LONDON ZOO TRAGEDIES

Hokitika Guardian, 15 August 1931, Page 2

LONDON ZOO TRAGEDIES

NOISIEST MOXKET DEAD. There have been many deaths at the London Zoo this year. Trouble started in February, when the Zoo should have been reawakening to the touch of spring with the death of Bumbus, the siaming gibbon. Bumbus was the noisiest monkey in the zoo. The human inhabitants of Regent’s Park rejoiced when the deafening boom of her voice was silenced, but since she died the monkey house was never the same. The next tragedy wa: ' lw death ol three jackal cubs, liny >1 n» -.iarvation, .because an unnatin il ni.’Unir re " fused to feed them. In the •'•■pi '<•' house the death of Peter Pan, the alligator, who refused to grow up, has left a blank that can never be filled. In the aviaries the infantile death rate has been the highest on record. Two crowned lapwings hatched a Brood in February, but the nestlings were frozen to death. A second nest of eggs was eaten by a marauding moorhen. Hunger strike accounted for the death of many snakes. - Gout for the death of a parrot, anaemia for a lynx, a fox, and several birds; malaria for a speenbill and a parakeet, an enlargement of the thyroid gland for , a tortoise. There was another pathetic tragedy at the zoo. The cranes have sat on an egg which they were guarding with tender solicitude, though the keepers knew it had been addled for weeks. But there is a bright side. The lambkins of the Barbary sheep and the moufflons on Mappin terraces have defied the chill winds. Two or three families of wolf cubs have survived the indifference of their mothers, with Fne aid of dogs as nurses. Two emu chicks, dainty and friendly birds, which cost £BS, counter balance a tragedy in which father emu, after sifting on a clutch of eggs for days, lost his balance and smashed the lot.