Flamingo Land zoo's vital role in animal conservation

IT’S difficult to take a shorthand note while ring-tailed lemurs are clambering all over you. I discover this when I follow Christine Decunha into the lemur paddock at Flamingo Land.

They’re beautiful little creatures, ring-tailed lemurs: about the same size as cats, and just as lithe. They have tiny hands, not paws, with fingernails and opposable thumbs like us; intense yellow eyes; and long, balancing tails ringed in black and white hoops.

And boy, can they jump.

I’ve hardly been in the paddock a minute before they’ve decided I’m no threat, and that it’s safe to treat me like a tree. One springs from the ground and lands lightly on my shoulder; another leaps from a tree branch a good six feet away and lands on the other shoulder; and before I know it, I have five perched on various parts of my anatomy, all looking hopefully around for food.

It’s a truly joyous moment: you can feel your kinship with these fellow primates. But with one perched on my right arm, taking notes isn’t easy.

Christine, the zoo keeper in charge of primates, is explaining about lemur social hierarchies. By the time I have managed to gently disentangle myself from the ring-tails I have to ask her to repeat what she has been saying.

She laughs. “Like most civilised societies, with ring-tailed lemurs the female is in charge,” she says again.

That is certainly true of this lemur troupe. An older ring-tail with a wise, wizened face goes – among us humans – by the name of Ruby and is clearly the boss.

I’m here at Flamingo Land to interview ecologist Dr Andy Marshall. He is the University of York expert who heads the Centre for the Integration of Research, Conservation and Learning (CIRCLE) based at Flamingo Land, and is also the zoo’s director of conservation science. And a couple of weeks ago he spoke out about the vital role zoos play in protecting endangered species.

Along with representatives from other zoos belonging to the British and Irish Association for Zoos and Aquariums (BIAZA) he created a list of the top-ten endangered species which depend most for their future survival on zoos.

Species on the list included the Amur tiger, the blue-crowned laughing thrush, and the scimitar-horned oryx – a member of the antelope family which is officially extinct in the wild. Flamingo Land is successfully breeding the scimitar-horned oryx – and hopes one day that it will be reintroduced into the wild in North Africa.

The list was prefaced with a simple but powerful statement: if zoos had existed in the time of the dodo, it may not be extinct today.

Zoos have not always had the best of reputations. It’s perhaps not hard to understand why. After all, the ‘wild’ animals they contain are held in captivity and it hasn’t always been a comfortable confinement.

Until a few years ago, images from around the world of sad-eyed elephants in grotty concrete enclosures or of mangy lions pacing desperately about narrow cages were all too frequent.

But the reality is that, over the past 15 to 20 years, conditions in British zoos have ‘massively improved’, says Flamingo Land’s collections manager Steve Nasir.

At Flamingo Land, he adds, they don’t keep polar bears any more or elephants – or chimpanzees, come to that. Not keeping elephants was a policy decision, Dr Marshall says – they’re not endangered, so there is no point.

He believes the animals in his zoo are happy. He said so recently in a debate on cable news channel CNN with Will Travers, the chief executive of the Born Free Foundation which opposes zoos.

“The fact is, most animals in zoos are happy, and if they weren’t happy, I wouldn’t be working in a zoo,” Dr Marshall said.

In a blog later, Mr Travers was scathing. “He knows whether an animal is ‘happy’? That’s quite a talent you have, Dr Marshall.”

By the same logic, however, you could ask how animal rights campaigners know animals kept in zoos are not happy.

Certainly, none of the animals I see on my visit to Flamingo Land appear unhappy. In the South American enclosure – a large area of open grassland studded by trees – family groups of mara seem perfectly at home: alert, and curious about the strange, two-legged creatures encroaching on their habitat. When seated these odd-looking rodents resemble very large hares with truncated ears. On standing, however, they look more like tiny deer. And one female in particular has a cluster of young at her feet.

The Humboldt’s penguins look happy, too. The zoo has 45 in a new, large pool that opened last year. It is up to two metres deep, so there is plenty of space for the birds to dive, or leap porpoise-like out of the water.

They are natives of the Peruvian coast, so are used to warmer climates than Antarctic penguins. They spend a lot of the summer playing, says Linda Neal, the keeper of birds: “messing about, chasing leaves, chasing bubbles. They’re generally full of mischief”.

One criterion for gauging animal happiness in captivity might be whether they breed or not. The Humboldt’s – officially classified as ‘vulnerable’ in the wild – are certainly doing that at Flamingo Land.

So are the scimitar-horned oryx, kept in a large pasture in the zoo’s Africa zone.

The zoo has six oryx altogether: a large male known as Boycie by his keepers, three adult females and two calves, born here. One, a young male, will eventually move to a zoo in France where he will join a breeding programme.

Then there are the white-crowned mangabey, West African primates related to baboons. They, too, are classed as vulnerable in the wild. They are difficult to breed, Dr Marshall says, but Flamingo Land’s pair bred a few years ago.

Zoo staff had to hand-rear the infant. “They are often not very good mums, especially with first-born. It happens in the wild: sometimes the mums reject them. We were the first zoo to hand-rear a mangabey and introduce it back to its mum.”

Whatever you may think about keeping wild animals in captivity, the fact is that without zoos we would have lost many animal species which are around today. Partly it is the breeding programmes that keep species alive. Zoos also contribute to conservation programmes in the wild, however (see below). And then there is the educational aspect.

Flamingo Land runs programmes for local schools, as well as junior keeper academies.

Even on a casual visit, children have an opportunity to see, first hand, animals they might never see otherwise.

The power of that is obvious. We’re a species that tends not to care about things we know little about. But no child who enjoys an encounter with ring-tailed lemurs such as that I had, then is told that in the wild they’re disappearing because their forests are being destroyed, will ever forget that.

Of course, we would all rather see animals in the wild. “But we have an obligation to future generations to make sure that these animals don’t die out,” says Steve Nasir.

And so we do.

Conservation work at Flamingo Land

OF THE 130 species kept at Flamingo Land, 20 per cent are classified as ‘vulnerable’ or worse, says Dr Andy Marshall.

The zoo runs breeding programmes with many of these – helping ensure that if the animals do become extinct in the wild, at least they won’t be lost altogether.

Tigers are a good example of a species being driven to the brink of extinction.

In the early 1900s, there were eight known tiger subspecies. Three – the Bali, Javan and Caspian – are now extinct. The remaining subspecies are under relentless pressure from poaching and habitat loss.

In just over a century, 97 per cent of all wild tigers have disappeared; as few as 3,200 live in the wild today.

Sumatran tigers are among the most endangered, with as few as 500 left in the wild.

Flamingo Land’s pair have not bred yet – they were brought to the zoo only last summer, says Dr Marshall, and will take time to settle. But hopes are high they will breed. “A world without tigers is unthinkable.”

Breeding programmes at the zoo that have already proved successful include the scimitar-horned oryx, the white-crowned mangabey, the Humboldt’s penguin – more than 100 chicks have been hatched since 1998 – and flamingos.

Then there are the ring-tailed lemurs – not endangered, but classified as ‘near threatened’: the wild population is declining because of habitat destruction in Madagascar. The troupe of ring tails at Flamingo Land is, however, thriving.

Flamingo Land also has some young male white rhinos. They aren’t bred here, but are raised until mature, when they leave the zoo to join breeding programmes elsewhere.

That’s a good example of the kind of inter-zoo co-operation typical of modern zoo breeding programmes. These are co-ordinated in European zoos through the European Endangered Species Programme (EEP), under which the young calf oryx successfully bred at Flamingo Land will one day go to a French zoo.

Zoos don’t only work to save endangered species through breeding programmes, however. They also contribute to conservation projects in the wild.

British zoos belonging to BIAZA contribute between £12 and £13 million every year to such projects, says Dr Marshall: and worldwide, zoos contribute about $350million a year.

Flamingo Land itself contributes £43,000 a year to the Udzungwa Forest Project in Tanzania. The forest is home to the endangered Udzungwa red colobus monkey, as well as the Magombera chameleon – a species discovered by Dr Marshall.

But the forest has been rapidly disappearing, cleared for sugar plantations, or chopped down by villagers.

Flamingo Land introduced a forest monitoring programme in 2007, runs education programmes for villagers, and is also helping them find alternative resources so they don’t have to cut trees down – for example by supplying briquette makers, so they can make briquettes from husks and leaves and burn these instead of trees.

The project is also hoping to help villagers set up small businesses – including eco-tourism – and Flamingo Land hopes to sell craftwork made by Udzungwa villagers.

Such conservation projects are hugely important, Dr Marshall says. By conserving a whole forest, you’re helping not just one endangered species, but many.

Top-ten endangered species

The list of the top-ten endangered species which owe their future survival to zoos, as announced by Dr Andy Marshall and other experts from BIAZA zoos:

• Mountain chicken (actually a frog)

• White clawed crayfish

• Blue-crowned laughing thrush

• Amur leopard

• Potosi pupfish

• Partula snail

• Verdcourt’s polyalthia tree

• Blue-eyed black lemur

• Ploughshare tortoise

• Scimitar-horned oryx