A Day Trip

Recently I was lucky enough to be invited along on a day trip to Jersey Zoo.  We zoomed across the Channel on a big and rather rattley catamaran and after a short drive we were at the zoo.  The first thing I learnt was that it is not a zoo but The Durrell Wildlife Conservation.  There are no elephants lions or giraffes here, but rather a rare collection of endangered species, living and breeding happily in the grounds of a Jersey estate.

We saw dignified and elegant blue cranes, the hilarious bald ibis, gigantic fruit bats and colourful frogs less than 2 centimetres long.

In almost complete darkness we saw the shadowy shapes of aye-ayes which so enchanted Stephen Fry in his recent TV documentary.

The young macaque monkeys were a delight with their cartwheels and handstands while their parents were busy getting on with the next generation!

We saw the gorillas in their grassy sunken enclosure into which in 1986 a child fell and the elderly Jambo (the first male gorilla born in captivity) lumbered over to the little boy to guard and protect him from the younger, more boisterous gorillas. Pictures and film captured the whole story at the time.

But best of all were the critically endangered orangutans. They don’t swim so they live on two islands surrounded by a moat – maybe 4 metres wide. There are plenty of climbing frames, ropes and swings for them and though the orangutans are rather deliberate in their movements, we were richly entertained by the gibbons that share the islands.

Feeding time was great fun.  The food – chunks of cabbage, whole carrots apples and parsnips - are put in large paper bags like a picnic and hurled across the moat.  The gibbons get there first, then some female orangutans but they don’t touch the bags.  They settle down and politely wait.  Then in his own good time, along comes Dagu the adult male.  He is seriously ugly with huge black pads either side of his face and under his chin.  But to the females he is drop-dead gorgeous and gets first go at the picnic.

We had a wonderful day at the the Durrell, blessed with good weather and thank goodness, flat calm both ways between Weymouth and St Hellier.  But it was a long one – 22 hours from our dawn start to our arrival home in the small hours!  We were tired.
http://www.durrell.org/