BY any standards, the Claypole family of Mill Hill, London, is a large one. It numbers nearly 130 — bearing in mind, of course, that the family includes a “zoo.”

Richard, who is 16 and attends Mill Hill Public School, has been passionately fond of most things that walk, crawl or fly since he was five.

So much so, that his back-garden collection now totals something like 120.

Add to that his sister Jackie’s two ponies, Tippin and Jassamine, and Mum and Dad’s two Old English sheepdogs, Ming and Nana, and you have just about the full complement.

Richard can be seen in Zoo Time on Wednesday. When I talked to him it didn’t take me long to realise what a dedicated young zoologist he is.

He’s a member of the XYZ (Young Zoologists) Club, and a familiar figure to the keepers at London Zoo.

Most of his own collection are reptiles or amphibians, which he keeps in a heated greenhouse. But there is also a hairy armadillo and a badger cub.

How did it all start?

“When I was about five,” Richard said, “I became interested in insects. From there I went on to reptiles, including green lizards and a grass snake.

“Now I have 49 different species and about 120 items. And, of course, the collection is growing because there are always some of them breeding.”

For many people, the biggest problem with a zoo such as Richard’s would be feeding. But he takes that in his stride.

“The reptiles eat worms; my owls have chicken heads, which I get from the butcher; I breed locusts for the toads and frogs; Mr. Todd, the badger, gets horsemeat and breakfast cereal; and the armadillo has mincemeat, milk and chopped fruit.”

In most cases, the only thing standing between a boy and the pet of his choice — particularly if it happens to be a little offbeat — is Mum. But Richard has no trouble with his.

“She got used to seeing caterpillars wandering all over the place,” he said, “and eventually took the rest as a matter of course. Well almost …

“I don’t keep snakes any more, because she doesn’t like them.”

How does Dad react to the zoo? “Oh, very favourably,” Mr. Claypoie said. “It gives Richard a lively and real interest.

“And I would certainly far rather he did what he is doing than a lot of the things in which the modern generation indulges.”

Thirteen-year-old Jackie is more concerned with her ponies than with her brother’s collection, though occasionally she brings friends along to see the latest additions.

Most of her spare time is spent riding and show jumping, and a pile of rosettes is evidence of her success over the fences.

Mr. and Mrs. Claypole’s two sheep dogs appeared in a film with Richard Attenborough and have been featured in a number of TV commercials. Most families have their “black sheep,” and with the Claypoles it’s Mr. Todd, the badger.

He is only half grown, but already he weighs more than 20lb [about 9kg – Ed].

And he has decidedly destructive tendencies, even though some of them are unintentional.

“I’m afraid he may have to go fairly soon,” Richard said sadly.

What does Richard intend doing when he leaves school?

“I haven’t settled for any career yet,” he said. But I think it probably will be something involving animals.

“Either that, or I shall have animals as a sideline. You know, importing and exporting them.”

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Temperamental, unpredictable and camera-shy. The stars of People Like Us, ITV’s new wild-life series, which begins on Tuesday at 10.5, have all these traits. Among them, also, are stars with a sting.

The series, filmed and directed by 28-year-old cameraman Norman Langley, will include shots of bumble bees building a home, jackdaws swooping on a herd of deer and swarms of ants at work and play.

But how, I asked Norman, do you film the life of an ant? Or a pair of jackdaws perched perilously 50ft. above the ground in an old priory?

Everything, he assured me, was achieved by a combination of logic, instinct and supreme patience. I would rather put it down to ingenuity and clever improvisation.

The series compares the animal society with the human society, hence the title. The programmes will be looking at various kinds of animal societies — from the insect to the ape — and will show how the individual fits into the remarkable pattern that nature has evolved.

The first programme deals with bumble bees. They will be seen flitting over the ground, house-hunting. Their site might be an old mouse-hole, a tussock of dead grass, a discarded sack, or an old tea-chest in a shed.

“We ran and crawled over fields and streams trying to shoot them,” said Norman. “To do close-ups I had to get within two or three inches with my 63 mm. lens.

“Of course, it takes time. Six months on and off to film the bumble-bee story.”

Part of the bumble-bee story was shot indoors, with the bees in specially constructed hives with glass fronts.

Here, for the first time, Norman encountered his biggest problem of the series. How to get the subject used to the powerful light needed for filming?

“After a while,” he said, “the honeycomb in our beehive used to melt. And the bees were buzzing around frantically trying to do running repairs.

“In the end we tried to cool them off with strategically placed fans.”

Norman and his team had to take several close-ups of clusters of flowers swarming with bees — and it was then that he discovered the sting in his “stars.”

“We were all a bit apprehensive,” he said. “More so after the technical adviser got stung!”

Norman — six years working on programmes like Animal Story and Breakthrough — found the trickiest subject in the six-programme series was the ant.

“They disliked the heat, too,” he said. “We could never get them used to it.” Shooting was divided between an ant-heap in a Surrey wood, and an artificial nest of plaster, sandwiched between glass.

In the programme dealing with the jackdaws the problem facing Norman was how to get up to them in their castle at Ripley, Surrey. In the end, the team built a scaffold and used a massive 600 mm. lens to get close-ups.

The jackdaws also provided one of the most unusual shots in the series. In Richmond Park — a few miles from Ripley as the jackdaw flies — they were filmed swooping down on deer, stealing tufts of hair from their backs to line their nests.

Oddly enough, the deer seemed resigned to losing their winter coats this way.

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The ancient art of falconry is the subject of “The Feathers of Death” in Granada’s Another World series on Tuesday. In the programme Douglas Fisher follows the training programme of a wild young Spanish falcon. Here is the story of a young man who has already faced this several times himself — Mr. Terry Pickford of Blackpool, one of the North’s leading falconers

KING HAROLD was an expert with falcons. In medieval times no thane or noble worth his salt would have been seen hunting without them.

But the eminent early aficionados of falcons and falconry couldn’t have seemed more remote as we strode out across the featureless stretch of heathland just outside Blackpool.

The gaudy painted face of the “Golden Mile” was only a few minutes away — as the hawk flies.

And the falconer I was accompanying had already spent the best part of his day at the drawing board in the British Aircraft Corporation works at Warton.

Only the elaborately reinforced glove he was wearing conjured up any of the romantic imagery I have always associated with this most ancient of British sports.

The Goshawk, with eyes like the Angel of Death, poised rigidly on his wrist.

“Some people will tell you that their birds have a genuine love for them,” said Mr. Terry Pickford, 19-year-old junior technician and modern-day falconer.

“I think that’s a lot of poppycock myself. The only thing that binds a bird of prey like this to its owner is the food that he provides for it.

“Love doesn’t enter into the arrangement at all — as far as the bird is concerned.

“Keeping a hawk or a falcon does have its commercial possibilities. Only recently I was invited to use the bird to scare away sparrows, which were proving a bit of a problem to several factories.

“And if you’re well known you get work with your falcon in films or by providing pictures for magazines. But generally the birds cost more than they make.”

Mr. Pickford, who calls his bird Blitz, got interested in falconry five years ago after reading a book about golden eagles.

“But getting a good bird is a lot more difficult than you would think,” he said.

“You can’t go into a pet-shop and buy yourself a hawk or a falcon. You can’t buy any British birds in Britain — it’s against the law.

“You have to send abroad for them, and it can be an expensive business.”

A Goshawk like Blitz costs about £15 [£260 in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed]. Falcons can cost £40 [£680] or more.

And when the bird has been bought the problems are still only just beginning.

“It has to be trained to eat from you,” he said. “Trained to sit on your wrist. Trained to return to your wrist. And trained eventually to hunt.”

Food is another expensive item. A bird has to be fed freshly killed meat every day. And the traditional equipment of the falconer, the glove, the jesses, the leash and the perches all add more to the bill.

“My advice to a potential falconer is not to bother — unless he is as wildly enthusiastic as I am,” said Mr. Pickford.

“The more work you do with these birds, the more you realise what you have to learn.”

But with all its problems the sport which was originally the birthright of princes never loses its fascination for the young Blackpool engineer.

“There’s marvellous satisfaction in training a wild creature like this into such a superbly efficient hunting instrument,” he said.

A cruel sport?

“Only to the falconer,” he said. “In the course of a day’s hunting, you are likely to have to run about 10 miles through broken country and over all kinds of obstacles.”

And when I pressed the point:

“It’s much less cruel than a gun. If you shoot a rabbit and only manage to wound it, it may take days to die.

“If a falcon hits, it kills instantaneously. And if it misses, the quarry gets away unharmed.”

Falconry and a general study of ornithology doesn’t leave much time for any other kind of relaxation for Mr. Pickford. Like girl friends.

“Most of the ones I had didn’t really like the falcon,” he grinned.

“I suppose they were jealous.”

The post No love from falcons appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

MISS ANGELA LLOYD is 21, has big, blue eyes and blonde hair that curls perkily at shoulder length.

She has rather unusual playmates, too, like Denise, a rheumatic Muscovy duck that can’t swim; Rebel, a rabbit that’s always on the run; and a gaggle of tame, baby sparrows that peck the grit from the soles of your shoes.

We all shared an interview in a backyard of the staff quarters at the Children’s Zoo, London, where Angela works and her off-beat animal chums live.

You can see Angela talking about rats and mice as pets on Zoo Time, on Wednesday. She is something of an expert on pet rodents, having kept and bred them since she was six years old. She talked to me about life in the Children’s Zoo … and the sort of things youngsters say and do when visiting this miniature Disneyland.

First, let’s introduce Denise and Rebel. Poor old Denise, aged about five — which I am assured is elderly for a Muscovy duck — has rheumatism in her webbed feet. As the affliction has dried out her feathers, it has upset her buoyancy and she can’t swim any more. A disastrous state of affairs for a duck.

But the girl helpers at the Children’s Zoo have adopted Denise as their personal pet. They even bath the old girl. She lives cosily in a bale of straw behind the staff quarters, growing old gracefully.

Rebel, the rabbit, is her bale-mate and keeps escaping from his pen in the Zoo. So he has been posted to the rear of the staff quarters, which are adequately enclosed but where he can roam freely.

“I’ve been working here for nearly three years,” said Angela. “Although I appeared in several TV plays and stage productions as a juvenile, animals have always been my first love.

“I adore the work. It gives me a chance to be near all the animals I’m interested in, mice and rats particularly.

“I look after and study rodents in the mornings. In the afternoons I take the children on pony rides. The children fail into two categories — the very shy ones and the super-confident, leave-me-alone-I’m-all-right ones.

“In fact, one little boy once told me: ‘Leave me alone. I know what to do. I’ve watched Rawhide!’ And he dug in his heels and almost managed to get a normally placid Shetland pony to break into a gallop.

“Hamsters, too, amuse the children. One day, two little boys watched fascinated for hours while a hamster chewed his way patiently through his hutch.

“Once he had escaped, they came and told me. ‘He’s super,’ they said. ‘Will you ask him to do it again?’

“And there was a sad scene when a little girl fed Hector, one of our mischievous goats, with a fresh loaf of bread.

“Hector left the bread … and gobbled the wax-paper wrapping. He loves that, although it’s bad for his digestion.

“But the little girl cried because she thought Hector didn’t want her loaf.

“I reassured her and told her he was a special goat who liked to eat paper and rags. Next time I looked around, sure enough, the little girl was feeding Hector her frilly handkerchief.”

Then Angela prepared to go and feed her mice. Mice? Weren’t girls supposed to be terrified of mice? “That’s silly,” said Angela. “They’re lovable little things.

“But I can’t stand spiders. Ugh. Even a tiny one sends me scampering away screaming.”

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THE wisest dogs in the world, sheepdogs of the vast Australian sheep ranges, will be in Granada’s Animal Parade on Monday.

Their daily work of sheep handling will be seen in trials filmed in Australia. Trials which display what must surely be the perfect understanding between human and animal intelligence as the dogs carry out the commands of their masters.

These dogs are Border Collies, originally from the English-Scottish borders.

They are mainly black and white in colour, alert, medium sized, lithe and fit, fast as the wind, and supremely intelligent.

Practical dogs, their standing is based on their working ability, not on their looks as with almost every other breed of dog.

Although the trials you will see in the Australian pictures vary slightly from the accepted British procedure — adapted quite practically to meet the special needs of Australia’s sheep farming pattern, the ultimate purpose is entirely the same — to produce a quiet and efficient working dog, capable of the steady and careful treat ment of sheep.

When the skilful teamwork of shepherd and dog is seen, either on television or in the countryside, and trials can be seen everywhere in the North of England, something of the comradeship that exists be tween the lonely hill shepherd and his dog will be appreciated.

Theirs is not a circus performance, a repetition of taught tricks, but a thought-out reaction to the whims of sheep to obtain their mastery.

More than one shepherd owes his life to his dog’s intelligence in winter drama on the high hills of this country.

Lost in snow and cloud on the fells of Lakeland, one young shepherd was guided over rocky slopes by hanging on to the tail of his collie, a journey to safety he could never have made otherwise.

In similar country, a 10-year old trials champion collie worked alone for three hours to bring some marooned sheep down a crag face; and one sheepdog of the Lancashire hills hung on grimly to the fleece of a sheep, preventing it from slipping to drown in a moorland stream, until relieved by his master.

And there is the famous example of devotion to duty of Tip, the 12 year old Derbyshire sheepdog which guarded her master’s body for 15 weeks on the storm swept moors of the Peak District.

Uncanny though the skill of the sheepdog appears on the trials field to the watching townsman, its intelligence and ability to reason have astounded even hardened sheepmen who have known it all their lives.

And as you watch them on Monday remember too that without them vast areas of moorland would be unproductive. For these moors are only suitable for sheep grazing and without his sheepdog the shepherd could not manage live flocks there.

For man for all his genius has still not been able to produce a machine to do the job of the working sheepdog.

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HOW does a homing pigeon find its way home? There are as many theories flying about on that score as there are racing pigeons in The Fancy, which is the name experts use for their sport.

And there are about 3,750,000 racing pigeons — not to be confused with the fat, strutting variety that inhabit Trafalgar Square and public places in most of the cities of Britain.

Granada’s Animal Parade on Monday tells of the life of the racing pigeon from the moment it pecks its way out of its shell.

Training methods are shown which can develop a bird’s speed to a fantastic 90 miles an hour.

The popular image of a pigeon fancier is a miner or a docker, but many prominent people, including the Queen, Sir Gordon Richards and breakfast foods millionaire Frank George, have been “bitten”.

Mr. George is one who has been puzzling over this homing instinct ever since 1919, when he bought his first pair of birds.

Today, with about 400 birds housed in his luxury lofts at his home in Wellingborough, Northants, he confesses himself defeated

“All I know is that they are wonderful creatures. They are often 15 hours on the wing. They get home tired — but they get back. Don’t ask me how or why,” he told me.

One theory is “astronavigation” — a system whereby the pigeon is said to use the position of the sun to plot its course.

This, it is believed, gets the bird to within a few miles of its home loft when “visual reckoning” takes over. The pigeons keen eyesight, and

many hours of practice flying near its loft, enable it to pick out the tiniest identifying objects.

Mr. J. W. Selby-Thomas, secretary of the National Homing Union, believes that the pigeon possesses a magnetically-attuned mind and flies a magnetic course. He cites an area around Penzance, in Cornwall.

“This district is rich in metal ores and these upset the finely attuned brains of the flyers so that they cannot strike a homing course. They fly round and round until they are exhausted and lost,” he claims.

Wing Commander W. D. Lea-Rayner, wartime head of the Air Ministry’s Pigeon Section, believes the whole of this controversial homing instinct centres on the brain-power of individual birds. He said:

“It is just like pilots in the days before radar. All flyers got the same sort of information from their instruments. The good pilots deduced the right result and flew to their right destinations; the indifferent pilots came to wrong conclusions and found themselves off course.

“Similarly, all homing pigeons get the same information and can see the same objects. Some have the strength of their convictions and fly straight back home. Others dither and dither until all sense of direction is lost.”

No true-blue pigeon fancier derides the theory of another, but Sir Gordon Richards came near to disagreeing with Wing Commander Lea-Rayner.

“Some birds are brainier than others, but how can you account for some pigeons returning to their original lofts two or three years after they’ve settled down in another?

“Several birds I bought in the North of England eventually found their way back home and birds I sold to fanciers in far-distant places came back to me,” he pointed out.

Sir Gordon, who gave up keeping pigeons when horse training claimed his full time, remembers with sadness the time he demolished his lofts.

“For months many of the pigeons I had to get rid of came back and sat around the place looking bewildered. The amazement on their faces had to be seen to be believed,” said Sir Gordon.

Sifting out all the theories (and carrying out his own research) is Cambridge zoologist C. Pennyquick. Ultimately Mr. Pennyquick will, no doubt, come up with a learned and scientific theory, but I doubt if it will settle the arguments that rage in Britain’s 3,000 pigeon clubs and associations.

Pigeon fancying goes back to the Ancient Egyptians and for nearly 5,000 years these game little flyers have been finding their way home, often over distances of several hundreds of miles.

The history of pigeon racing is patterned with rich stories. N. M. Rothschild, of the banking family, is said to have made a big “killing” on the Stock Exchange after getting a “scoop” on the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo — by pigeon post.

The Duke of Wellington, who had an extensive loft and many famous birds, regarded them as part of his military equipment. Pigeons have been on the military strengths of many countries. During World War II, the Air Ministry had more than 30,000 on its “feed” roll.

Ounce for ounce, top-class pigeons are probably more expensive than star soccer players.

In Mr. George’s Wellingborough lofts are the Flying Dutchman, which cost him £750 [£13,500 in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed], King Pin (£350 [£6,250]) and News Lad (£500 [£9,000]) and a few years back he paid an all-time high figure of over £800 [£14,300] for the winner of the pigeon racing classic — the Barcelona-Holland race.

A record of another sort was the 900 miles which a Swedish-owned bird flew in one day. The longest recorded distance in this country was 725 miles flown from sun-up in the North of Scotland to dusk in a remote part of Cornwall.

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IN a clearing in the African jungle a duiker, an antelope-like animal, is cowering. Beside her is her newly-born baby, his legs still wobbly.

In the undergrowth a pack of wild dogs is scavenging. Two lives hang in the balance. If the dogs catch the scent the duikers will be torn to pieces.

A minute-by-minute account of this exciting and terrifying drama of the wilderness is one of the incidents in the first of a new series of Granada nature programmes, The Animal Story.

“Monday’s episode is entitled ’Family Circle’ and the plight of the duikers is an excellent example of the problem we are dealing with — the method of bringing up a family in the wilderness.” explained the man who will be doing the commentaries, Dr. Desmond Morris, Curator of Mammals at the London Zoo.

“If the duiker is to survive in the jungle it has to be able to outpace its natural persecutors almost within hours of being born.”

If you want to know the fate of the duikers in the film watch Monday’s episode.

Dr. Morris went on to talk about the other features of the programme — the big cats, the monkeys and the fishes.

“For the big cats, fear of aggressors isn’t a very acute problem,” he said. “But other dangers await the cubs. Until he is old enough to hunt for himself, the baby is dependent on the parent for food, and a cub that wanders away from home will not survive long.”

To illustrate the point, Dr. Morris uses some fascinating film about a leopard and her cubs in the mountains of Northern Asia.

The babies are adventurous and inquisitive, but the way in which the mother bundles them back into the cave when they wander makes it clear how well aware she is of the danger awaiting them beyond her immediate vicinity. Personal experience of danger has probably taught the snow leopard her mothercraft. But who taught it to Toli, the orang-utan who has been in captivity since she was a baby?

This question arose recently when Toli’s baby was born — the first orang-utan to be born at London Zoo in 130 years.

“Although she had no previous experience of handling young, Toli instinctively knew just what to do,” explained Dr. Morris. “It was fascinating work, watching and filming her as she washed and tended the baby as if she had been doing it for years.”

Survival for the young monkey in the wilderness depends usually on the baby’s ability to cling on to his mother’s fur when danger threatens.

For sheer novelty, so far as protection is concerned, the mouth breeder fish takes some beating.

In the savage underwater jungle of the tropics, the female mouth-breeder takes her eggs into her mouth after they have been laid — and “gargles” with them until they are hatched.

“This not only keeps them safe from aggressors — but keeps them properly oxygenated.” explained Dr. Morris.

Even after the eggs are hatched the mother’s work isn’t done. Her brood follow her through the underwater jungle in a little cloud, and the slightest hint of danger will send them speeding for safety, straight back into her mouth.

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In the unpopularity poll the most disliked was the snake followed by the spider. The lion, eighth in the popularity poll, was also third in the unpopularity poll.

Then came the rat, crocodile, skunk, gorilla, hippopotamus, rhino and in the last place, the tiger.

It took me several weeks to check almost 50,000 votes from young viewers and also to choose the two most original suggestions for new features in future programmes.

Choice for the junior prize (the model zoo) was the entry sent in by eight-year-old Janice Ironmonger of Harrow-drive, Hornchurch, Essex. Janice — an accurate observer of animal behaviour—described strange goings on in the penguin pool and asked to see this item again.

The senior prizewinner (who wins zoo books) is 14 year old Carol Hill of Bridge-road, Trent Vale, Stoke-on-Trent. Carol would like to see a feature on prehistoric animals and of animals of the future.

Finally. I would like to thank all the boys and girls who sent in their suggestions, many of which will find their way into new animal programmes.

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OXFORD graduate Ramona Morris would like a young wolf to bring up at home. For she is making a study of wolf signals in an attempt to communicate with these animals in the only language they understand.

Ramona’s interest springs from co-operation with her husband. Desmond Morris, who presents Granada’s Zoo Time.

Viewers may recall having been shown in a recent programme the proper way to “talk” to a chimpanzee. Recordings of various chimp noises were played and the relationship of these different sounds to chimp behaviour explained. Since then, Morris has been making further research.

“People who make a point of talking to animals almost always use the ‘Hullo. Aren’t you pretty!’ sort of approach,” he complains. “But, of course, it doesn’t mean a thing to the creature that’s being addressed; although sometimes an animal does pick up something from a tone of voice. If one must talk to an animal the sensible thing is to try to imitate the language of its species.”

Tigers and eagles are the latest creatures with which Morris has established some degree of direct communication. Every day as he walks from his nearby flat to The Den at London’s Regent’s Park Zoo he pauses for a word with the tigers in their own tongue or exchanges greetings with the eagles.

“The tiger’s particular greeting noise is a sort of loud, stuttering purr,” says Morris, as he gives an impressive imitation of this jungle sound.

“Of course, if people hear you doing this outside the cages they stare as if you’re crazy. They stare even more if, for some reason, the tiger isn’t interested at that moment and doesn’t reply.

“The African sea eagle’s idea of a friendly word is a cry like a high-pitched scream attempted by someone suffering from laryngitis, while the Bateleur eagle’s ‘Good morning’ is more of a growling scream. These fellows and 1 have quite a big session as I pass their cages.”

Morris’s eagle mimicry is even more terrific than his tiger talk. But it was through practising chimp chatter that he stirred up a spot of trouble in a pet shop.

“I was in the shop with a friend,” he told me, “and started to have a word with a lonely looking female chimp. The result was pandemonium. Instantly, the animal got into such a state of frantic excitement that she began flinging herself about and shaking the bars of her cage with tremendous violence.

“That set off all the monkeys in the shop in a hullabaloo. Puppies began barking and birds screeching, and in seconds the place was in such an uproar that my friend pulled me away.”

As to those wolf signals, Morris emphasises that they are visual, not aural. Not a whistle in the language!

The post Ramona Morris wants a wolf – to talk to! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.