A YEAR AT THE ZOO.
AN increasing budget is always interesting, and the Report of the Zoological Society, issued for its eighty-third annual general meeting held on April 29th, has a special interest in that last year was one of the most successful in the history of the Zoo. At one time, indeed, it looked like making a"record." By the end of July the number of visitors to the Gardens was 529,462, which is an increase of 27,316 over the same period in 1910, the second best year since the founding of the Society in 1826. But the great heat and the railway strike in August lowered the figures of the later months of the year, and as a result the total number of visitors reached only 892,622, which was 4,839 leas than the total of 1910. However, the attendance of last year was the fourth best out of eighty-three years. The highest total of all belongs to 1876, when King Edward's Indian Collection, presented to him as Prince of Wales, brought the number of visitors up to 915,764. The lowest total was in 1847, when there were only 93,546 visitors ; and other interesting years of compare.- tively early dates have been those of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the International Exhibition of 1862, and the year 1882, when the impending departure of Jumbo for America increased the number of visitors by more than 200,000. Given fine weather, and the extra interest of the King's Indian Collection, it would not be surprising if the present year saw the number rise nearly to a million.
An attractive item in the Zoo budget is the statement of the accounts of the commissariat. The food bills for so large a collection of birds, beasts, fishes, and reptiles are naturally
enormous. The fodder bills alone account for huge quantities. The grass- and grain-eating animals, the elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, asses, zebras, camels, sheep, goats, cattle, and deer consumed among them 177 loads of hay, 884 loads of clover, 2234 loads of straw, 36 tons of chaff, and 13,584 bundles of tares. The corn and grain accounts included 3614 quarters of oats, 248 quarters of bran, 384 bushels of wheat, and 376 bushels of maize, besides one ton 18 owl. of rice ; and the amounts paid in cash came to £653 for hay, £400 for clover, £254 for green food and chaff, £379 for oats, and £247 for grain and seeds, which included 318 bushels of canary, millet, and hemp. But these enormous amounts are not difficult to understand if one takes into consideration the appetites and the capacities of individual animals—the elephants, for instance. A full-grown elephant will eat a couple of hundredweight of hay and straw in a day. The elephants do not, as a fact, average that amount ; they are not all full-grown, and they need less fodder in summer than in winter, for in summer they get more from visitors, especially when they are out in the gardens carrying children. Johnny, the African elephant, in particular, during his walks from the mounting ladders to the terrace and back does not cease to solicit additions to his fare. He swings his trunk from side to side as lie goes, and receiving here an orange, there a piece of cake, generally retires a moderately full elephant to his stall. Once the writer observed him as he passed a lady who, un. heeding his approach, sat eating her lunch out of a paper bag. Johnny swung a discerning trunk and transferred the entire bag to his mouth, while the lady, suddenly deprived of her day's sustenance, sat stupefied at her loss. But in winter Johnny does not walk abroad, nor does Sophy, the largest elephant in the Zoo, walk abroad either in winter or summer. She does very well, the keeper considers, in her stall. " If you give her a truss of hay and a truss of straw at night you wouldn't find any- thing in the morning—all gone, bands and all, not a straw left." The hay and straw bills become comprehensible. Not quite so easily realized are the quantities of the fish bill. The fish account for the year includes 16,965 lb. of herrings, 61,584 lb. of whiting, and 1,585 pints of shrimps. The shrimps are mostly for the flamingoes. The herrings and whitings aro mainly for the seals and sea-lions, the cormorants, gulls, and other fish-eating birds. The king penguin is a. bird with a good appetite. He will take twelve, eighteen, or twenty herrings in a day. But the prodigious fish-eater is the elephant- Beal. He is not an active animal, like the ablest of the sea- lions, who swallows whiting in mid-air between rocks and water: he is generally asleep, and frequently snoring, but during the day he disposes of fifty pounds of fish ; that is, 18,000 lb. of fish in a year ; and it is he who is mainly account- able for the rise in the Zoo fish bill in 1911. In 1910 the Society paid £72 for freshwater fish and £373 for sea fish ; and in 1911, with more otters to feed, the freshwater fish came to £118 and the sea fish, chiefly because of the elephant-seal, to £494. Compared with the fish bills the amounts paid for meat for the carnivorous animals and Lirds do not seem so large. The Zoo paid last year for horses £491, as compared with £301 in 1910 ; there were 266 horses, which weighed 133 tone; goats cost £106, and 175 goats weighed 831 stone. But the rise in the horse bill is not, apparently, entirely due to an increase in the number of lions, leopards, and so on. "It's the motors," a keeper will tell you. " The motors and Germany. There aren't so many horses as there used to be, and the Germans want all they can get for beef products, so it's difficult to get what you want, and the price has gone up. And you don't get a horse that's worth any- thing, either. Three pounds you may have to pay, and then what is it P Skin and bone—nothing l" Fortunately other supplies remain fairly constant. Motors do not affect the numbers of goats or of poultry. Fowl-heads, which are wanted for the foxes, cost last year £105, which purchased 50,544—that is, about a halfpenny each. Fowl-heads are an item which most people would attribute to the right animals at once, but other items suggest puzzles, particularly in the fruit bill. The fruit bill comes to £523, and includes 11,982 oranges, which are mostly eaten by birds ; 424 lemons, which make lemonade for the apes; 252 lb. of currants, mostly for monkeys ; and 96 lb. of figs for small mammals like kinkajous. Three melons went to the insect house, and a rather odd item is 56 lb. of pears, some of which, it seems, Were used to feed the serows. The largest entry of all is 113,829 bananas. One may wonder what took their place before bananas became so cheap and easy to get. In the monkey-house alone they use three hundred bananas in a week, and the monkey-house is also well provisioned by visitors. So is George the mandrill immediately outside the monkey-house. He is an animal who keeps to his own corner in the world, 'but he will leave his corner for a banana. Ile does not, as a rule, eat the banana on the spot, but retires again to his corner and deals with the fruit turning his back to the donor.
The income of the Society last year was satisfactorily large. It amounted to £36,732 18s. 5d., and the chief contributing sources, of course, were the fees and subscriptions of Fellows, which amounted to 212,19,5, and the receipts for admission to the Gardens, which came to £20,590 19s. 10d. Other items which increase with the popularity of the Zoo are the riding receipts—the animals earned among them last year £735— and sales of the Garden guide and picture postcards, which brought in £909. But this large income was not a penny too much for the expenses, which, indeed, could be greatly in- creased in any year by further improvements in buildings and new arrangements of cages. The salaries and pensions make up the largest sum which can be put down to one head: they amounted in 1911 to £9,740. The bill for provisions is the next highest, and comes to £5,507. Menagerie expenses, which in- clude coke, straw, water, sand, labels, cleaning, and so on, come to £3,124, and building and maintenance account is £3,828. Another large item, which may be inspected in another form in the charm of the flowers and lawns, is £1,583 for gardeners and gardening ex- penses. These items, except to those who are initiated in the methods and cost of upkeep of public places, may seem rather surprisingly large. Another item, however, seems correspondingly small. That is, £1,160 for "cost and carriage of animals." It means, of course, that the Society-made com- paratively few purchases last year; but that would be natural enough, considering the large addition which was made to the number of the Society's animals by the King's African Collection. Besides the King's Collection, there were other considerable gifts made to the Gardens. The Duke of Bedford, for instance, the President of the Society; pre- sented two Bactrian camels, one common camel, one European bison, one yak, one Kashmirian deer, and a number of birds. But the majority of the gifts made to the Zoo come from the ordinary public. Whether or not the Zoo often refuses offers of gifts of birds and beasts does not appear in the Report; but if it does, it also accepts much. The interest or import- ance of the animal does not seem to be the deciding factor in acceptance, and the numbers accepted must surely sometimes be a, little embarrassing. One would suppose, for example, that the Gardens might be in danger of being slightly over- stocked with owls, of which all sorts were offered and apparently found room. Each entry is carefully recorded. The Natural History Club of Bootham School gave one com- mon viper ; another contributor forwarded one cinnamon snail another two slow-worms. Two separate persons gave one cuckoo ; the stock of doves was increased by one woodpigeon and one domestic pigeon ; one donor presented a stoat, another contributed a weasel ; and there are several entries of rate. Black rats, it is easy to understand, might find favour; but an offer more difficult to accept with enthusiasm would seem to be indicated by the entry " four black rats, three brown rats."
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