Interview: Lee Durrell - on the wild side

Published on Thursday 16 April 2009 20:01

F THERE is some living creature residing in the enclosure we certainly can't see it, however hard we peer at the shrubby patch of ground in Edinburgh Zoo.

But Lee Durrell gestures at the colourful sign that assures us this was until very recently the home of the Canna mouse and explains that – while Scottish mice might not be up there with, say, Siberian tigers in the wildlife glamour stakes – this is exactly the sort of conservation project she and her late husband, the inimitable naturalist and well-loved author Gerald Durrell, have supported over the years.

The Canna mouse was a variety found only on the Hebridean island. When the island became over-run with rats whose appetites for eggs threatened the local seabird population, conservationists were tasked with finding a way of eradicating the rats without wiping out their unique little cousins. So dozens of Canna mice were captured and moved to Edinburgh zoo for safekeeping until they could be returned to their rat-free homeland.

"It's conservation in your own backyard," enthuses Lee, who has somehow achieved that near-impossible combination of elegance and practicality in dress, swathed in a cream shawl as we hike up the zoos hilly paths on this chilly Edinburgh afternoon. "We've done something similar with the Jersey Green lizard," she adds, speaking of the zoo on the Channel Island which her late husband established five decades ago.

As the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, of which Lee is now honorary director since Gerald died in 1995, celebrates its 50th anniversary year, Lee is visiting Edinburgh to promote the trust's work and discuss the role zoos can play in the future of conservation.

The two zoos have a long history together, staff trained at Jersey – where Gerald's dream of founding "a mini-university for conservation" has seen more than 1700 conservationists from across the world study at the Durrell International Training Centre – have held senior positions at Edinburgh. More recently Princess Anne, the long-standing patron of Edinburgh Zoo, has also become patron of Jersey Zoo further strengthening ties between the two institutions.

We wander up the hill in search of the lemur walk-through where Lee is keen to see how staff at Edinburgh have achieved a safe space where visitors can pass through the animals' enclosure without glass or wire between them. It is something she would like to emulate in Jersey because – she hopes – it will help further break down the wider barriers between humans and animals.

We pass a group of ringtailed lemurs, conspiring together in a tight circle of stripes that is strangely reminiscent of the Celtic huddle, and Lee stops to tell me more about them. These fascinating creatures with their bouncy gaits and long fingers, originate in Madagascar where Lee first visited as a PHD student and later returned to on a conservation expedition with Gerald, an adventure recounted to hilarious effect in his book The Aye-Aye and I.

Her knowledge of the lemurs' ways is impressive, and the warmth and enthusiasm with which she speaks to the young female zoo-assistant about them demonstrates why Lee makes such an excellent ambassador for this particular brand of conservation.

Yet zoos are strange places and they provoke mixed reactions from animal lovers. While most of us are fascinated by the opportunity they offer to get close to all sorts of wonderful creatures we would never otherwise see, it sometimes feels impossible to see beyond the bars and glass walls that keep these living beings in captivity. To some observers, they are prisons that can have no place in the modern world. To others, including Lee, well-run zoos have never been more necessary at a time when hundreds of species across the globe are under threat of extinction.

That doesn't mean she's not painfully aware of the ethical dilemmas that rise from keeping animals in captivity. "Many zoos are still really horrible places," she acknowledges, urging people to be vigilant, particularly when visiting such places in the rest of Europe, where standards aren't always as high as they could be, but new EU laws are now in place to prevent the worst abuses. Standards, she says, that were in part derived from Gerald's criteria of what a zoo should be. "But zoos like ours, and it looks like Edinburgh here too, which provide the most natural environment possible without them being in the wild… well just think what they can achieve for the animal kingdom, which is so beleaguered right now. Let's get behind the good zoos," she urges.

She has a sincere passion which, along with her remarkably pretty face, makes it easy to see why Gerald fell for her back in 1977 when she was a young PHD student and he was an internationally famous conservationist and writer, almost quarter of a century older than her.

Was it an instant attraction, I inquire. "Well, he was my hero," she responds, a hint of awe in her voice even now.

And what about him? "Well, there was twinkle – I noticed that," she says with a little smile.

Their relationship was founded on a mutual obsession with conservation and she insists she never felt she was second place to his work, because she cared about his as much as he did. Indeed he was extremely protective of her. She's recently learned to fly – something her late husband wouldn't countenance because he considered it so dangerous.

Yet she went trekking through jungles and other risky territory with him and got up close with various potentially deadly wild animals?

She laughs. "I remember one time we were doing a show, The Amateur Naturalist, about rivers and eddies and they wanted to send me down this river in a kayak. I was just going to do it, but Gerry was extremely unhappy about it and told the director that if anything happened to me, he would kill him!"

They certainly shared some adventures together: even in the apparently safe environs of Jersey they had incidents such as the evening they looked out of their window and saw Gambar, a large male orangutan, swaggering his way towards their front door.

"We just locked ourselves in," she recalls with a shake of her head, even now sounding somewhat discomforted by the idea of coming face to face with such a potentially dangerous primate.

But she has a real fondness for orangutans and also for gorillas, which the Jersey zoo has successfully bred. Here in Edinburgh, it is Chimpanzees that are the main focus of primate conservation. She firmly corrects our photographer when he refers to them as "monkeys".

We head to The Budongo Trail, Edinburgh Zoo's 5.6 million flagship chimp enclosure – an interactive visitor exhibit and centre of chimpanzee research which opened last year. There's an impressive range of environments for the chimps to wander through, and it's a world away from the old enclosures I remember from my last visit to the zoo several years ago.

Lee is clearly impressed by the hi-tech facilities which allow visitors to find out more about chimps and their natural habitat and the important educational role such an exhibit can play in raising conservation awareness.

When I wonder whether some of the money spent on that could have been spent directly on saving animals she is diplomatic.

"Bronx Zoo in New York spent $70 million on their Congo exhibition, which is mainly gorillas. Their explanation was that they also have a large field station in Africa and the end of the exhibition people are asked to donate to that.

"The conundrum for zoos, is you've got to bring people in (to generate income) and you have to have good (exhibits) to do that."

It is her honesty and openness about such dilemmas that makes Lee so convincing an advocate for the work zoos can do.

However, she is unstinting in her praise of the links between the Budongo exhibition here in Edinburgh and the Budongo Conservation Field Station in the Budongo Forest in Uganda. The Ugandan project helps conserve its threatened population of chimpanzees, and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland has been the initiative's main sponsor for the past three years.

The ability of zoos to support animals in their natural environment is one of the most important benefits they offer, says Lee.

So after all these years of conservation work, what does Lee believe is the greatest challenge that lies ahead?

"My biggest worry is that, amid the massive challenge of global climate change and the incredible knock-on effects of that, people may stop thinking about bio-diversity and their attention (will be] twisted away from the importance of (saving all the different] species. The species are the glue that holds it all together."

Lee stresses that one thing her husband was always trying to highlight was that the small, unglamorous species are just as vital as the larger ones which perhaps provoke a more emotional response in people.

She points to the truly perilous situation of frogs and amphibians at the moment as a deadly disease sweeps the globe and threatens to wipe out many species for ever – unless zoos and other conservation organisations can step in. If these creatures do die out, the knock-on effect for other animals and the wider environment could be disastrous.

She draws a deep breath: "Everyone's got to do our bit regarding our carbon footprint, but we mustn't forget the species that make our planet tick."