They grew at an astonishing rate and very soon had to be moved into a new cage. Here Jeremy had designed and had had constructed for them a special piece of furniture for their edification. It was like a long iron ladder slung from the ceiling. This gave them masses of handholds, and they enjoyed it thoroughly; they took so much exercise on this that their tummies soon reduced to a more normal size.
In character they were totally different. Oscar was a real toughy; he was a terrible coward, but never lost an opportunity for creating a bit of mischief if he could. He was definitely the more intelligent of the pair and showed his inventive genius on more than one occasion. In their cage is a recessed window; we had boarded over the window-ledge to form a platform on which they could sit, and leading up to it is an iron-runged ladder. Oscar decided (for some reason best known to himself) that it would be a good idea to remove all the boards from the window-sill. He tried standing on them and tugging, but his weight defeated his object. After considerable thought, he worked out a method of dislodging the planks which is one of the most intelligent things I have seen done by an ape. He found out that the top rung of the iron ladder lay some two inches below the overlap of the shelf. If he could slide something into this gap and press it downwards, it would act as a lever, using the top rung of the ladder as fulcrum; and what better tool for his purpose than his stainless-steel dish? By the time we had found out that we had a tool-using ape in our midst, Oscar had pried up six of the boards and was enjoying himself hugely.
It is unfortunate that, like many apes, Oscar and Bali have developed some rather revolting characteristics, one of which is the drinking of each other’s urine. It sounds frightful, but they are such enchanting animals and do it in such a way that you can only feel amused to see Oscar sitting up on his iron ladder, urinating copiously while Bali sits below with open mouth to receive the nectar, and then savours it with all the air of a connoisseur. She puts her head on one side, rolling the liquid round her mouth as if trying to make up her mind from which vineyard it came and in what year it was bottled. They also, unfortunately, enjoy eating their own excreta. As far as I know, these habits in apes apply only to specimens in captivity. In the wild state apes are on the move all the time and to a greater or lesser extent are arboreal, so that their urine and faeces drop to the forest floor below, and therefore they are not tempted to test their edibility. Once they start this habit in captivity, it is virtually impossible to break them of it. It does not appear to do them any harm, except, of course, that if they do happen to be infected with any internal parasites (of which you are endeavouring to cure them), they are constantly reinfecting themselves and each other by this means.
Other new arrivals of great importance from the point of view of conservation were a pair of tuataras from New Zealand. These astonishing reptiles at one time had a wide range but were exterminated on the mainland, and are now found only in a few scattered groups of small islands off the coast of New Zealand. They are rigidly protected by the New Zealand Government and only occasionally is the odd specimen exported for some zoo. On a brief visit I paid to that country, I explained to the authorities the work I was trying to do in Jersey and they—somewhat unwisely—asked me if there was any member of the New Zealand fauna which I would particularly like to have. Resisting the impulse to say ‘everything’ and thus appear greedy, I said that I was very interested in tuataras. The minister concerned said that he was sure they could see their way to letting me have one, to which I replied that I was not interested in having one, although this seemed like looking a gift-horse in the mouth. I explained that my idea was to build up breeding colonies, and it was difficult to say the least, to form a breeding colony with only one animal. Could I, perhaps, have a pair? After due deliberation, the authorities decided that they would let me have a true pair of tuataras. This was indeed a triumph, for as far as I know we are the only zoo in the world to have been allowed to have a true pair of these rare reptiles.
The climate of New Zealand is not unlike that of Jersey. Previously, when I had seen tuataras at various zoos they had always been incarcerated in reptile houses in cages, the temperature of which fluctuated between seventy-five and eighty degrees. At the time this had not occurred to me as being a bad thing, but when I went to New Zealand and saw the tuataras in their wild state, I realized that the mistake the majority of European zoos had been making was to keep the tuatara as though it were a tropical reptile; this accounted for the fact that very few of these creatures kept in Europe had lived for any great length of time. Having obtained permission to have a pair, I was quite determined that their cage must be the best possible, and that I would keep them at temperatures as near to the ones to which they were accustomed as we could manage. So when I was alerted by the Wildlife Department of New Zealand that the tuataras would be sent to me very shortly, we started work on their housing. This, in fact, resembles a rather superior greenhouse: it is twenty-one feet long and eleven feet wide, with a glass roof. This roof is divided into windows, so that we can keep a constant current of air flowing through the cage and thus make sure that the temperature does not rise too much. A large quantity of earth and rock-work was then arranged and planted out, so as to resemble as closely as possible the natural habitat of the reptiles. We sank one or two pipes into the earth to act as burrows, should the tuataras not feel disposed to make their own, and then we waited for their arrival excitedly.
At last the great day came, and we went down to the airport to collect them. They were carefully packed in a wooden box, the air holes of which did not allow me to see if they had survived the journey, and I remained in a state of frustration all the way back from the airport to the zoo. There I could lay my hand on a screwdriver and remove the lid of the box, to see how our new arrivals had fared. As we removed the last screw and I prepared myself to lift the lid off, I uttered a brief prayer. I lifted off the lid, and there, gazing at me benignly from the depths of the container, was a pair of the most perfect tuataras I had ever beheld. In shape they resemble lizards, though anatomically they are so different that they occupy a family all their own. They have, in fact, come down from prehistoric times virtually unchanged, so if anything in the world can be dignified with the term prehistoric monster, the tuatara can.
They have enormous, lustrous dark eyes and a rather pleasant expression. Along the back is a fringe of triangular spines, white and soft, rather like the frill on a Christmas cake. This is more accentuated on the male than on the female. A similar row of spines decorates the tail, but these are hard and sharp, like the spikes on the tail of a crocodile. Their bodies are a sort of pale beige, mottled with sage green and pale yellow. They are, altogether, very handsome creatures with an extremely aristocratic mien.