four or five seconds. For two or three minutes she sat clasping the baby tightly to her like this, and then she gradually loosened her grip and started to examine it. Her first action was to clean the top of the skull by licking and sucking; sometimes the whole top of the cranium would disappear into her mouth, and knowing what large and well-developed teeth she had, I was terrified lest she should suck or bite too hard on the baby’s soft skull and thus kill it. But apparently this sucking was very gentle, for the baby didn’t seem to be worried by it in the slightest. She then set about cleaning its hands and feet, sucking each toe and finger individually and licking its palms with great thoroughness. Then she held the baby, using her hands as a cradle, and licked its eyes, occasionally stopping and expelling her breath through her pursed lips in what can only be described as a raspberry. Whether this was to spray spittle on to the area she was cleaning, or whether it was an expression of affection, we couldn’t really tell. Curiously enough, she evinced no interest at all in cleaning the baby’s body. The umbilical cord was long and appeared to be about an inch in diameter and the afterbirth, which was attached to it, must have measured some twelve inches by eight.
Having cleaned the baby, Sheena then, for the first time, became aware of the umbilical cord and the afterbirth and seemed rather worried by them. Holding the baby to her with her left hand she proceeded to walk up and down the shelf holding the cord in her right hand with the afterbirth dangling from it. Periodically, she would put the afterbirth down in the straw, carefully cover it, treading the straw down with her feet, and then retreat and sit down as though she imagined that by this means she had disposed of this irritating object. After a few minutes she would become aware that the baby was still attached to the afterbirth by the cord, and would repeat the whole performance. During the next half-hour she buried the afterbirth under the straw some six or seven times. On one occasion she came to the edge of the shelf and, to our horror, dangled the afterbirth over the side, swinging it to and fro like a pendulum. If she’d dropped it and the cord had broken, the baby might well have bled to death. By this time I’d been joined by my committee and also by our doctor who happened to have been visiting a sick member of the staff. They had watched this performance, fascinated. But when Sheena started swinging the afterbirth over the edge of the shelf, our doctor turned away in horror.
‘I simply can’t watch it,’ he said. ‘If she drops it, I dread to think what will happen.’
But, fortunately, Sheena took the weight of the afterbirth in her hand, so it had no effect upon the baby. A little later she got down from the shelf and pulled some straw with her, presumably hoping that this action would rid her of both the cord and the afterbirth, but after a minute she climbed back on to the shelf again.
Within an hour Sheena had become resigned to the cord and the afterbirth as being unwieldy but necessary parts of motherhood, and she then began to investigate the afterbirth more closely, poking it and licking her fingers. Within another half an hour she’d picked it up and begun eating it – but in a rather vague sort of way – more as though she found this was the only way of getting rid of it than as if she enjoyed it. After a time she’d eaten approximately half the afterbirth. She was holding the baby high up on her chest but, as far as we could see, she made no effort to show it where her teats were. This was rather worrying because, in many cases, with a first birth like this, if the mother does not instinctively show the baby where her breasts are, or if she holds the baby too low down so that it cannot reach them, it might well starve to death. However, Sheena was holding it high enough and the baby, mumbling at her body, soon found her breasts. We saw that it was feeding from both the right and left breast. Having fed for a few moments the baby, rather astonishingly, started making chimpanzee greeting noises – the ‘eh, eh, eh, eh, eh,’ – to which Sheena responded with great excitement, clasping it more firmly to her breast and then peering into its face and licking its eyes at intervals. She went to sleep that night lying on her right side with the baby lying alongside her chest, and we all heaved a sigh of relief that up to this point things were going well.
The following day the umbilical cord was partly dry, as was the afterbirth, but Sheena showed no further signs of eating it. On the third day, the cord, which by now was dry and brittle, broke off, to Sheena’s obvious relief. We were well satisfied with the baby’s progress; it seemed to be feeding well and Sheena appeared to have plenty of milk. Needless to say, all the mammal staff went about wearing rather smug expressions because, after all, the birth of a chimpanzee is not the easiest thing to achieve in captivity. Indeed, some of the oldest zoos on the Continent – Antwerp, for example, which has been established for a hundred years – had not managed to breed chimpanzees in captivity, so we all felt rather proud of ourselves.
The baby progressed remarkably well and Sheena proved to be a good mother. It was soon crawling about on the floor of the cage and climbing occasionally on the bars, but it only had to utter the slightest sound for Sheena to rush to it and clasp it protectively to her bosom. Muffet, as we called the baby, started to take an interest in fruit at about four months. At first he did not appear to eat it but mumbled it round in his mouth, but soon he started eating it and taking milk from a bottle. It was also when he was about four months old that he was observed playing with straw. He would crawl to different parts of the cage collecting it and piling it in one spot. He did not appear to be bed-making but simply playing. However, after about a fortnight of this activity, he was seen on the shelf, collecting, arranging and stamping the straw into place, and constructing the same sort of nest in miniature that his mother made each night.
Unfortunately, Muffet’s good progress did not last. I was watching him closely one day and I decided that I did not like the way he was moving. He was not as brisk and efficient on his hands and feet as he should have been for his age. Also, when he climbed up the wire and started sucking on one of the bars, I noticed that his gums were paler than they should have been. I mentioned this to Jeremy, and he and practically every other member of the staff, as well as Jacquie, all went and peered closely at Muffet. They agreed with me about the paleness of his gums, but not about his movements. I still insisted that I thought his movements were curiously laborious for a chimpanzee of his age. I mentioned this to Tommy Begg on his next visit and we agreed that we would increase the quantity of B.12 that Muffet was already getting, to try and cure his apparently slightly anaemic condition.
As the weeks passed, it became obvious that there was something very wrong with Muffet, and that we would have to try to put it right; but we couldn’t do anything without taking him away from Sheena. With the aid of the Capchur gun we anaesthetised Sheena, went into the cage when she was unconscious and removed Muffet. Although we did this as slowly and as gently as possible, it seemed to be a great shock to him. He was quite used to us, but he was used to our being the other side of a barrier, and when we suddenly removed him from the contact of his mother’s body he collapsed. His face and tongue turned blue and he choked and then stopped breathing. We tried artificial respiration and the kiss of life, and an analeptic was injected. This stimulant seemed to have some effect, artificial respiration was applied again and Muffet started to breathe spontaneously. Ten minutes later, however, his heart ceased to beat and breathing stopped. We tried everything we could, but he didn’t revive.
Needless to say, we were full of despondency but we sent Muffet’s body away for post mortem, hoping that perhaps we could learn from it the reason for his death and that this might help us in the future with any other baby chimps that Sheena might have. The results of the post mortem were very interesting, for it showed the extent to which an animal may be ill without any outward signs of it becoming noticeable for some considerable time. It was found that Muffet’s left arm was permanently flexed and the elbow was bound down by a scar tissue, and that the limb bone was not properly calcified. The left hand bottom ribs were distorted and concave. It was also found that he had a massive ulceration near the heart – although there was nothing wrong anatomically with the heart itself – and that this must have caused his death. The post mortem result cheered us slightly as it ended by saying: ‘The specimen was definitely extremely stunted and it is doubtful whether this state would have been overcome by treatment even at an early stage of its life.’ So at least we knew from this that, first of all, Sheena was obviously not getting enough calcium in her diet, and, secondly, that we were not responsible for Muffet’s death as the heart failure would have occurred sooner or later whether we had tried to move him from the cage or not. But this was cold comfort.
However, it was not long before Sheena became pregnant again. This time she gave birth in the middle of the night and the baby was a strong, healthy female which, at the time of writing, is about two years old and is now separated from her mother and doing fine. She shows none of the symptoms that Muffet displayed. Of course, we had increased Sheena’s diet in the latter stages of her second pregnancy to allow for the lack of calcium she had had in her milk, and I think we can attribute Alexa’s good health to the extra vitamins that we’d been giving to her mother. So at least Muffet’s death had taught us something.
It was some time after this that we were cheered up by another happy event. Jeremy arrived in my office in a state of considerable excitement, his nose bright red and his long blond hair flopping in all directions.
‘It’s the Colobus!’ he said. ‘They’ve had a baby!’
Now this was incredible news. There’s only one other zoo in the world that possesses this species of Colobus, and as far as we knew they’d never been bred in captivity before. For us, just the fact that we had managed to establish them and keep them alive and healthy was a triumph; if we succeeded in rearing this baby it would be doubly so. We rushed down to the cage to have a look. The three females were all vying with each other in holding the baby which, like all Colobus babies, was pure white at birth, and so it was extremely difficult for us to tell which was the mother. We were not sure what the Colobus behaviour pattern was in the wild state. It was quite likely that they acted like baboons in that, when a baby was born, all the other females took it in turn to play ‘auntie’ to it. But as the baby was being handed from one to the other and being pulled about so much, we decided that we would have to try and ascertain which was the mother before the baby came to grief.
We went into the cage and managed to get the baby out, whereupon it was hurriedly weighed and sexed. This action proved to us conclusively, which was the mother, for the smallest of the three females came down to the wire and made vigorous attempts to get the baby back again. We shut the other two females inside the bedroom and gave the baby back to its mother, keeping her and the baby separate for a couple of days until we felt sure that it was suckling well, and was strong enough to put up with the attention of its aunties. When we reintroduced the rest of the group to the mother and baby there were several minor skirmishes, with the other two females trying for possession of the infant, but when they failed to get hold of it they sat down quiet to groom each other. A few hours later the baby was often seen with the other two females, but as soon as it let out a high-pitched scream the mother would hastily and forcibly retrieve it.
The Sod, who was very much the domineering Victorian father in the group, displayed little interest in his young, constantly brushing it aside and occasionally banishing the female with the young from the inside quarters. Most of the time he completely ignored it, sitting with his normal, superior, faraway look on his face as though he was the lord of all he could survey. The infant progressed very nicely indeed and grew up to be a fine female. We called her Ann, since it was due to Ann Peters’ efforts that we’d got the Colobus back to Jersey in the first place. Since then the Colobus have bred again and again, and now we have a group of twelve. As I say, we are the only zoo in the world who have bred them and we consider them to be one of our major achievements.
Not to be outdone by all this activity, Bali, our female orang-utan, became pregnant. This was very exciting from our point of view. It is particularly important that orang-utans should be established in captivity because, at the present rate of slaughter, experts estimate that they might well become extinct in the wild state within the next ten or twenty years. Bali is an exceptionally nice-tempered animal and very placid by nature, and this made our task much easier, for it meant that we could actually go into the cage and examine her periodically. She got bigger and bigger, and it was well past the time that we thought she should have had her baby. We began to get a little worried. As I say, like most of the Continental zoos, we have our doctor to look at the apes in conjunction with our veterinary surgeons because the apes are, after all, so like human beings that a doctor sometimes might be able to make a diagnosis where a veterinary surgeon could be stumped. I was discussing the problem of Bali’s pregnancy with Jeremy one day when our doctor called at the zoo on some other matter. We got talking about Bali’s baby and I said that I was inclined to think that the whole thing was a myth.
‘Well, if I could get my stethoscope on to her stomach,’ said Mike, ‘it’s possible I might be able to hear the baby’s heartbeats. Is she tame?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Jeremy. ‘She’s perfectly all right.’
‘Well, let’s go and have a try,’ said Mike.
So we trooped off to the mammal house and Jeremy went into the cage, followed by Mike. He squatted down on his haunches in the straw, put the stethoscope round his neck, and approached Bali slowly and cautiously, talking to her all the time. Bali was lying there looking like a ginger, furry Buddha, and she watched him with her placid almond-shaped eyes in an interested fashion. Eventually, Mike had crawled close enough. He put the stethoscope in his ears and gently started to press the other end against Bali’s enormous stomach. Bali was fascinated. Here was this nice, kind gentleman, talking to her so soothingly and pressing something on her tummy which looked as though it might be worth investigating, and which was attached to a long pair of tubes that might even be edible. She gently put out a hand and touched the stethoscope, but Jeremy made her take her hand away. After a minute or so of listening, Mike took the stethoscope out of his ears.
‘Well?’ I said anxiously. ‘Can you hear anything?’
‘Not really,’ said Mike. ‘There’s a sort of double thump which might possibly be a baby’s heartbeat as well, but she’s not exactly lying in the right position. If she was sitting up a bit more it would help.’
Jeremy tried to get Bali to sit up, which Bali had no intention of doing. She liked lying as she was, and was quite happy to lie there and let this strange man poke about at her tummy all day long if it gave him any pleasure. We managed to shift her a little bit to one side, and Mike tried again. Again, he could hear a faint double thump that might or might not have been a baby’s heartbeat, but he couldn’t be sure. So there we had to leave it. Mike came out of the cage and dusted the straw off his immaculate suit.
‘I can’t tell definitely,’ he said. ‘I would have thought that she was pregnant, but really, from the position she was lying in, I couldn’t get a conclusive heartbeat. I’m afraid you’ll just have to sit it out.’
Which is what we did. Bali continued to grow rounder and rounder, and more and more placid and lethargic. Then, one day, Jeremy went into the mammal house first thing in the morning and, to his great distress, found that Bali had given birth and that the baby was dead. He got it out of the cage and examined it. Our estimate of the length of Bali’s pregnancy must have been wrong for the baby, although perfectly formed, was obviously premature and this was one of the reasons why it had been stillborn. But this is not a very uncommon occurrence among first births with wild animals of any sort. What did cheer us up, to a certain extent, was the fact that we had thought that Bali was still too young to breed, and yet she’d had what would have been a very fine, healthy baby. So we kept our fingers crossed and hoped for better luck next time.
I think Bali must have rather enjoyed the extra fuss and attention that was made over her when she was pregnant, because it wasn’t long afterwards that she started to display all the symptoms of pregnancy again. Once again she was cosseted; she was separated from her husband; she was given every delicacy we could think of, and, once again, the kind man came and crawled into the cage with her and pressed his stethoscope all over her stomach – without any result. We kept her apart from Oscar until it was well after the time when she should have had the baby if she was going to have it. We decided that this time it was a false pregnancy, which indeed is what it proved to be, because as soon as she was put back with Oscar, her tummy went down and so did her breasts. We were extremely annoyed that she had had us on like that, but we are still hoping that one day she will give birth successfully.
Spring had come again and, once again, the thing that occupied the minds of both Shep and myself, to the exclusion of practically everything else, was the breeding of the White-eared pheasants. The cock bird still had a severe limp and we didn’t for a moment think that he would be able to tread the hen. We investigated the possibilities of artificial insemination. Now while this is quite common with domestic birds, little work has been done on it in wild ones, and although we got the most expert advice we could from both the Continent and England, the consensus of opinion was that, as we only had a pair of them and they were such rarities, the risk involved would be too great. We would just have to leave them and hope to goodness that the cock’s leg would get better so that one day we might get some eggs from the hen.
About this time I went on my annual holiday to Greece. Of course, whenever I go away it is never entirely a ‘holiday’, for I generally seize the opportunity to try to write a book during these periods when I’m away from the telephone and other interruptions and can concentrate properly. So I lolled about in the Greek sunshine, enjoying the spring flowers and the olive groves, and then we made our way back, slowly, across France, eating like pigs. Catha and Jeremy kept me informed by letter of what was going on in my absence, and if anything was urgent they always knew where they could telephone me so that I would fly back immediately. But fortunately this wasn’t necessary. Jeremy had done a marvellous swap with the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and had got us several different species of Tenrec – strange little hedgehog-like insectivores from Madagascar which were all on the danger list – and so we were very pleased to have these breeding groups. When we got half-way across France we decided we would telephone Catha to find out how the Tenrecs were getting on and to tell her roughly when we were due to make landfall in Jersey. I was sitting at the dinner table with Jacquie, trying to make up my mind whether I was going to start with écrevisses flambées or snails, and sipping meditatively at a nice dry white wine, when the waiter told us that the call we had put through to Jersey had come through.
‘I’ll take it,’ said Jacquie, as she got up and left the table, and I continued my mouth-watering perusal of the menu. Presently she came back and from the exuberant look on her face I could tell immediately that something exciting had happened.
‘What’s the news?’ I said.
‘You’ll never guess!’
‘Well, come on. I don’t want to have to muck around guessing. Tell me.’
‘It’s the White-eareds,’ she said. ‘They’ve laid nineteen eggs and Shep’s hatched fourteen of them.’
It is difficult to describe the sensations that I felt at that moment. The first was of sheer disbelief; the second a tremendous thrill that ran through my whole body because, if we successfully reared fourteen White-eared pheasants, it would mean that we would have the largest breeding stock known outside China. And if the bird was, indeed, extinct in the wild state, we were now in a position to establish it firmly in captivity and thus save it, as a species, from total extinction. At last the Trust was fulfilling the function for which I had created it. We had a glorious meal and drank far too much wine to celebrate, and the whole of the next day, as we drove through the lovely French countryside, I was thinking to myself: Fourteen of them! Fourteen of them! . . . Sixteen, with the adult pair . . . And if she does as well next year . . . My God! We’ll be able to distribute them to all the zoos so that we don’t have all our eggs in one basket. I hope to heaven that they don’t all turn out to be one sex . . . We’ll have to have some special aviaries for them. It’s absolutely essential . . .
So, filled with all these exciting thoughts, we reached the coast and crossed over to Jersey. As soon as I got to the zoo I sent for Shep.
‘What’s all this I hear?’ I said, ‘about you killing off all the White-eared pheasants?’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Whole lot dead. Sorry about it, but there it is. Can’t be helped.’
‘Come on, you coot,’ I said, ‘let’s go and look at them.’
So he took me up to the special pens where the broody hen was clucking round the pheasant chicks which were by now a week or so old. They were all fine, sturdy, little youngsters and as Shep had taken great precautions to keep them on absolutely clean ground, we felt sure that with luck we could rear the whole lot. I took Shep up to the flat and opened a bottle of champagne, and we solemnly toasted each other and the White-eared pheasants. It was a great moment of triumph for us after all the heartbreak and the setbacks that we’d had ever since we’d got the birds.
