The Antelope House is redolent with a delicious perfume of the finest hay, and its graceful inmates nibble at their fragrant breakfast with the same dainty selectness which marks their habits at meals on less appetizing days. Many of the larger kinds, lying in their neat stalls, look like some glorified form of Oriental cattle. The eland, couched placidly on a bed of golden straw, with its satin-like biscuit-coloured skin gathered into soft little wrinkles at the folded joints, and its dark full eye turned to gaze mildly at the visitors, seems a type of what the domesticated antelope should be, shielded from the weather, eating artificially prepared food, lying on the straw of civilization, and dependent for its food on the stockman’s punctuality. The only creature which showed some effects of the exhilaration in the frosty air was the beautiful little Nagore antelope, the only living specimen, we believe, of this rare animal now in Europe. In form it is almost like a large gazelle, with lyre-shaped horns, a golden fawn-coloured skin, of perfectly uniform tone, set off by large and brilliant black eyes. This antelope was unusually active and friendly, standing on its slender hind feet, and reaching its head up to be caressed and fed.
In the open paddocks and runs of the smaller deer and wild-fowl, there was great good-temper and content. The Japanese deer were all curled up sleeping in the cold air round their food-box, which was filled with chopped straw, bran, and oats, and swarming with impudent Zoo sparrows. These little robbers, as also the Zoo starlings, are in such good case from the abundance of food left at their disposal by the fastidious strangers in the cages and paddocks, that, like the owls during the plagues of mice on the Pampas, they defy the weather and the seasons, and marry and bring up irregular families irrespective of the almanac. Dozens of them, as well as many of the starlings, had selected this particular cold morning of all others to take a bath. The gradually sloping drinking-pools in most of the runs, especially the tortoises’ baths, which have a wide shallow entrance, exactly suit their wants. Many were washing and splashing in the pools in the swine runs, while others were drying themselves in rows on the sunny wall above the styes, with an immense amount of fuss and vulgarly loud conversation.
The gulls were particularly noisy, and playing at a new game with bits of ice, which they picked up from the broken edges of their ponds, and let fall on the sound ice. They then scrambled and fought for the pieces as they slid on the slippery surface. One big gull swallowed a large triangular piece, which stuck for some time in its throat, and evidently gave it much discomfort until the sharp edges melted. The ravens in the crow-cages were also much pleased with the broken ice, and were busy hiding all the pieces in holes round the edges of their aviary. One of the birds was evidently not satisfied with the concealment offered by the cranny into which it had poked a large fragment, so after considering for some time, it drew it out again, rubbed it in sand till it was well covered with grit, and then pushed it back, protected by a coating of colour “adapted to environment.”
The heating of the Monkey House had been carefully looked to during the night, and beyond showing a disposition to huddle together and sleep, the common monkeys betrayed little obvious sensibility to the bright dry cold outside. But the delicate little marmosets and small tropical South American species were, with the exception of the Capuchins, removed to the warmer inner room behind the glass palace. One creature only seemed penetrated by the frost, a sleeping lemur. It was clinging to the bars of its cage, its hands grasping the rods, its two front arms stretched out, and its head, heavy with sleep, drooping between them. Yet, though steeped in slumber, it was shaken from moment to moment by spasms of shivering, its body conscious and responsive to the cold, though its drowsy brain was insensible to the warnings of physical malaise.
Winter in the Insect House is the time of incubation and sleep. All the beautiful forms of tropical moths and insects, which burst into life in the butterfly form in May, are sleeping in their pitcher-shaped cocoons, or buried in moss and mould. Only the great Goliath beetle, with a body like a well-blacked boot on which cream has been spilt, and immense stag-like horns, was alternately eating melon and sipping highly-sweetened tea, two indigestible forms of food on which it had made an almost uninterrupted meal for seven weeks.
From another point of view the demeanour of the semi-tropical birds in this sudden wave of cold was even more interesting than the power of adaptation to climate shown by so many quadrupeds. The whole pheasant tribe, perhaps the most beautiful, as a class, of any family of birds, are in the acme of plumage and condition. The Himalayas and China are the main homes of these gorgeous creatures, and we are not surprised to see in Regent’s Park the metallic lustre of the Monauls, or the scarlet, orange, and gold of the rarer Chinese varieties, in equal perfection with that attained in the glens of Nepaul, or the mountains of Pekin. But the Argus pheasant is a native of Sumatra and Borneo, the companion of the trogons and the ourang-outang; yet the cock-bird was displaying its beauties in the open air, among leaves and grass tipped with hoar-frost, and showed plumage so close and perfect, that it was impossible to doubt that the colder climate had, if possible, added a lustre to its unrivalled wealth of ornament. It is to be regretted that the eggs laid in the previous summer were not fertile, else the development of perhaps the most perfect instance of animal pattern might have received further explanation from the processes of growth in the plumage of the young. One tender nestling from the tropics was being reared at the Zoo, though not exposed to the rigour of December frost. In October 1893 a young king vulture arrived from South America—a round, fluffy ball of white down, with a smooth black head like a negro baby, and as helpless as a young pigeon. It grew rapidly, and at the time when this paper was written, was the most interesting and intelligent specimen of a young carnivorous bird that the writer has yet seen. As a rule nothing could well be more morose and forbidding than the eaglet or the young of any hawk or falcon. They are helpless, savage, and unresponsive to any form of kindness. But the young vulture is almost as tame and intelligent as a puppy. It follows its keeper in the warm house, which it shares with the tortoises, sitting down when he stops, and rising and running with a half-bird, half-quadruped gait which is irresistibly comic. When frightened or shy in the presence of strangers, it lays its head on the ground and “shams dead,” like a young plover, though almost as large as a turkey. But it soon loses all fear, and takes food or pulls at the garments of its visitors with amusing confidence. But the young vulture is an accidental visitor. The frosts of winter are mainly interesting at the Zoo as the time when the inmates exhibit the full beauty and vitality of vigorous maturity.
Note.—Since the above notes were written, the young king vulture has grown to full maturity, and is an even more interesting bird than its early promise indicated. At the end of July 1894 it was full-grown and in perfect plumage, every feather being distinct and unbroken. It is black from the crown to the legs, without a single white feather, and has none of the unpleasant appearance of the less noble vultures. So devoted is it to its keeper, that when some of the gigantic Seychelles tortoises were introduced into the large house in which it lives, it rushed at them to drive them away the moment he entered the house to feed it, and stood between him and the horny monsters, its wings wide stretched and its beak open and hissing. It still lies down to be caressed, and is in every way a very handsome and interesting bird.
THE GHOSTS OF THE TROPICAL FOREST.
Perhaps the rarest, certainly the least known to man of all the creatures which, by a strange chance, find their way to the Gardens of the Zoological Society in Regent’s Park, are the denizens of the Tropical Forest. We say forest, because, though divided by the dissociable ocean, there is only one great forest which belts the globe. The notion of the physical symmetry of the world, which fascinated the old geographers, and led Herodotus to surmise that the course of the great river of Africa must of necessity conform in the main to that of the Danube in the opposite continent, was wrong in theory and application. But shifting the guiding forces from the control of original and plastic design to the influence of the dominant Sun, the theory still holds good; and while the tropical heats remain constant and undisturbed, so must the tropical forest flourish and endure, with its inseparable concomitants of vegetable growth overpowering and replacing the marvellous rapidity of vegetable decay.