In case nobody has seen this, the list for the first and early breeding records for mammals in the UK and Eire is available on the Bartlett society website, fascinating read. Biggest surprise for me so far is that Glasgow zoo was the first to breed Amur tigers in the UK. First and early breeding records for mammals in the UK and Eire - The Bartlett Society
My favourite bit is the hybrids. While I don't necessarily approve of deliberately breeding them, once they exist I find them fascinating. Would've loved to have seen the Swamp x Agile Wallaby or the Cherry-crowned Mangabey x Rhesus Macaque, or the Ankole x American Bison!
Also is the Geoffroy's cat, I also believe that these are mentioned in the Glasgow Zoo Year booklets which was produced and covered numerous husbandry topics which also made there way into the IZYB's and Ratel's.
I've just added two new entries: Little Red Flying Fox (Wingham) and Wolverine (Cotswold WP). This is the first entry for both collections; surprisingly so, in the case of the latter.
Question, Whipsnade is listed as having bred the first Eurasian moose, but weren't the moose at Whipsnade a gift from Canada? I see there is no listing for blesbok?
The Zoo Life magazine for Spring 1956 states that Whipsnade supplied Quebec Zoo with a pair of Bactrian camels in exchange for a trio of moose and the first post-war moose in the UK, a male “Mike”, arrived from Canada at the end of February. (I cannot find a reference as to when the other two animals arrived.) The ZSL Annual Report for 1960 confirms that a moose was born at Whipsnade that year; it doesn’t state whether it was an American or Eurasian moose.
That's a very good point! As Tim says, the male arrived from Quebec in 1956, but no further animals arrived in 1956 or 1957. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the annual reports for 1958-60 but I would be very interested to learn when the female(s?) arrived and from where. They may have come from Quebec eventually, or they have been sourced from Europe, in which case the Whipsnade births would have been hybrids by today's taxonomy (at the time, of course, only one species was recognised). That's simply because we don't know where the first breeding took place! Ungulates are particularly difficult to research as they were so widely kept on private estates in the 19th Century. Again, we are back to the grey area of subspecies which have now been elevated to full species level which complicates matters even further.
I can confirm that no moose are listed as arriving at Whipsnade in the ZSL Annual Report for 1959. Frustratingly, my collection of ZSL Annual Reports is missing the one for 1958 but next time I'm in the ZSL Library I'll look at the Annual Report for that year to see what information is supplied about moose arrivals.
It seems that at least one female must have arrived in 1958. It's a shame that only births and arrivals were recorded in the annual reports in those days - it would be really interesting to know if the 1956 male survived and sired the 1960 calf, or whether a new male was acquired with the female(s) in 1958.
If it is the case that moose are in fact North American, then would that mean HWP would have the first UK breeding of European moose? Or did the Norfolk wildlife park ever keep/breed European moose?
Interestingly, but perhaps of little relevence to this thread, the first moose to be kept in the UK belonged to the Duke of Richmond. He kept them at his menagerie at Goodwood. General Carleton, the govenor general of Canada, sent him a young female in 1766 which died ten months later in 1767. It was followed by a second female which died the following year. A bull was received in 1770 and a second in 1773. At around about the same time, Lord Rockingham also owned a bull while Lady North (the then priminister's wife) owned a female. Yet another female that originally belonged to the King, was passed to Horace Walpole and then on to the Countess of Upper Ossory who kept it at Ampthill Park in Bedfordshire. So although there is no evidence to suggest that Alces, of either taxa, bred prior to the Whipsnade animals, there was certainly the potential for a first breeding long before the 1960 event.
