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The real goal at the manor is babymaking. This is a zookeeper's greatest challenge, since many animals refuse to cooperate even under conditions that seem ideal−to the human eye. Durrell recalls the case of a Congo peacock and peahen that kept trying unsuccessfully to mate. "One day I noticed that their feathers were getting too dry, so we sprayed them with water. Suddenly, bang! Success!" Durrell also warns against expecting animals to take an automatic liking to each other. "We humans seem to think we have a monopoly on love. How would you feel if you were locked for 30 years in a cage with a partner you couldn't stand?"
The Jersey staff has done itself proud as matchmaker and midwife. From four rare pygmy hedgehog tenrecs, 20 have been raised for other zoos and eleven kept on Jersey. From four African civet cats, 14 have been shipped off and nine kept for further breeding. The zoo's most expensive inmate, a $12,000 male lowland gorilla, fathered one infant in July, and has impregnated a second female. The most notable success is the whiteeared pheasant, possibly extinct in the wild. The zoo has bred 51 of them and exported ten pairs to seven countries.
Jeremy Mallinson, zoological director at Jersey, points out that most zoos are actually a severe drain on natural populations. Every animal seen in a conventional zoo represents about nine that have died from disease contracted in captivity or carelessness on the part of collectors. In that sense, old-fashioned zoos are actually helping animals toward extinction.
Durrell is horrified by this irony and notes that the last passenger pigeon on earth died in 1914−in a zoo. He has chosen the extinct dodo as SAFE'S emblem, and sports a button reading "Dodo Power," in the hope of dramatizing the urgency of the situation: the flightless bird was extinct only 186 years after Europeans landed on its home island of Mauritius. "The dodo was part of a delicate spider web that connects us all," says Durrell. "Every time you muck about with that web, it sends tremors all the way through."