The Hunt for the Golden Mole Read Online Free Page B

or ‘critically endangered’, according to IUCN conservation criteria, but I can detect no effort to conserve them.
    I don’t do much better with the ‘peculiarities’ that so diverted Alfred Russel Wallace in southern Africa. Where the aardvarks ought to be, I see only meerkats. There are no hyenas, aardwolves or elephant shrews, though for compensation there is a magnificent okapi – a species known to Wallace only in the last few years of his life.
    London Zoo now would astonish its nineteenth-century superintendent Abraham Dee Bartlett. Few of the original buildings survive, and many of the stars of the early collection – bears, elephants, hippos, rhinos, pandas – have been taken away. Some, like the quagga, are globally extinct. For pioneers such as Bartlett, keeping animals was a process of trial and error. His exhibits were not captive-bred specimens of known provenance, well-documented health and studied habit. They were wild-caught strangers wreathed in mystery. Bartlett recorded the arrival on 22 May 1869 of the zoo’s first panda. It was not in good shape.
    â€˜I found the animal in a very exhausted condition, not able to stand, and so weak that it could with difficulty crawl from one end of its long cage to the other. It was suffering fromfrequent discharges of frothy, slimy faecal matter. This filth had so completely covered and matted its fur that its appearance and smell was most offensive.’ He identifies the species as Ailurus fulgens , the small, teddy-bear-like red panda, not the giant panda Ailuropoda melanoleuca , but most people today would be able to guess what it ate – mostly bamboo, supplemented by eggs, birds and small mammals. Bartlett, however, knew none of this. ‘The instructions I received with reference to its food were that it should have about a quart of milk per day, with a little boiled rice and grass. It was evident that this food, the change of climate, the sea voyage, or the treatment on board ship had reduced the poor beast to this pitiable condition.’ With no textbook to consult, Bartlett could only guess what to feed it with. He went to work with a zeal that might have earned the envy of his contemporary, Isabella Beeton. First he tried raw and boiled chicken, rabbit and ‘other animal substances’, but the panda would have none of them. ‘I found, however, it would take arrowroot, with the yelks [sic] of eggs and sugar mixed with boiled milk; and in a few days I saw some improvement in its condition. I then gave it strong beef-tea well sweetened, adding pea-flour, Indian-corn flour, and other farinaceous food, varying the mixture daily.’
    Soon the panda was well enough to be let out into the gardens, where it straightaway attacked the fruit and foliage. It liked particularly the large yellow berries of a tree Bartlett named as Pyrus vestita , now better known as Sorbus cuspidata , a native of China, the country whose south-western provinces are the panda’s home. ‘He would grasp the bunch in his paw, holding it tightly, and bite off these berries one by one; so delighted with this food was he, that all other food was left as long as these berries lasted.’ It enabled Bartlett to conclude ‘that berries, fruit, and other vegetable substances constitute the food of thisanimal in a wild state’. For zookeepers of the nineteenth century, this was how it went. They would work like field naturalists on the basis of observation wherever that was possible, and by trial and error when it wasn’t.
    They also learned to respect wild animals’ natures, and did not expect them to cosy up like family pets. Bartlett noted somewhat ruefully the panda’s ‘fierce and angry disposition’, though he believed this to be a peculiarity of the individual and not necessarily typical of the species. Even an attack was the subject of careful study: ‘When offended, it would rush at me and