Catch Me A Colobus

by Gerald Durrell

Here Durrell has his own zoo established, but is working on a tight budget so he outlines how it was set it up as a Trust to get people interested in wildlife conservation to help support the zoo. The book describes their work at the zoo with various wild animals- how they were cared for, dealing with illness and injury, their excitement and feeling of success when some of their animals bred for the first time in captivity: the rare white-eared pheasant, the tapir, Geralda baboon, a chimpanzee, a lioness that had problems giving birth, serval cats and civets. Most of the book though, is about his trips to foreign countries to collect new animals for the zoo. On one trip they had extra complications caused by taking along a film crew, hoping to educate the public about their work via a television program. The most memorable trip was one to Sierra Leone where they acquired leopards, various birds and other animals but the focus was on two types of colobus monkey- beautiful creatures with long silky fur quite unknown (at that time) to the rest of the world. Durrell tells in detail of their efforts to find these animals, to catch enough of them to keep a breeding colony, and the difficulty they had getting the animals adjusted to eating the kinds of food they could be provided with back at the zoo. I admired the fact that when one of the groups of colobus failed to adjust and refused all food to the point of becoming lethargic, he simply let them go again. He also tells of another trip to Mexico where they collected thick-billed parrots but in particular were searching for the teporingo or volcano rabbit- and it proved very difficult to get ahold of. Like all his other books, Gerald entertained me with amusing incidents and lively descriptions of the interesting animals. The last chapter tells of numerous wildlife species he feared would soon go extinct, with a plea for wildlife conservation and financial support to the zoo's trust.

Rating: 3/5     221 pages, 1972