Somtimes species discovered just phoned it in.
Tag Archives: Durrell Wildlife Park – Jersey
Magpie
Sometimes they pose.
Ring-tailed Lemur (Lemur catta)
Vincent and Jules
Martinique anole (Anolis roquet summus)
One of the biggest arguments against intelligent design is that opaque lizards can climb glass, but glass lizards can’t.
Water
The Isle of Jersey has a weird concept of rain. The raindrops don’t fall so much as gently drift in all directions, with minute drops sticking to everything around.
It’s like fog with intent.
Pied Tamarin (Saguinus bicolor)
This is an example of the marmoset roaming free. I was lucky that this little guy decided to come down from the trees and spend a good fifteen seconds posing on this fence for me.
Grey Crowned Crane (Balearica regulorum)
There is a scene in a much later book by a much older Gerald Durrell.
He wrote about what it was like to be old and tired. He was done with journeys. He had achieved his dream.
As he wrote, he sat in the manor house, looking over the land and thinking about all he had done in his life to save animals … first one creature at a time, now, managing entire species.
He wrote about how he had international foundations assisting his goals, young zookeepers helping out, and his friends and family all working on helping to keep things running smoothly.
He closed the book by describing his new home, surrounded by the living memories of a life well spent, and what it was like to finally rest and look out the window at the crowned cranes performing mating displays thousands of kilometers from their natural home, but still, living their lives.
I like to think that this is what he saw.
Durrell – Scorpion Box
Before I went to Ireland (like, immediately before) I took a side trip to the Isle of Jersey and visited the Durrell Wildlife Park. I had read about it in some of Gerald Durrell’s many excellent* books, and since I was going to be in Ireland anyway, I figured I’d go check it out. What makes this place special is that the balance between endangered species management, education, and entertainment is shifted much further to the endangered species side of things and considerably away from entertainment. Think of them as the anti-SeaWorld.
They have a considerable amount of land and they place their animals very sparsely, so they have tons of space in which to roam. There is a piece of wood in which marmosets are (somewhat) free to roam. I walked around it five times before I saw any, because they are extremely small monkeys in a very large space. The same goes for their lemurs though, lemurs being larger, they were easier to see.
They also pay attention to history. The history of this park is quite well documented in the twenty six autobiographical works. Being able to see the places that were described was fascinating, but perhaps the most interesting was the little two-room museum to Gerald Durrell’s life. This particular sculpture illustrates a memorable scene from My Family and Other Animals, in which Gerald Durrell, as a boy, puts a scorpion with babies in a matchbox for safe keeping. As often happens when one is young, this is forgotten and his brother goes to get a match for his cigarette. Hilarity ensues.
If you haven’t read the book, you probably should. The others are good, but none of them come close to the brilliance of My Family and Other Animals.
* This is not to imply that all of his books were excellent, just many of them.
Alaotran Gentle Lemur (Hapalemur alaotrensis)
This lemur suddenly realized that there is little more indicative of the systemic failure of the American mental health system than the fact that the only therapist that Charlie Brown can afford is the same person who constantly bullies him in football.