Vanishing Animals - Gerald Durrell

A herd of deer in China was not known to the modern science of Zoology until 1865. They came to Europe by a sheer chance from their country. If some of these animals had not come to Europe, they would have been an extinct race now. They are now called Pere David deer. Their existence was first discovered by a French missionary, Father David. He was a naturalist who spent his spare time collecting specimens of the flora and fauna to send back to the museum in Paris.  In 1865 he came to Peking on his work. He heard a rumour that there was a strange herd of deer in the Imperial Park. This park is reserved for centuries for a sport of hunting pleasure for the Emperors of China. It was completely surrounded by a high fortified wall and strictly guarded by Tartars along the forty-five miles its border. It was a forbidden park, hunting in this park is prohibited. If anyone found harming or killing animals in this park, will be prosecuted and such attempts may attract sever punishment or the sentence of death may be awarded. Father David wanted some specimens of this herd. He knew that any official request for a specimen would be politely refused. He met some guards and obtained two deer skins and sent them to France. As he had expected, the deer turned out to be an entirely new species and so it was named, in honour of its discoverer, the Pere David deer – Father David’s deer. When the zoos in Europe heard this new kind of deer they wanted some living specimens of those deer for exhibition. After a lengthy process of negotiations the Chinese authorities rather unwillingly allowed a few of the animals to be sent to Europe. Nobody knew that this action would in future save these rare animals from extinction. Thus, 1865, Pere David deer first became known to the world.

In 1895, there were great floods around Peking. The HunHo River was in spate and overflowed its banks and caused havoc in the countryside. These floods  destroyed the crops and rendered the population to near starvation. The water also caused cracks in the walls of the Imperial Hunting Park and all the deer in the park escaped into the surrounding countryside where they were quickly hunted, killed and eaten by the hungry peasants. So, the deer perished in China. The only ones left them off were the handful of live specimens in the various zoos in Europe.

Towards the end of the 19thcentury, a small herd of Pere David deer arrived in England. The Duke of Bedford bought them from the various zoos and kept them on his estate at Woburn in Bedfordshire. He had made there a wonderful collection of rare animals. The eighteen deers felt the place homely and began to breed. The herd that started with eighteen now numbers over a hundred and fifty animals, the only herd of Pere David deer in the world. Among the extinct species in the wilderness, Durrell mentions the white-tiled gnus. They are not totally extinct but in their wilderness they are not found.

The white-tailed gnu is an uncommon creature to look at. Its appearance is like that of a well-built pony – a squat blunt face with very wide-spaced nostrils, a heavy mane of white hair on its thick neck and a long white sweeping plume of a tail. They are very playful. They would prance and twist and buck, gallop, rear and pirouette and doing so they would throw their slim legs out at extraordinary and doing completely un-anatomical angels. Their peculiarity is that in the middle of the wild dance they would suddenly stop dead and glare at. These antelopes contributed to their own downfall in an unusual way. They are very curious creatures, when they saw the ox-drawn wagons of the early settlers, they would dance and gallop round the wagons in circles and then suddenly stopping to stare. Thus, the enterprising “sportsmen" used them for their rifle practice. So, they were killed and their numbers decreased rapidly. In spite of the all these adverse activities these peculiar did not become extinct. Today these unusual animals count under a thousand figure. They are listed among the endangered species. The author includes Pere David deer to this group.

There is a long list of creatures that have already vanished altogether. The dodo is an extinct race now. It was a great ponderous waddling pigeon, the size of a goose was extinct because man's entry into its paradise.

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