Life at the Zoo: Notes and Traditions of the Regent's Park Gardens

A regiment of Life Guards recently owned a large brown bear, which ultimately found a home in the Zoo after giving proof of the wisdom of the keeper’s opinion. It was a pet of t...

The phosphorescent power is by no means confined to the fishes proper of the deep sea. Starfish and most of the various forms of zoophytes possess it, though in less perfect org...

The well-known escape of the tiger which the elder Mr. Jamrach recaptured in the street, was partly due to the weakness of a cage. An Indian tiger had been brought up from the d...

“On September 26 they were first seen to eat fish, and follow the mother into the water. They did not dive like the mother, but went in like a dog, with their head above water,...

There is only one monkey which we can thoroughly recommend as an indoor pet, the beautiful and intelligent little Capuchin. The marmosets, even more beautiful and equally pleasi...

THE parrots and macaws which live in the Parrot House at the Zoo are so numerous and noisy that the keeper has no leisure to teach them to talk. But a parrot which can say a ver...

But the elephant must still hold the first place as a beast of burden. His normal load is eight hundred pounds, so that in India he is reckoned equal to eight ponies, to five pa...

The experiences of this Russian soldier when he had penetrated into the regions behind the plateau of Tibet to the mysterious lake of Koko-Nor, lying 10,000 ft. above the sea, a...

Since then the beavers have been supplied with a fine new house of concrete, which will probably keep out their enemies the rats which invaded the old house, though it will leav...

The paragon of the Lion House at the present moment is the snow leopard. It is a most lovely creature, and deserves all the praises lavished on it. It is exactly like a grey but...

The story of the enterprise, so far as it has yet appeared, is given in a connected form in the last report of the Smithsonian Institution of Washington. Mr. Corbin is a “railwa...

THE result of the first experiments made upon animals with musical sounds, was such as to invite a second visit by the violin-player to the inmates of the Zoo. The sun was shini...

Eggs are favourite food with many lizards and snakes; but the “monitor,” a very large and handsome lizard approaching the size of the half-grown crocodile, is perhaps the most r...

“Both my specimens,” he wrote, “were remarkable for good-temper and playfulness; no domestic kitten could be more so. They were always courting intercourse with persons passing...

To the naturalist, the most marked feature of the great tropical forest south of the Equator, is the inequality in the balance of Nature between vegetable and animal life. From...

To-day, though the public are ready to make the biggest elephant their greatest favourite, as in the case of the African “Jumbo,” the keepers and trainers have little to say in...

At the time of their arrival the largest was then about 11 ft. high, the height of an adult male being 12 ft. at the shoulder and 18 ft. at the head. For many years, as we have...

IT may be said that some of the subjects of these notes are not obviously part of life at the Zoo, and this remark would be well founded. They have in the writer’s mind a connec...

The pre-eminence in this respect belongs without question to the marmosets. Two of these are by this time sufficiently acclimatized to be placed in a separate cage in the large...

Each of the little creatures, though so frail and so delicately formed that its body offered a scarcely greater obstacle to the passage of the sunlight than the water in which i...

One of the oddest tales in the “Bestiaries,” or stories of Bible animals written by the monks, is the legend of the panther. “The panther,” so the homily runs, “is the most beau...

But considering the great number of horses on training, and the accuracy with which their disposition and temper is known, the instances of homicidal tendency in the horse are s...