Past Her Prime...

Well, I paid for my athleticism moving a bit quicker than usual at unusual angles at Ping Pong yesterday! Aching all over. Been reading up on the rules. They did change the size of the balls in 2000! There must have been a lot of folk caught with the wrong size balls.... And of course, it’s called Table Tennis, not Ping Pong…

Managed to get to the Budongo Trail Lecture Theatre, via the wrong venue, just in time. The talk today was by Dr Samantha Bremner-Harrison, who started her career as a volunteer in Edinburgh Zoo.

She was talking about ‘The Effect of Personality on Re-introduction Success’, and it was as dry as the title suggests…

There is a scale from Bold ---> Shy and she spent a few years (funded by the zoo) studying groups of rural, urban and island foxes in Canada and California and an island somewhere … and ranking them. They were tagged and radio collared.

And guess what? Her research showed that in any group of released foxes, there should be a range of personalities … if you just release all the Bold ones in an area with predators (ie most of the world) it will be unsuccessful.

The ones who died/were killed in the urban and rural groups were mostly the Bold foxes. The ones who bred most successfully on the island with no predators were the Bold foxes.

I just kept thinking - I wish I’d known that sitting watching foxes all day for years, devising wee tests for them, was a possible career choice when I joined a queue at a High School careers night and discovered, when I got to the desk, it was for Teaching College...

She said she’d like to study snails - and yes, there are Bold and Shy snails, but they’re easier to study - they don’t go far.

Anyway, I think it should be Bold/Cautious… Or Fearless/Fearful...

I hung around the chimps (who had created a racket all the way through her talk) afterwards. This is Cindy, relaxing. She’s the oldest chimp, 48 years old, and used to be a star in the un-PC ‘Chimps’ Tea Party’ days of yore. Her favourite foods are spring onions and leeks. The zookeeper was telling a group about how clever she is. He had been cleaning something and went into her cage without his rings on. She pointed to his bare fingers. She also pointed to a photo of herself on his laptop screen. She’s very good at puzzles. This is taken through a Very Dirty Window. And very low light.

Wonder what she’s thinking about. Possibly her heyday - when she was a star...