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

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In the open paddocks and runs of the smaller deer and wild-fowl, there was great good-temper and content. The Japanese deer were all curled up sleeping in the cold air round their food-box, which was filled with chopped straw, bran, and oats, and swarming with impudent Zoo sparrows. These little robbers, as also the Zoo starlings, are in such good case from the abundance of food left at their disposal by the fastidious strangers in the cages and paddocks, that, like the owls during the plagues of mice on the Pampas, they defy the weather and the seasons, and marry and bring up irregular families irrespective of the almanac. Dozens of them, as well as many of the starlings, had selected this particular cold morning of all others to take a bath. The gradually sloping drinking-pools in most of the runs, especially the tortoises’ baths, which have a wide shallow entrance, exactly suit their wants. Many were washing and splashing in the pools in the swine runs, while others were drying themselves in rows on the sunny wall above the styes, with an immense amount of fuss and vulgarly loud conversation.