What a difference the sun makes. I have a theory that adisproportionate number of expatriates who leave thiscountry to seek a place in the sun have seasonal affectivedisorder (SAD) to some degree. I’m sure I’m on thecontinuum somewhere, as I crave the onset of spring fromthe first moment the leaves turn brown in autumn. When thesun finally did start coming out, in late April and May,everything looked a hundred times better. The liberalsprinkling of snowdrops gave way to a host of daffodils,and the optimism in the air was palpable, and no longeronly coming from me.
The workshop was churning out newly welded metalenclosure posts, big machines were laying new pathwaysbefore our eyes, and the restaurant was a teeming hive ofactivity. Spring was definitely in the air, and with it came theneed for some reversible vasectomies, as we didn’t yethave the paperwork or facilities for many of our animals tobreed. First in line was Zak, the elderly alpha wolf, whoseproblem actually looked more serious. One testicle hadswollen to the size of an avocado, and though this canhappen to wolves for short periods, Zak’s had beenengorged for several weeks and the vet thought he neededto be opened up. The vet room was still a work in progress,so the shop beside the restaurant was sterilized and sometables pushed together. On the allocated day, Zak wasdarted and went down easily. Though the van was inposition, the vet and Steve decided it was just as easy tocarry him the hundred yards or so to the mocked upoperating theater. In truth, if Zak had managed to get upand do a Tammy, no one would have been very scared. Atnineteen years old, even on his best day you could probablywalk faster than he could run, and he maintained his grip onthe pack now, not with brute force, but through sheercharisma and experience.
They arrived slightly breathless, and Zak was placed onhis back, cradled by two large plastic blocks with asemicircle cut out of them, a bit like a headsman’s block,specifically designed for keeping animals with ridgedspines steady on their backs. The blocks were well worn,and this procedure was fairly routine, though I asked howmany actual wolves the vet had done. “Oh, quite a few bynow. Don’t worry. No different from an Alsatian.” Likeanyone being prepared for an operation, Zak lookedpainfully exposed and vulnerable, and as he was shavedand washed in the relevant areas, waves of empathy fromthe men watching went out to him. The women presentfound our discomfort hugely amusing.
Once he was opened up, the avocado-size testicle wasinstantly declared cancerous, and its black and purplestriations clearly indicated the presence of this malignnemesis of so many animals and people. Luckily, evenwhen advanced, dogs and wolves hardly ever getsecondary cancers from the testicular region—unlikehumans. But the sound of a vas deferens, the small strandof connecting tissue between the testicle and the bodycavity, being cut, is not a pleasant one. There is muchcrunching of gristle, and much wincing and crossing of legsin the audience. His other testicle, pinkish white and normalsize—more like a big conker in the shape of a kidney bean—was also declared a potential health hazard, since itcould have been contaminated by its neighbor, and thesecond set of crunching and cutting was far worse, as itwas into healthy tissue. When the second ostensibly healthytesticle clanged into the metal dish, it was a poignantmoment, and every man present felt something, thoughexactly what, it was hard to pin down. Mainly, probably,never to let the medical profession anywhere near yourgonads. Though we had saved Zak so that he could live tolead the pack another day, it could hardly be described asa good day for him. But he made a full recovery, andworries that his empty scrotum might impinge on hisleadership abilities were unfounded, as Zak went on toprovide his pack, and his successor in waiting, the slightlypathetic Parker, with guidance and leadership for severalmore months.
Next in line was Solomon, king of the beasts, the hugelyimpressive male African lion. This really was a routinereversible vasectomy, as one day we will probably try tobreed from him, but at the moment the production of a lioncub would have been seen by the zoo world asirresponsible. Although slightly smaller than Vlad, Solomonis arguably the most impressive cat we have. At around230 kilos, or more than five hundred pounds, he, his mane,and his roar are truly epic. Tigers don’t roar, but thisawesome sound is high in Solomon’s arsenal of weaponsof terror. I feel it is worth reiterating that, in nature, you don’tgenerally get to hear this sound from so close and live. AsSolomon blasted Steve with his Death Roar from theconfines of his house, his lips curled back revealing daggerteeth, presenting highly alarming visual as well as auditorystimuli, I watched Steve brace himself and resist thetemptation to back to the far wall of the narrow corridor.
Steve bided his time and soon got the dart in Solomon’sflank. When I next visited the scene, Solomon was out cold,the door was open, and the vet was stitching up the lion’sback end, utterly undaunted by the sheer scale of hispatient. I was not undaunted, however. Solomon’s flankswere absolutely huge, and the gory procedure going on inhis most intimate region would surely be a source ofdispleasure should he wake up. John was there on firearmsduty, but otherwise there was an open door between himand the park. When Kelly, positioned at the head endinside the enclosure (the other lions were locked away intheir parts of the house), started to report that he wasblinking—i.e., that the anaesthetic was beginning to wearoff—I looked for signs of panic, or at least increased workrate from the vet. After all, doing what he was doing, he’dprobably be number one on Solomon’s hit list should hecome around. But the vet remained unperturbed, andcontinued his methodical stitching as if he were operatingon a house cat in the comfort of his practice. A few minuteslater, it was done, and the vet and others stepped in withSolomon to microchip him and move him clear of the door.
This was also performed with nonchalance, though perhapsnow just a hint of urgency. Then, mission accomplished,everyone stepped clear, the door was closed, and normalsecurity levels were resumed. And Solomon bounced backfrom his ordeal to happily fire off his blanks, in accordancewith our license requirements.
The final vasectomy, which I didn’t witness and was alittle uncomfortable about, was Vlad’s—again, carried outin his house, decreed from on high in case he impregnatedhis two sisters, the absurdly named Blotch and Stripe.
These three tigers were bred illegally and hand-reared,despite an obvious genetic defect in the line andoverrepresentation of this strain of Siberian tigers in thegene pool. This was one of the reasons Ellis, the previousowner, had run afoul of the authorities, and all three tigerswere classified as “Display Only,” and not to be bred from.
This I didn’t mind, but what bothered me was that tigers areparticularly susceptible to dying under anaesthetic. Vlad’sbrother, Ivan, had died during a routine procedure someyears before, and Tasmin’s heart had stopped somemonths before, while she was being investigated for anongoing kidney problem. In that instance, only Duncan’sfast response in alerting the vet, who was walking back tohis car at the time, saved her, and she was quickly giventhe antidote to bring her round. As Vlad’s amorous effortswith his sister had so far, in seven years, resulted in noillegal offspring, I was reluctant to have him tampered withat the possible risk of his life. I liked Vlad a lot—he is anice, friendly boy—and the machinery of state intervention,coupled with a mild snobbery about his lack of strictzoological value, I felt, was exposing him to unnecessaryrisks. But by now I was a bit battle weary, and with my standon the wolves and monkeys and various other issues, itwas probably a good time to let a few slide past. Theoperation was a success, and Vlad returned to duty thenext day.
The money was ebbing, but at last we had an inspectiondate, set for 4 June, which gave us an all-or-nothingdeadline to work toward. Everybody pitched in,occasionally getting a little high on resources, sending outfor new tools or equipment with relative abandon. The corestaff we had inherited were brilliant improvisers—they hadhad to be for many years as the fortunes of the parkdeclined. Instead of buying new metal bars, for instance, Iencouraged salvaging existing ones that were liberallyscattered around. There was an estimated acre of scrapbehind the restaurant, for instance, containing old cars,even lorries and the long-forgotten husk of an old dumpertruck, as well as perhaps twenty fridges, innumerable tiresand wheels, bits of wood, and a thousand other things“stored” for future use at some indefinite time in the future,which never came. We did a deal with a local scrapmerchant, who arrived with a large flatbed truck with agrabber on it and a mini digger (which he kindly lent to uswhen he wasn’t using it). The deal was that he could haveeverything, except the choicest bits of metal that we couldrecycle, in exchange for clearing the site. “No problem,” hesaid, delighted. “It’ll take about five days.” Nine weeks later,he was still loading up his lorry every day with more metalobjects dragged from the ground. Although 95 percent waspure, unadulterated rubbish, in the meantime we hadsalvaged all kinds of useful things, including double-glazedpanels of glass miraculously unbroken, some perfectlyuseable fence posts, and enough scrap angle iron tofabricate a small enclosure. The first object fabricatedentirely from the salvaged scrap was a trailer for thekeepers’ new quad bikes that John made in less than aweek, using wheels from an old sit-on mower. That trailer isstill in service today.
The quad bikes, however, are not. Or rather, one of themis, just. Duncan’s idea to buy cheap quad bikes as amorale booster for the staff backfired at first, when thewrong people ended up using them for the wrong reasons.
Instead of Hannah and Kelly’s workload being lightened,they still seemed to be pushing heavy barrows of meat orbedding up steep paths, while junior maintenance staff andcasual employees thrashed around the park on the bikesdoing minor errands. The quad bikes deteriorated rapidly,and spent more and more time being fixed or waiting forparts. This caused a lot of bad will, and several meetingswere held where strict protocols were implemented for theuse of the quads. The person who was least happy about itwas probably Rob, head keeper and long-sufferinggrandson of Ellis. “What’s wrong with walking?” he’d ask.
“It’s part of what working in a place like this is all about.”
Though well-intentioned, the purchase of the quad bikestaught us a lesson about tampering with the ecosystem wehad inherited.
My own gift to the keepers was on a smaller scale, andcaused less controversy. Ten headlamps, distributedthroughout the staff, had made working in the dark winterevenings, in the absence of exterior lighting (and evenlights inside some of the big cat houses) safer and morebearable. “I haven’t heard a word said against them,” saidRob. Though by spring, every one of them had been lost orbroken. On a lighter note, in the lighter evenings we didn’tneed them.
The peacocks were another welcome part of that spring,pouting and preening their quite unbelievably over-the-topplumage for all they were worth. Peacocks seem to havebeen designed by a flamboyant madman, probably ofIndian extraction given the fine detailing, though with morethan a nod toward the tastes of Liberace. Even in reposethey are stunning, their impossibly blue heads and neckssuddenly giving way to equally unlikely green and goldfeathers laid like scales from halfway down their backs.
These in turn abruptly change into their famous long tailfeathers, many of them around a meter, easily three timesas long as the males’ bodies. As if this is not enough, as anafterthought their heads are embellished with more bluetippedfeathers on narrow stalks, which blossom out in ananimal parody of a Roman centurion’s helmet. And why thehell not? you think. They’ve gone this far. It seems the onlylimit to their opulence is the almost boundless confines ofthe imagination of their Indian Liberace designer.
In the sunshine, watching these extravagant birds, I found,was uniquely cheering. Their sheer physical beauty wasuplifting, a symbol that, even striding around with a mobilephone stuck to my ear, I was somewhere unusual,worthwhile, and with a hint of the exotic. And they werehighly amusing, too. These pea brains would launch theirshimmering fan at anything that moved, and quite a fewthings that didn’t. The older males, with their magnificenttails, shimmered in the sunlight, flashing their wares at theducks, cockerels, and moorhens, who studiously ignoredthem or walked away embarrassed. But they also targetedpicnic benches, footballs, plant pots, and even the cats(which upset these still slightly nervous felines no end). Onlyoccasionally, it seemed, did they actually display theirwares to the correct subject, a peahen, who is supposed tobe so impressed with this array that nothing less will do. Butthey didn’t seem impressed either, and often wandered offleaving some hapless male shimmering away at nothing,abandoned as if halfway through a promising first date. Inthe whole mating season I think I witnessed only onesuccessful copulation, and there was certainly only onepregnant female by the end of it.
I also loved the peacocks because of their place inevolution, or rather in the explanation of it. As an occasionalwriter on evolutionary psychology, particularly regardingmale behavior, I often used the peacock’s tail as shorthandfor some elaborate and expensive male display designedto attract females. There are strong arguments in favor ofthe idea that the entire human cortex—metabolically themost expensive organ we possess— evolved with mateattraction in mind. Similarly, humor, hunting, risk taking, andred Porsche 911s can all be shorthanded as peacock’stail–type phenomena. You look for other examples, oftentoward the birds of paradise, but their elaborate displaysand one-off shock-tactic plumage, though certainlyridiculous, have nothing on the sheer extravagance of theencumbrance the peacock has landed himself with. Thepoint of the tail is that it is very expensive to produce andmaintain—like the Porsche, or cortex—and having one is adefinite drain on resources. A human neocortex requires 40percent of our calories, and a Porsche costs a lot to buy,and, subject to legal action pending at the time of writing,may become almost as costly to drive in central London,where most of them surely live. But the peacock’s tail reallyhampers him, drawing massive attention from predatorsand making evasion much more difficult. The weightimpedes take-off, and you rarely see them attempt morethan a wing-assisted hop when in full plumage. This pointwas illustrated graphically a few years previously, when,according to Robin, the bears were moved into their newenclosure in woodland frequented by peacocks. “Yes, ittook them a while to get used to the change,” said Robinmildly. “The bears ate mainly peacocks in the first week.”
Having landed, the birds were startled by and then poorlyequipped to evade the three fast-moving, voraciouspredators, and this lesson in natural selection is fascinatingto me. Watching them parade this incredibly expensivedisplay so poorly, and at such inappropriate objects, whilechildren play football around them, I have to think that,having gone to all that trouble, squandering the display on acamera bag or a tree stump seems marvelous in itsprofligacy. It really does say to me, to borrow Dawkins’
phrase from his famous book on Darwinian theory, that theWatchmaker was blind. Just an extra gram of neural tissue,you would think, would be a better investment, but not whenthe market, evolved through rigorous sexual selection, is inexpensive tails. I had a soft spot for the peacocks. So I wasdisturbed to learn that Owen, our star bird keeper, hadtaken it upon himself to cull four of them, citingovercrowding. I suspected there was more to it than this,because Owen, like Sarah, had told me that he didn’t seethe zoo as a place where non-exotic animals, or morespecifically, “animals of no zoological significance,” shouldbe kept. Most of the hundred or so birds in the walk-inenclosure—mainly chickens, geese, and ducks—hadgradually disappeared—culled apparently by somesystemic parasitic infection that was too advanced to treatand that was a health risk to the more zoologicallysignificant rare birds we had and planned to acquire in thefuture. But several neighbors and farmers were contactedand invited to take the birds, subject to their own healthcheck, and many were saved, going on to produce manyeggs for many other people. Adam in particularoccasionally taunted me that he enjoyed a particularly fineduck egg for breakfast. This culling, deemed necessary,particularly upset Mum, who had enjoyed being followedaround by this raggedy brood while feeding them, anexperience, standing in her own park, which seemed adaily reminder of the remarkable distance she had traveledin her life since childhood. It upset me too, and indicated alevel of disagreement with the new keeper-staff, which wasto culminate in a fiery meeting about the direction of thepark a few weeks down the line. More of that later.
In the meantime, I went along with this and other, to me,quite radical measures, simply because there wasn’t timeto contest everything, and nor was it wise to challenge theorthodoxy on everything I felt uncertain about. Zookeepersare a little bit like paramilitaries. They wear big boots andcombat trousers, they communicate with walkie-talkies, andthey do a dangerous job that sometimes involves firearms.
To come up through their ranks requires a lot of disciplineand dedication, as well as conformity to the establishedorthodoxy. I couldn’t do it. Arguably, I have a modicum ofself-discipline (though I can imagine my dad snorting withderision at this assertion), but external discipline oftenseems to rankle with me. Duncan tried to be a zookeeperonce, for about six months in the reptile house at LondonZoo, and it wasn’t for him either. “I remember my first day,”
says Duncan. “The man in charge of me held up a broom,told me what it was, and then showed me how to use it, byputting the head on the floor and then pushing it out in frontof you repeatedly. It took a while for it to dawn on me that Iwas standing here being shown by a grown man how tosweep a floor.” Having been fully trained, he thought, inthese esoteric cleaning arts, after a few days he made aninnovation. “The head of the broom kept falling off, so Ipopped a nail into it and trebled the efficiency. But thebloke was livid. ‘Who told you to do that?’ he yelled, andwith good reason, it turned out.” Apparently the head wasleft loose because it was sometimes necessary to go inwith the alligators to clean around these slow-movingthrowbacks, and the broom was the keeper’s maindefense. “The idea is that if an alligator ever made a movefor you, you offered it the broom and it would bite the headoff and retreat, thinking it had got something. And then atleast you still had the handle, instead of it being yanked outof your hand and thrashing about the place.” So there wasmethod in this apparent madness (though this arguablymost important part of the training had been lacking), butsome of what Duncan encountered just seemed like plainmadness.
“The Galapagos tortoises had beak rot and weren’tbreeding, so I decided to use my lunch hours to look into it,”
he says. London Zoo is home to one of the mostcomprehensive zoological libraries in the world, but as atrainee keeper in the early 1980s, Duncan wasn’t allowedaccess to it. “They made it really hard, and it was as if theygenuinely didn’t understand what I wanted to do in there.”
Eventually Duncan got in, and found that the only zoo tosuccessfully breed these huge, long-lived reptiles—one atLondon at the time was thought to have been brought backby Charles Darwin—was San Diego. Reading their papersand contacting their staff, he learned that the beak rot wascaused by eating bananas, which stick to the lower part ofthe jaw. In the wild, such matter is brushed off by the longgrass through which the tortoises walk, but in London theyweren’t, so the beak rots. Duncan took his findings to thesenior keeper in charge of the reptiles, expecting to beable to implement the necessary changes, and possiblyeven be thanked for his efforts. In fact, the old man said,“I’ve been doing this job for twenty years. Who are you totell me how to do my job?
Fuck off.” Science, they say, advances funeral by funeral.
Duncan isn’t the type to wait around, so he left to becomehis own boss, importing marine fish from the tropics.
Now we both found ourselves running a zoo—or trying to—and while we knew we had to listen to and closely followwhat we were told by our advisors, from keepers to curatorto council, we also knew that there would be times when wewould be able to innovate. Business managers know thatoften the best innovators are not insiders. Our trouble wasthat we weren’t really business managers either. But atleast we were outsiders.
We also knew that, for now, we all had to work together,and to use the Environmental Health officer PeterWearden’s phrase, “ticking the right boxes,” was whatcounted most in the run-up to the inspection. Sometimesthose boxes could be ticked, after a struggle, via a differentchain of events from those prescribed or recommended,like with the wolf dispute, or the monkeys, but this alwaystook time, and invariably, during the hiatus beforeresolution, our fragile credibility would be eroded. Until thebox was actually ticked, when it became an invisible issue,and everything moved toward the next box. Time we did nothave, and we had to get as many boxes ticked as possiblebefore our inspection, now set firmly for 4 June. We had toenter into a box-ticking frenzy, otherwise the bankers andthe lawyers would gleefully produce their own clipboards,offering much less room to maneuver, and with much lessfriendly boxes.
There was an exhilarating sense of teamwork—a trulyflexible, skilled, and dedicated team working together toachieve a common aim. On paper, this was our business,and everyone was an employee contriving, in the long run,to produce profits for us. In actuality, I don’t think anyonethought like this—least of all us. Day in, day out, it felt likewe were all battling to save a beleaguered public resource,and most important, a collection of beleaguered animals,safe for the future. And if we failed, the consequences wereunthinkable. Tourette Tony did an excellent job, swearinghis way through countless setbacks, dancing his diggerthrough ridiculously skillful and efficient maneuvers, andworking himself and his team as hard as was humanlypossible. Anna and Steve were absolutely invaluable, Annahandling the complicated paperwork, feeding back to usexactly which boxes we needed to tick, and exactly how,while Steve deployed himself as laborer, keeper,supervisor, roller driver—whatever he needed to be.
Hannah, Kelly, Paul, John, and Rob alternated betweenkeeping and maintenance tasks, and a crew of temporarylaborers got stuck with unpleasant tasks like dredging slimymoats, sweeping acres of wet leaves, and tensioninghundreds of meters of new fence mesh, which bites into thehands, made more painful by the chilly breeze. Owen andSarah led their troop of junior keepers from the front,working incredibly hard, leading, training, and instillingappropriate modern practices, though a little harshly itseemed to me at times—Owen told me that to train anovice you had to “break them down and build them upagain, sometimes.” This didn’t chime with my preferred(though admittedly made-up-as-I-went-along) managementtechnique, but then I wasn’t from that culture. Inevitably, thison going process had its occasional rows and threatenedwalkouts, but the overall atmosphere was of everyoneknuckling down and doing whatever was necessary. It wasgoing as well as it could. And then came the rain.
After the exceptionally sunny and buoyant May, weentered the wettest June in the UK for a hundred years. TheSouthwest suffered just over twice the averageprecipitation since records began in 1914, but it felt like itrained every single day. The gnawing doubts of whether wecould accomplish the task in the allotted time returned.
Working in waterproofs, many tasks like fencing and barrierreplacements could still be achieved. But things likewelding outside, concreting, chain-saw work, and often,using the digger, were out of the question.
The peacocks, so recently a symbol of hope, now lookedbedraggled. One female sat on the grass verge outside thetoilets for several weeks, and when I asked the keepers ifshe was okay, it turned out that she was roosting someeggs. In the rain. Within a few yards of where she sat was aperfectly viable bush, which would at least have providedsome cover from the elements and, at least as important,foxes. But this dumb-assed bird—apparently the only oneto succumb to the male’s elaborate, evolutionarilyexpensive spring display—persisted in trying to rear herdelicate brood fully exposed to the elements and predators.
Eventually three eggs hatched, and she wisely moved herlittle ones around each night, but as they grew and sheroamed further afield—she and her little trio of actually quitepretty chicks, desperately trying to keep up with their mum—we gradually lost track of them, and I can’t honestly saywhether any of them survived or not.
Even in the rain there was much to do, both inside andout, and I threw myself into work. By now, less than threemonths after Katherine’s death, I could notice significantphysiological changes in my response. Mainly, I didn’t feelso leaden, as if the life had been sapped out of me with herpassing—though my Stella Artois diet, much reduced butstill a significant part of my routine to get to sleep afterputting the kids to bed, was expanding my waistline so that,in reality, my physical leadenness was actually increasing.
But the energy within was beginning to return. The manydaily triggers were becoming more recognizable and morebearable, I was much less likely to be wrong-footed bysomething unexpected, and the amount of crying I neededto do gradually reduced. I would occasionally beoverwhelmed by dipping into the enormity of what we hadlost. A couple of brief but necessary trips to London, everypart of which I seemed to have visited with Katherine,during this period were particularly horrible. But generally, Icould feel it was getting better. And the children seemed tobe thriving at the new school, and adapting with themalleable resilience of the very young.
Obviously they were still profoundly affected, and I madesure that I kept talking to them whenever they wanted me to.
Increasingly, though, they seemed to be protecting me—and themselves—from my grief, which must have beenalarming for them, but was impossible (and I thought,inadvisable) to hide in the early stages. They confidedoccasionally to friends and neighbors, and Amelia, whotrickled their concerns back to me. Once they both came upwith the idea of wearing one of Katherine’s jumpers in bed,and as I rummaged through her drawers of neatly foldedclothes, last visited during those all too memorable weeksof dressing and undressing her, I felt myself becomingincreasingly upset. Milo, watching closely, smiled andwagged his figure at me, saying good-naturedly, “Uh, uh,uuh, Daddy. Don’t turn on the tears.” It cheered me up noend and I promised him that I wouldn’t, and reassured himagain that whenever he wanted to talk about Mummy Iwouldn’t cry. Which is where we are now.
Outside in the park, the inspection date loomed, and therain often made it impossible to see farther than a fewyards. We persevered, and even a few weeks before theinspection, the mood on the ground was lifting; theconsensus seemed to be that we had “ticked enoughboxes” to show willingness. It is almost unheard of for a zoothat has had its license withdrawn to haul itself back fromthe abyss, but the feeling was that we were probably goingto do it—though we couldn’t afford to slack off for an instant.
Our short resumé looked good. We had the right people,the right intentions, and if not quite the right amount ofmoney, at least we were spending it in the right way. One ofthe most important parts of our license requirement was theconservation measures we were going to implement. Steveand Anna have good contacts with an endangered speciesprogram in Sri Lanka, and Owen and Sarah’s back catalogof successes was filtering through to us with promises ofbreeding programs for the future, which also scored uspoints. As did creatures like Ronnie, the officially“Vulnerable” tapir, and Sovereign, our prize stud-book jag.
But increasingly, local conservation measures are seen asat least equally important. Fortunately, we were in a goodposition to implement many. On the edge of Dartmoor,itself a thriving habitat of many species that are decliningnationally, we were perfectly placed to help endangeredanimals of the much less glamorous variety. Like dormice,horseshoe bats, vulnerable ground-nesting birds, newts,snails, and even certain mosses and lichens. One species Ialready knew a tiny bit about was a certain kind of fritillarybutterfly thought to have one of its last toeholds in thecountry in Dartmoor, which I happened to have writtenabout briefly for the Guardian. I called the ButterflyConservation Society (“Butterfly Conservay-shun, how canwe help you?” they cooed), who informed me that we couldwork to provide habitats on our land that could be suitablefor butterflies. We already had a couple of acres ofdedicated conservation woodland, but the requirements forspecific plants may have been detrimental to what wasalready there. They would welcome a donation. Er, maybeone day.
Another thwarted effort was the Dartmoor pony, down tofewer than nine hundred breeding mares (making it evenrarer than that conservation figurehead the giant panda),and subject of a concerted local campaign to protect themfrom ruthless landowners who sometimes shoot them orsell them for meat rather than pay the newly introduced ￡20fee for a horse passport, now required under Europeanlaw. The idea is to register animals that may pass into thehuman food chain so that any veterinary drugs they haveconsumed can be monitored. The reality is that a Dartmoorpony can be sold for as little as a pint of milk, and manyhard-pressed farmers simply can’t afford to comply with thepassport law. Charities are looking for landowners who canoffer paddocks to small herds of ponies, who areperiodically transported back to certain areas of the moorto graze and manage it as only these tough little indigenouscritters can. My sister Melissa researched and promotedthe scheme, having once kept a Dartmoor pony—Aphrodite—who had a stubborn but gentle temperament. Iremember Aphrodite fondly, nonchalantly standing outsidein the snow, with icicles clinking from her whiskers, trying toreassure a namby-pamby semi-Thoroughbred in its heatedstable, wearing a thick horse coat, who had caught a cold.
This local project sounded perfect, and I brought up plans todevote eight acres, which would support about eight totwelve small ponies, to this admirable aim. But I hit a brickwall: it didn’t tick any boxes. Dartmoor ponies may beendangered, but the actual species, Horse (Caballus), canonly be described as thriving. Dartmoor ponies wereartificially bred by humans a few centuries ago, probably towork in the local tin mines, and count as a breed, ratherthan an endangered species. It’s like trying to save theSiamese cat, or the Staffordshire bull terrier. Of interest tolocal breeders perhaps, but zoologically insignificant. Thisseemed to me a particularly irritating pill to swallow, butagain, time was not on our side, and we had to do whatwas necessary to get our license, rather than what wethought we might like.
One local scheme, which I did manage to include as acentral plank of our conservation strategy, was reinstatinghedgerows. There are an estimated couple of kilometers ofhedgerow bordering and crisscrossing our thirty acres,most of it depleted and sparse, providing little of the richhabitat for local wildlife it once did. Some hedgerows(though not, it has to be said, ours) are more than sevenhundred years old. Properly maintained, hedgerows aregiant elongated ecosystems in their own right, acting ascorridors for wildlife to pass along, and protecting manywildflowers, plants, insects, birds, and mammals thatexperience difficulties when out in the open. We also hadpockets of different kinds of hawthorn, which could betransplanted from other parts of the site, and this project,fortunately, was given an enthusiastic thumbs-up by theauthorities. It also ticked my own personal box for a longterm,slow intervention, a gradual enhancement of thebroader ecosystem of the park, unlikely to provide shocks,but very likely to provide long-term benefits and educationalopportunities—and security, as thick hedgerows are agood barrier against intruders, as well as certain errantexotic animals. And—AND—where we took out hawthorn, itfreed up space for other uses, like public viewing areas. Itwent into the plan, and we set about putting out feelers forthose wise in the ways of the hedgerow to train us up.
Fortunately, in this area of Devon, these old countrysidepractices still go on, and I looked forward to one day beingable to lose myself in the ancient art of coppicing for a fewhours a day before too long.
Meanwhile, over at the restaurant, the ringmaster Adamwas gradually drawing everything together, though it tookan experienced eye to discern through the chaos that somecoherence was emerging. The kitchen was still“shambolic,” as was the eating area and the shop—covered in sawdust and work tools—whi............