Another great character was Dingle, a Cornish Chough. These strange members of the crow family are black with scarlet legs and a long curved scarlet beak. Dingle had been hand-reared as a baby and so was perfectly tame. When he first arrived we kept him in the flat for a few days, but after he had broken his eighth glass I decided that the time had come when Dingle must be banished to one of the outdoor aviaries. But he was a most endearing bird and liked nothing better than to have his head scratched, whereupon he would crouch on the ground or on your lap, his eyes closed, shivering his wings in ecstasy. He liked to sit on Jacquie’s shoulder and run his beak delicately through her hair, presumably in the hopes of finding the odd woodlouse or some similar delicacy, and one day, when he was sitting on my shoulder and I wasn’t concentrating on what he was doing, he rammed a piece of paper into my ear – presumably some frustrated nest-making attempt – and it required a pair of tweezers to get it out again. Dingle bore no malice at being banished to an aviary and still comes down to talk to you and to have his head scratched through the wire.
Of the birds that talk, we have quite a number. We have a parrot, Soocoo, who says, ‘Good night, Soocoo,’ to himself as the lights are switched off last thing at night. And we have Ali, the Hill Minah, who can say, ‘Where’s Trigger?’ and ‘Oooo, he’s a good little boy!’ But probably the best talker of all is a smaller Minah called Tuppence. If you go up to Tuppence’s cage and talk to him he will laugh and giggle, and if you push your finger through the wire and rub his tummy, he will close his eves and say ‘Oooo, that’s nice! Oooo, that’s nice!’
Lots of people have asked me whether I think that birds that talk really know what they are saying. I’m not quite sure what the answer is. Take Tuppence, for example. He says ‘Oooo, that’s nice,’ when you scratch him because, presumably, that is what his former owners used to say to him when they scratched him, and so he associates the sounds with the actual scratching. But one day he did something which almost made me believe that he knew what he meant. Mr Holly, our ancient and much respected gardener, was trimming a hedge near Tuppence’s cage when he suddenly cleared his throat and spat. Immediately, Tuppence in a clear and penetrating voice said, ‘You dirty old man.’ Mr Holly was vastly amused by this and went round for the rest of the day chuckling to himself.
There are, of course, numerous stories about parrots, most of which are highly suspect. But there are two I know in which it seemed that the parrot was doing more than just repeating sounds it had learned. The first concerned a parrot that was owned by some friends of mine who lived in Greece. This parrot was taken out every day and put in his cage in the shade of the trees. One day a peasant had tied up his donkey on the other side of the hedge and presently, as donkeys will, it threw up its head and gave its lugubrious bray which went on and on, ending in the great snort that donkeys give when they have performed their solos. The parrot had listened to all this with great care, its head on one side, and as soon as the donkey had finished braying it said, quite clearly and in terms of interrogation, ‘What’s the matter, darling?’
The other parrot story is of the African Grey Parrot that was the pet of some friends of mine in Athens. He had quite a large vocabulary – in Greek, of course – and his owners were very proud of him. This was in the days when they used to have ‘At Homes’, that is to say once a week all your friends knew that they could drop in for tea; it was round about the early nineteen hundreds. One day they were having one of their ‘At Homes’ and the topic of conversation was the parrot and his vocabulary. There was one member of the party who insisted that parrots couldn’t talk at all. They merely made unintelligible sounds, he said, and their proud owners immediately exclaimed, ‘Listen to what the parrot said. It said so and so.’ Holding his tea in one hand and his slice of cake in the other, he walked up to the parrot’s perch, looked at the bird, and said, ‘You can’t talk, Polly, can you?’ The parrot regarded him for a moment, and then, in that curious chameleon-like way they have, walked down the perch until it reached him, put its head on one side, and said, in clear and unmistakable tones, ‘Kiss my behind.’ The effect upon the party was one of stunned shock. The parrot had never used the phrase before and, indeed, never used it again, but it had said it as clear as a bell and there was no getting round it. But the amusing effect was upon the man, who put down his tea and his cake, took his hat and his stick and, white with rage, left the party, saying he wasn’t going to stay in a house where guests were insulted.
It is during the winter that the birds usually cause us more concern than all the other animals put together, especially the ones that live in paddocks or aviaries, for these have to be watched carefully to make sure that they don’t either suffer from the cold or, what is worse, get frostbite. Bad frostbite on, say a flamingo or something like that, can result in one having to amputate several of its toes. The worst winter that we ever had was that of 1962/63. It was unprecedented in Jersey’s history. There was about two feet of snow on the ground, and the ground itself was frozen to a depth of about two feet. As well as all our own birds we had to worry about, we got a constant stream of wild birds being brought in, that were exhausted through lack of food. There were starlings, robins, thrushes, blackbirds, in an unending stream. We did the only thing possible which was to close the bird house completely to the public – not that there was any public in weather like that – and simply release there all the wild birds that were brought to us. At least it had warmth, and we would place great piles of food on the floor. At one time we had as many as forty coot and twenty-five moorhens, a bittern and two swans, as well as all the smaller fry, all loose at the same time in this small area. It was during this very cold winter that there came, one day, a knock at the front door. When I went to it, there standing on the doorstep was an extraordinary beatnik-like character. He had long sideburns, he obviously hadn’t shaved for a considerable length of time, his hair was greasy and matted, he was wearing filthy, shabby clothes, and he looked as though he hadn’t washed for all of his nineteen years. He was holding, one under each arm, a pair of coot.
‘Ere, mate,’ he said to me. ‘Can you do anything for these poor little bleeders.’
To say I was astonished is putting it mildly. I took the birds, examined them and found that they had both been shot, but no more than winged, a mere flesh wound which would soon heal. However, they were very weak and thin. I looked at the beatnik accusingly.
‘Have you been out shooting?’ I inquired.
‘Naw,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t me. It was some bloody Frenchman. I saw ’im bag these two, and I saw the poor little bleeders weren’t dead, so I went and got ’im. Then I took ’is gun away from ’im, and I gave ’im what for. I don’t think ’ee’ll be ’unting again in an ’urry.’
‘Well, we’ll certainly do what we can for them,’ I said. ‘It was kind of you to bring them to us. We’ve got forty of them already.’
‘Oh, that’s yer problem, mate,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Anyway, ta very much.’
And he stumped off through the snow. I thought, as I watched him walk away, how wrong it was to judge people by their appearance. If he’d been in an identity parade he’d have been the last one that I’d have picked out as having a heart of gold beating under that grubby exterior.
Another disaster that nearly overtook us was when the oil tanker, the Torrey Canyon, went down, causing such an uproar in the papers and drawing the public’s attention to the great dangers of oil pollution, particularly to sea birds. Day by day we anxiously followed the news of the gigantic oil slick. Presently, to our horror, the tide and wind started to turn it towards the Channel Islands. Soon it was heading straight for us. Now I knew that if it did hit us it would not only probably put an end to the gannet and puffin colonies on the Channel Islands, but also that we would have to be prepared to try and cope with hundreds, if not thousands, of oiled sea birds. With all the goodwill in the world we simply had not got spac
e in the zoo to cope with more than about forty or fifty. Something had to be done, and done quickly, so I phoned up Animal Shelter, which is the local equivalent of the RSPCA, and told them what I thought was going to happen. They said they could cope with about forty or fifty birds themselves. Obviously this wasn’t going to be enough to deal with the holocaust I visualised, so I phoned up Saranne Calthorpe and asked her if she would come round and see me and form some sort of a plan of campaign. This she did, and in a very short time she had, like a brilliant general, organised the whole of the island.
A large map of the island was put in the office and different coloured pins were stuck in at different points. Some indicated where search parties would go out regularly along the beaches and coves, others indicated the picking-up areas of the birds, and other coloured pins showed areas where we could keep the birds. Everybody rallied round with enormous enthusiasm. The Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides and the Sea Scouts all acted as patrols, as did a number of private people who had the time to do it. Several people with vans or cars acted as bird transport officers, and we found numerous sheds and barns where birds could be kept. In one instance we found a hotel and the managing director very kindly gave us the loan of their swimming pool which, when surrounded with wire netting, could cope with anything up to a couple of hundred birds. Then we waited grimly for the oil slick to reach us. But, by some quirk of fate, the winds and currents changed, and although the tail end of the slick just flicked one or two of the Channel Islands and did a certain amount of damage, the main bulk of it slid past us and headed for the French coast. We had, I think, only about half a dozen oiled birds to treat, so all our preparations had been in vain, but at least we felt that we would have been ready for the emergency if it had arisen. When the slick eventually hit the French coast, the French were, it seemed, completely unprepared and thousands of sea birds died in consequence.
One fine spring day I was feeling in a particularly benevolent mood, and so I set forth in search of Shep. Whenever you couldn’t track Shep down by the intercom system that we have all over the zoo, you knew perfectly well where to find him; he’d be in what was called Shep’s field. It is a large water meadow down by the swannery; a field sloping due south and shaped somewhat like a billhook with a stream running along the sharp edge. This stream Shep had dammed up into a series of small ponds and it was here that he did all the breeding of his birds. In the ponds he bred his ducks and geese, and on the high grounds his pheasants. Now of all the birds, pheasants are Shep’s chief love, and this particular year he had done extraordinarily well. I went down to the field in the spring sunshine. There was the usual cacophony of sound: the cackling of the geese, the quacking of the ducks, the thin cheep-cheep-cheeping of the baby pheasants in their pens, their foster mothers, bantams or chickens according to the size of the babies, clucking proudly round them. I found Shep whistling cheerfully to himself, his Alsatian and his miniature schnauzer close at his heels, peering into a cage containing a number of little balls of fluff that were running to and fro and in and out of a bantam’s legs as she clucked to herself and pecked at the ground.
‘Morning,’ I shouted as soon as I was within hailing distance, and Shep looked round.
‘Morning, Mr D,’ he said, ‘Come and look at these.’
I went and peered at the animated balls of fluff as they scuttled about their foster mother.
‘What are they?’ I inquired, for most baby pheasants look very similar at a casual glance, and I usually had difficulty in telling one species from another.
‘They’re the Elliot’s,’ said Shep proudly. ‘They hatched out last night. I was just letting them dry out and then I was coming up to tell you.’
‘Marvellous!’ I enthused, for Elliot’s Pheasants are one of the species that are on the danger list, and might well be extinct in the wild state.
‘Eight hatched successfully out of eight eggs,’ said Shep. ‘I never expected that proportion.’
‘They look all right to me.’
‘Well, there’s one that looks a little bit wobbly, but I think he’ll be all right,’ said Shep.
‘I came down to give you a piece of news,’ I began. ‘I’ve decided that as you’ve done so well this year, I’ll buy you any pair of pheasants that you like, that come on the market, and are of interest to you. I don’t mean the zoo or the Trust will buy them. I will buy them personally, as a mark of my esteem for your noble efforts.’
‘Gosh, really?’ said Shep. ‘Thanks very much, Mr D.’ Little did I know, when I made this rash statement, what I was letting myself in for.
Every morning, when the mail is sorted, there are the inevitable lists from dealers in different parts of the world, telling us what creatures they have got for sale. These are piled on my desk and I skim through them, keeping a careful eye out for anything that is particularly rare and of value to the Trust. On this particular morning I skimmed through the lists but didn’t happen to notice what was on one of them. All the lists were returned to the main office, where the staff, in turn, would look at them. Presently there came a knock on the door and when I shouted, ‘Come in,’ Shep’s face poked round the corner.
‘Can I see you a moment, Mr D?’ he said. He looked white and strained, not at all his normal cheerful self. ‘Come in,’ I said. ‘What’s the problem?’
He came in, carrying a dealer’s list in one hand, and closed the door.
‘Did you see this list?’ he asked in hushed tones. ‘Which one is it?’
‘Jabira.’
‘Yes, I saw it,’ I said. ‘Well . . . why? What’s on it?’
‘Didn’t you notice?’ he said. ‘White-eared pheasants.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure,’ said Shep. ‘Look . . . Here.’
He put it on my desk and pointed. There, sure enough: ‘Expected shortly, White-eared pheasants’. No price was given. This was an ominous sign as it usually meant that the animal in question was expensive. In the case of the White-eared pheasants I knew very well that they would be. Firstly, they are one of the largest and most spectacular of the eared pheasants. Secondly, they are probably extinct in the wild state. And, thirdly, as far as one knew, there were only seven birds in captivity anywhere in the world, and most of those were in America. I sighed. I knew perfectly well that they were birds that the Trust should have, and I also remembered my promise of the previous day to Shep.
‘Well,’ I said, resignedly, ‘you’d better phone them up straight away, because the other zoos will be on to them like weasels on to a rabbit. But, you understand they’ve got to be a reasonable price, Shep. I can’t go paying the earth for them.’
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I realise that.’
He got on the telephone and presently was through to Holland.
‘Mr van den Brink?’ he said, and his voice cracked with emotion. ‘I phoned up about the White-eared pheasants on your list.’
There was a long silence while he listened to what van den Brink had to say.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘I see.’
He turned imploring eyes on me and put his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone.
‘He hasn’t got them yet, but they’re on the way. And he wants two hundred and fifty pounds each for them.’ I groaned inwardly, but a promise is a promise.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Tell him we’ll have a pair.’
‘Mr van den Brink,’ said Shep, his voice shaking, ‘we’ll have a pair. Will you reserve a pair for us, please? Yes, that’s right, Jersey Zoological Park . . . And you’ll let us know? You’ll give us some warning before they come, won’t you? . . . I see; they’ll be coming via Paris . . . That suits us very well. Thank you very much indeed. Goodbye.’
He replaced the receiver and started pacing up and down the office, looking extremely harassed.
‘Well, what on earth’s the m
atter with you now?’ I said. ‘I told you can have a pair of them. What are you looking so glum about?’
‘Well . . . Well, I think it’s unsafe just to have one pair,’ Shep blurted out.
‘Now, look, dear boy,’ I said. ‘That’s five hundred quid I’ve just spent on a pair of pheasants for you. I really can’t afford to buy another pair.’
‘No, no! I didn’t mean you ,’ said Shep. ‘I meant me . Would you let me buy another pair? It would be far safer if we had two cocks and two hens.’
‘But Shep,’ I protested, ‘it’s five hundred quid! Have you got that amount of money?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Shep, impatiently, ‘I’ve . . . I’ve got the money. It’s . . . it’s, will you let me buy them?’
‘Of course I’ll let you buy them, if you want to spend your money on them,’ I said. ‘But it’s a lot of money.’
‘It’s a lot of risk if we only have one pair, and lose the cock or the hen,’ said Shep. ‘So I can do it?’
‘Of course you can, but you’d better phone up right away.’
So within minutes he was back on the telephone.
‘Mr van den Brink? About those White-eared pheasants of yours . . . We’ve decided we’ll have two pairs instead of one . . . Yes, two pairs . . . Thank you very much indeed. Goodbye.’
Shep put back the telephone and looked at me with exultation on his face.
‘Now, with two pairs, we should be able to do something,’ he said.
But the buying of the birds was only the start, for now two aviaries had to be built for them on clean ground – that is to say ground upon which no other bird had been kept so that there could be no risk of infection being left in the soil. This was done, and we waited impatiently for the arrival of the White-eareds. Weeks and weeks passed, and periodically we would phone Mr van den Brink who was very apologetic but said that as the birds had to come from Peking, through Moscow to East Germany, and then, from there, to Paris and thence to us, it was quite a complicated procedure. He would get them to us as fast as he could. Then the great day dawned when he phoned us and said that the birds had arrived in East Berlin and would be dispatched the following day. Shep was remarkably agitated that day and couldn’t concentrate on any conversation that anybody had with him. He was waiting, with the utmost desperation, to see what condition the White-eareds were in when they arrived. At last, they came from the airport. We stripped the sacking from the front of the cage and saw our two pairs of White-eared pheasants: beautiful, big, white birds, with long fountain-like tails of white feathers, scarlet cheeks and black top-knots. They were incredibly handsome and we gloated over them. Then we carried the cage carefully down to the two aviaries that had been prepared for them, and released a pair in each aviary.