Lee Durrell's history of Jersey Zoo
Lee Durrell's history of
Jersey Zoo
Gerald Durrell with zoo patron Princess Anne
This article by the widow of Jersey Zoo's founder Gerald Durrell was first published in the parish magazine Trinity Tatler in 2019
Since Gerald Durrell started Jersey Zoo 60 years ago, three generations have passed – human generations, that is!
For the endangered species that have been bred at the Zoo, numerous lifetimes have come and gone. But as everyone knows, our beloved zoo in Trinity is not only about breeding rare animals. It is also devoted to learning as much as possible about those animals, to training people in how to save them from extinction, and to raising awareness in all our visitors of the inherent value of all life forms on the planet.
Survival of species
This was the vision of Gerald Durrell, who judged the zoos of those days to be little more than menageries. He pledged to devote his own zoo to the survival of species and pioneered the role of zoos as significant conservation organisations in their own right.
In 1963 he set up a charitable trust, now Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, to run the zoo and ensure that it always followed conservation principles. I must come clean and remind you that I have not lived in Trinity for all of the 60 years since Gerry started the zoo!
Born in America and only ten years old when the zoo opened, I came to live in the parish when Gerry and I married in 1979. I had read Gerry’s books, of course, which amusingly describe many incidents from the very early days, such as the one involving Claudius, the tapir Gerry brought back from South America. One night Claudius escaped from his paddock and ran joyously through the fields of our neighbours, Lennard and Eileen du Feu,trampling all his cloches with Gerry and five young zoo keepers in hot pursuit.
Training centre
We eventually bought the du Feu’s lovely farmhouse, Les Noyers, to create the International Training Centre, now called Durrell Conservation Academy, which has ‘graduated’ thousands of conservationists from hundreds of countries where they now apply what they learned in Jersey.
In the early days the café was in the east wing of Les Augrès Manor, with chairs and tables arranged around the forecourt in the summer. Shep Mallet, who worked on the bird section and later became Curator of Birds, was often mistaken for Gerry as he walked through the forecourt, because of his blonde beard and hair.
He played along with the conversation about G’s books and travels, doing nothing to correct the hapless visitor.
Shep had the equivalent of animal ‘green fingers’, as Gerry used to say. In the 1960s he was responsible for the regular breeding of the white-eared pheasant, believed then to be a gravely threatened species, a real ‘coup’ forJersey Zoo, as these birds were known to be tricky to breed successfully.
VIP visitors
We welcomed many VIP visitors, even in those days. One unscheduled such visit involved Shep. When glamorous screen legend Katherine Hepburn was visiting Bill Rose, the Hollywood scriptwriter who lived behind the zoo,she would come into the zoo the back way, dressed in tattered gardening clothes, to help Shep on his rounds feeding the bird collection, includingthe white-eared pheasants.
Jimmy Stuart came to open the Nocturnal House, which featured the guinea-pig-like Jamaican hutias, one of the original endangered species we worked with, famously calling them the ‘hoot-ears’.
Some years later, their descendants were the first animals bred at JerseyZoo to be released back to the wild, representing one of the earliest efforts of such conservation initiatives by zoos. David Niven opened the ‘new’ gorilla complex in the early ‘70s (an adaptable building, which has since housed orangutans, Rodrigues fruit bats and red-billed choughs), soon followed by Princess Anne on her first visit toJersey.
She had wanted to see the special zoo that all the fuss was being made of and had been started by one of her favourite authors. Needless to say, she was bowled over by the warm Trinity welcome, the Zoo and the author, and agreed to become our patron.
Gorillas
Since then she has come to the parish many times, often greeted by schoolchildren lining the front drive of the zoo waving flags. With the arrival of the magnificent silverback gorilla, Jambo, in 1972,our gorillas started breeding – not exactly like rabbits, but very productively!
Inexperienced mothers, N’Pongo and Nandi, were uncertain as to how to care for infants, so the first babies were hand-reared. We had a veritable kindergarten of gorillas, who were often brought out to play on the lawn in front of the Manor by their human ‘parents’, the keepers.
Jambo became one of the most prolific gorillas in the zoo world, and the ‘Jambo line’ numbers nearly 200 descendants. When I moved to Jersey in the late ‘70s, I recall waking to the roaring of the Asiatic lions, whose enclosure was just behind the Manor.
I remember the vivid coloured macaws sitting in a tree near the entrance to the Zoo, and the gorgeous snow leopards, one of the most popular species ever, who took over the lion enclosure when the lions moved on.
1984 was an incredible year for the zoo and the trust, celebrating their 25th and 21st anniversaries, respectively. We held a ‘Festival ofAnimals’ at Fort Regent in the presence of our Royal Patron, with guests ranging from Johnny Morris to Yehudi Menuhin.
Returns to the wild
We formally opened what became Durrell Conservation Academy. But best of all, we returned to the wild two critically endangered bird species that had been bred for release – the Mauritius kestrel and the pink pigeon, bred at aviaries in Mauritius.
The recovery programmes for those species have been spectacularly successful. Sixty years on Jersey Zoo has matured and evolved into a globally recognised institution with a vital mission, of which we and the people of the parish and the Island are immensely proud.
Our staff today are second to none, and they carry forward Gerry’s legacy with as much passion and personal commitment as the staff from the ‘old days’.
