Donors of Reptiles to London Zoo 1915: 4. Harold Duncan Foster

The first example of an amateur reptile keeper I have found so far from the list given by Clin Keeling of those individuals who donated specimens to London Zoo around the time of the beginning of the First World War is Harold Duncan Foster. He gave two Slow Worms, a Delande's Gecko†, a Green Lizard, two European Tree-frogs, a Fire-bellied Toad, a Yellow-bellied Toad and two Great Crested Newts.

In the 1911 Census he is shown at the same address, namely, 43 Queen's Grove, St John's Wood — only a short walk from the Zoo. Born in Marylebone, he was a colliery owner, single, and employed a parlourmaid, another servant and a cook.

He married Alice G Anderson at Marylebone in 1913. Was it a coincidence that his reptiles and amphibians went to the Zoo in 1914? Or was it a case of me or those creatures? Alice died in Hampstead in 1934 aged 52.

Harold Duncan Foster died, a widower, in Hampstead in 1955, aged 71.

There is information on his family history at:
http://www.dannebrog.biz/whieldon/furley.pdf

†Delaland's Gecko?

Donors of Reptiles to London Zoo 1915: 3. Guy Aylmer

Following up this series of posts, this is what Clin Keeling wrote in A Short History of British Reptile Keeping:

It's 8th August 1914 and one Guy Aylmer of Risby Manor, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, enriches the 1883 reptile house with two Black-collared Cobras, an African Rock Python, a Green Night Snake, a Burrowing Viper, a Rufescent Snake, an Emerald Tree Snake (Boa?), a Smoky Snake (Tropidonotus fuliginoides), four Tree Frogs (species not stated), and a Senegal Chameleon. Again, we hear no more of him, and once again I suspect here was someone entrusting his stock to good and experienced hands before going off to face the foe; the contest was less than a week old, and this makes me wonder whether he was possibly an officer on the reserve list. Through the helpful offices of Mrs. S. Greening of the Barrow (a nearby village) local History Society, I've discovered he was the son of Colonel Henry Leycester Aylmer, who was living at the Manor in 1912, which rather strengthens this idea. The fact remains, though, that zoology has heard no more of him, so in all probability he was soon to find a far-off grave.

In fact, Guy Aylmer not only survived the war but achieved lasting fame as a falconer, as we shall see.

Guy Aylmer was born on 20 April 1887 at Corsley House, Warminster, Wiltshire. He was educated at Winchester (he was at the school on the day of the 1901 census). He sent many reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates to London Zoo from Sierra Leone. In view of his later career and the fact that references are made to him with respect to the trees of Sierra Leone, I strongly suspect he was working in the Colonial Service in connexion with forestry in the years before the the war.

There is a reference to his having collected Picathartes gymncephalus (White-necked Rockfowl) in Sierra Leone in 1912. He also played a key part in showing that the Servaline Cat was not a separate species but a a colour form of the Serval. He found a litter with both forms present.

Mr. Guy Aylmer, F.Z.S., exhibited some skins of mammals from Sierra Leone, including those of a Serval (Felis capensis) and of a Servaline Cat (F. servalina), and stated that a native had brought him two kittens, almost certainly from the same litter, one being spotted like the Serval, and the other obscurely speckled like the Servaline Cat. This he regarded as proof that the differences between the Servals and Servaline Cats are of no systematic importance.

The many reptiles and amphibians presented to London Zoo at this time proved to be of wider interest. There is no evidence he was other than a temporary keeper of reptiles and amphibians. Edward G. Boulenger, Curator of Reptiles at the Zoo (not to be confused with his father, George Albert Boulenger FRS 1858-1937 of the British Museum (Natural History)), reported in 1915:

Among a collection of Reptiles and Batrachians collected by Mr. Guy Aylmer, F.Z.S., in Sierra Leone last year and presented by him to the Society, I found two frogs of the genus Rappia which have not hitherto been recorded. I propose for one the name of Rappia aylmeri, after its discoverer, for the other Rappia chlorostea, from the green colour of its bones, visible through the skin…

Sadly for Aylmer, R. aylmeri disappeared as a synonym of Hyperolius fusciventris. R. chlorostea, however, survives as Hyperolius chlorosteus.

Guy Aylmer was commissioned as a temporary (i.e. he was not a regular solider) 2nd Lieutenant in September 1914 and served with 12th Battalion, King’s Royal Rifle Corps. He was promoted to Lieutenant virtually immediately. The 12th (Service) Battalion was part of Kitchener’s New Army. It was formed at Winchester on 21 September 1914. It landed at Boulogne on 22 July 1915. Aylmer survived the Somme, Passchendaele and Cambrai. From the 22 battalions in the regiment 12,824 men were killed and more than 123,000 were wounded.

He was promoted to Captain on 10 February 1915. He then moves up and down between Captain and, when employed as second-in-command of his battalion, Acting Major. Then on 27 November 1917, the London Gazette stated that he had resigned his commission to resume employment under the Colonial Office with effect from 1 December 1917 and that he was granted the honorary rank of Major.

During the war, he married Christabel Henrietta Rushbrooke on 12 January 1916. A son was born in 1925.

I have not been able to find anything of his activities in the 1920s, other than that in 1922 he published a paper, The Snakes of Sierra Leone (Sierra Leone Studies 5, 7-37). There are other possible references to a Major G. Aylmer in the Indian Army from 1919 until 1924 but I do not know if it is the same person. Similarly, a Major G Aylmer was chairman of a company that was wound up in 1925.

In the 1930s, there is much more information and this is where he achieved fame amongst the falconers. There are numerous comments on internet fora but this one sums up what he achieved in inventing, with a Bill Ruttledge, the ‘aylmeri’ jess:

Every day since I have flown my hawks and eagles, I have thanked Major Guy Aylmer for the peace of mind his invention has given falconers like myself, who religiously use the aylmeri jess. He came up with the idea whilst he was Conservator of Forests in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. In his spare time he was not only Master of the Khartoum Foot Foxhounds, but flying his eyas and wild-caught Red-Headed Merlins. It was whilst flying, that these merlins, with their jesses trailing, attracted the unwanted attention of piratical birds, thinking the merlins were carrying snakes etc. His idea was to fly his merlins with just the anklets, leaving the field jess behind in the grip of the falconers glove. Little did he realise what a great contribution he would be making to future falconry, and that countless hundreds of hunting hawks and falcons lives would be safer. For this alone his name should live on as long as falconry.

http://www.eaglehunter.co.uk/Articles/Thank-you-GuyAylmer.htm

Aylmeri jesses are sold by falconry suppliers.

I then came across a fascinating account, published in 2007, by Mary Keenan of her tracing the steps of her mother’s cousin who was part of an expedition to the Sudan in 1933-34 (Sudan Studies 2007, 35, 3-17)(http://www.sssuk.org/SS/SS35.pdf). The sustained efforts she made to do so would put most people to shame.
Her mother’s cousin was James Edgar Dandy (1903-1976) then an Assistant at the Natural History Museum but eventually Keeper of Botany. The original expedition comprised the leader, Cecil Graham Traquair Morison (Agricultural Chemistry, Oxford), Dunstan Skilbeck (Soil Science, Oxford) and Dandy. Descendants provided Mary Keenan with the expedition diary and photographs.

When in Khartoum (arrived 16 December 1933), Dandy stayed with Guy Aylmer and his wife. They showed the nearby zoo and Sunt Forest, as well as the sights of Khartoum, Omdurman and Shambat.

Mary Keenan was shown the house, which was recognised from a photograph, when she was tracing the steps of the expedition in 2007.

Aylmer’s work (including an unpublished checklist of the trees and shrubs) in Sudan is quoted in botanical reviews and floras, for example, Flora of the Sudan-Uganda Border East of the Nile by I Friis and K Vollesen (Kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 1998).

In 1935, the following notice appeared in the London Gazette:

Whitehall, January 21, 1935

The KING has been pleased to give and to grant unto Guy Aylmer, Esq., Conservator of Forests, Sudan Government, His Majesty’s Royal licence and authority to wear the Insignia of the Fourth Class of the Order of the Nile, which Decoration has been conferred upon him by his Majesty the King of Egypt, in recognition of valuable services rendered by him.
By 1939 he was back in England. My guess is that he would probably have retired in 1937 at the age of 50, the then usual age for retirement in the Colonial Service.

The Chelmsford Chronicle of 3 February 1939:

Otter Hounds Kill 38

At the annual meeting of the Eastern Counties Otter Hunt, held at Colchester...The Hunt Committee for the 1939 season consists of...Major G Aylmer…The Master reported a successful season, during which hounds were out on 81 days, finding 63 otters and accounting for 38 of them...Prospects for the coming season were excellent, and reports as to otters working the country are most satisfactory.

The Times of 15 September 1947:

Lost Falcon Found

The trained falcon lost by Major Guy Aylmer, of Risby, near Bury St. Edmunds, which is thought might have been shot on Thursday by a gamekeeper who saw a bird attacking partridges on the Denston Hall Estate, Newmarket, has been found in the Kentford district...

There is a report on an internet forum that he also lived in Spain.

Guy Aylmer died in 1954, aged 66. He was clearly a man of his class and of his time: a falconer and a hunter as well as a naturalist. His wife had died in 1951, aged 64. There is a gravestone for Christabel, her father and Guy Aylmer in Rushbrooke, Suffolk. He appears to have married again, to Beryl E Bland, in 1952; there is a matching death for her in 1959.

Aylmer Close in Risby, Suffolk is named after the family.

------------------------------
UPDATE—December 2014

Professor Bryan Tyson read the original post and provided the additional information:

I met Guy Aylmer in 1943, when he was living with his wife and son Michael (who had just started at Cambridge)  in Risby Manor—a large house a little further down the Green than ours (which is today called “Little Manor" but was, in those days, known as “Shepherd Elmer's cottage" where we lived throughout the War.) His house was majestic enough, with its white half-timbered frontage and  large well-cultivated grounds.  He took me on many a trip when I was about ten years old, showing me the nests of garden warblers and blackcaps, whose eggs were a little difficult to distinguish from one another; and upstairs in the rather cold house, where a pair of house martins had actually nested against the glass of his study windows, so that you could see into their nest! I remember he also had the head of a Tiger that he had shot on safari, and a big model Malayan house-boat.His wife used to make a fuss if mud was walked into the house, and we had to take our shoes off, I recall, before we went upstairs. His egg-collection was an absolute dream: all set out in cabinets with glass-topped drawers that slid open at the touch. I remember shyly offering the information I had received from a boy at school that it was impossible to “blow” kingfishers’ eggs, as their shells were too frail. For answer he opened a cabinet drawer to reveal a line of little round kingfishers’ eggs like a row of smiling teeth. He taught me a great deal about birds on our expeditions, and I remember his envy when I showed him my Stone Curlew’s egg (he didn’t have one).

On one occasion, he called over at our house with his son Michael, to see if I would accompany them to play in a scratch team, in a cricket match somewhere. I said yes, and we drove there in his car. The experience was positive, though I do not remember scoring many runs; but I remember observing that Michael—who was about eighteen at the time—breathed through his mouth with a slight panting. He had a heart condition, which had prevented him following his father into the Army, and which threatened to curtail his career in farming (he was reading something to do with Agriculture, I believe.) The irony is that he survived and prospered, while his father, the Major, fell dead one day in 1954,  at age 66, while gardening; and it transpired that he had the same heart defect as his son, but  it had gone undiagnosed all his life. Mrs. Aylmer, whom I recall as a very tanned lady, predeceased him, dying of cancer in 1951 at the age of 64,  shortly after we left the village. You mention his grave in Rushbrooke cemetery; but there is a gravestone for Guy Aylmer in Risby churchyard (where my own parents are buried.) It reads simply “Guy Aylmer. Falconer and Gentleman."

Henderson Island Rats: nil desperandum

One of the most disappointing pieces of news this year came from the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). The massive international effort in 2011 to rid the Pacific island, Henderson, a British possession in the Pitcairn group, of rats had not been successful. However, the reports indicate that the population had been greatly reduced and that the colonies of nesting seabirds were recovering as a result.

The Polynesian or Pacific rat (Rattus exulans) was introduced during the expansion of the Polynesians across the Pacific. Henderson was abandoned but the rats, identified as a major predator on nestling sea birds, remained. Quoting from the Henderson Island News (Issue 5):

Rats have had a devastating effect on the island, killing over 25,000 petrel chicks a year and driving the Henderson petrel towards extinction. Seabirds, which would have numbered in the millions before rats arrived, have beenreduced to just 40,000 pairs. Rats have also been limiting the populations of other endemic bird species, altered the forest through seed consumption, and preyed upon marine turtle hatchlings and Henderson’s unique invertebrate populations. 

The job of covering the island 43 square km in area with rodenticide (while capturing, holding (and breeding) Henderson rails in captivity until the exercise had been completed) while operating a long way from everywhere was a very great effort and attracted financial support from around the world, as well as from the UK government.

We visited Henderson on October 2010 on MV Clipper Odyssey during a Noble Caledonia Expedition Cruise from Easter Island to Tahiti. By the time we got to Henderson we had visited Ducie Atoll, also in the Pitcairns, now apparently rat free, with its incredible seabird colonies but no land birds. Henderson has its few land birds and some seabirds but in nothing like the numbers on Ducie. While looking in the undergrowth behind the beach we saw a rat and I managed to get a few seconds of video footage. It clearly had not read the information on this species stating that it is nocturnal.

I hope efforts to remove the rats will continue at this World Heritage Site and that those who provided financial support (including many individual RSPB members and expedition cruise passengers and the travel company Zegrahm Expeditions, as well as government and other charities) will continue to do so. Just seeing the contrast between Ducie and Henderson was enough for me to conclude: ...whatever it takes.

Hong Kong Naturalist: Who Was Roy A Pereira?

In my note on tigers in Hong Kong, I mentioned the report by R.A. Pereira. Pereira wrote a number of articles in Hong Kong Naturalist between 1934 and 1938. There were notes on birds from his shooting trips in the New Territories, on the goldfish, on domesticated ducks, on the goldfish, on a tame Crested Bunting, on cage birds in Hong Kong and, of course, on his sighting of the tiger in December 1934. He also raised incubated the eggs of francolins and reared the young to study their development. But who was Pereira and what became of him?

He gives the most information about himself in his account, To Canton on Foot, of taking a party of scouts from the Chinese border to Canton (Guangdong) at Easter 1935. They walked along the Kowloon-Canton Railway for 140 km (88 miles) in slightly over three days. He was a teacher at St Joseph’s College, a secondary school then, and now, on Kennedy Road on Hong Kong Island. The account of this trek would give 21st century teachers in Britain severe palpitations:

Our plan was to hug the railway as much as possible until Canton was reached, both for safety and necessity, as we were unarmed and carried only a few tins of provisions. 

Most of the younger members, who imagined that they could rough it by sleeping on the bare ground with only a flimsy ground-sheet. were sadly disillusioned. There were mosquitoes galore but with the aid of some eucalyptus we managed to avert many of their intended onslaughts. 

To add to the discomfort we had to traverse two pathless iron bridges in complete darkness, when a slip would have meant a broken leg. 

The railway guard advised us not to sleep at the station as the district was infested with bandits adding that one man had been killed that very morning.

From his articles, it is clear that he had come to Hong Kong from Malaya and that he spoke English, Portuguese and Malay with some understanding of Spanish. It also seems to me that he spoke fluent Cantonese and that is how he obtained so much information from villagers in the New Territories.

In searching for more information, the only snippet I came up with was this newspaper report from the Straits Times of 8 April 1925:

His writings ceased in 1938. Publication of the Hong Kong Naturalist ended in 1941 with the Japanese invasion. Had Roy Alfred Pereira left Hong Kong by then? Did he return to Malay(si)a?

My clear impression is that he would have left a lasting impression on his pupils at St Joseph’s as well as being an important contributor to the natural history of Hong Kong in pre-Second World War Years. Does anybody have  any more information?

Note added on 19 June 2018. Roy Alfred Pereira's son has been in touch. I have amended the article to include his full name.

Fructose

The proposed deleterious effects of fructose and, therefore, sucrose (which is broken down in the gut to produce glucose and fructose) in the human diet has hit the headlines in London again this week. The notion that fructose is deleterious over and above any effect of excess energy intake leading to obesity has been around for a number of years now and is vigorously championed by Robert Lustig.

The argument that fructose is special in promoting the onset of type II diabetes and the rest of the ‘metabolic syndrome’ is equally vigorously opposed by a very large group of human nutritionists. Getting meaningful evidence in human nutrition is extremely difficult and every statement has political implications. Those who propose a deleterious rôle of any dietary component are attacked as anti-food industry while those who present evidence in opposition are dismissed by the former as corrupt food, or sugar, or fat industry lobbyists.

Stepping aside from the human nutritional aspects of fructose ingestion is not only a relief but also scientifically illuminating.

A number of commentators have pointed out that hummingbirds live on nectar (mainly sucrose, glucose and fructose) and a few insects. They ingest enormous quantities of sugar every day. Frugivorous birds and mammals also metabolise vast quantities of fructose.

There has been a fair amount of research on the digestion and uptake of sugars from the gut of nectarivores but very little on the metabolism of fructose per se. It would also seem that, at least in frugivorous bats and nectarivorous birds, fructose, like glucose, is used very quickly to provide energy. As I understand it, the story of fructose metabolism goes like this: if liver glycogen stores are low, fructose forms glycogen until the stores are replete (if the biochemical pathways are the same in nectarivorous birds, glycogen must be being formed and broken down very rapidly for fructose to provide an energy source) but If liver glycogen stores are replete, excess fructose is converted to triglyceride in the form of very low density lipoproteins. (At this point I am usually told off by young biochemists for not using the term triacyglycerol instead of triglyceride. I make a short reply.). It is these triglycerides that are blamed for causing insulin resistance (type II diabetes).

So, here is a chance for comparative studies and I do not mean just comparing rat and man. We need to see what happens to fructose in nectarivores and frugivores as well as in animals in which fructose is normally only a small part of the diet. Do nectarivorous and frugivorous birds and mammals ever get to the point at which glycogen stores are replete and there is excess fructose? If so, are triglycerides formed, and what effect do they have?

In a similar vein, does adaptation to high fructose intakes occur? All the experimental evidence I have seen involves suddenly subjecting rats or human volunteers to high intakes of fructose or sucrose. What happens later with continual or continuous ingestion, as in rats and mice living in cane or sugar beet fields or sugar refineries and warehouses?

To return to human nutrition, the question still remains of why some people continue to eat and drink vast quantities of food and/or energy-rich liquids, far in excess of energy expenditure? But again the comparative questions creep in: why do some animals also eat to excess when food is available ad libitum while others do not? For ‘animals’ in the last sentence you can write ‘individuals’ or ‘species’ and try to think of examples of each as an interesting exercise on what is and what is not known.

Does the ‘fructose is bad’ story help or hinder the research effort on these questions?

Whose Genes Are In My Chinchilla?

We are a family of rodentophiles. The current family champion in this pursuit is #2 son, who, for the past ten years, has kept chinchillas, first the late Misses Inca and Chimu and, at present, the ridiculously tame Miss Picchu. It may seem incongruous to keep inhabitants of the Andes in the heat and humidity of Hong Kong but chinchillas are popular pets there, living in air-conditioned comfort for six months of the year and waking up to entertain their diurnal keepers after the latter’s dinner.

When we visit and displace the chinchillas to the dining room from the spare bedroom, talk is inevitably of chinchillas when they are let out each night for a run around the room. We have often talked about the origins of the domestic chinchilla but found that evidence-based information on chinchillas is surprisingly hard to find, especially on the genetic origins of the domestic population and current status in the wild.

Most rodents which are kept as pets were either commensals (mice and rats) or spilled over from laboratory colonies (golden hamster, Mongolian gerbil). By contrast, the chinchilla was bred for its fur and, only later, became a desirable pet, and, even later still, a laboratory animal.

A number of different colour varieties have been bred. This is Picchu, a ridiculously tame Black Ebony chinchilla with aspirations to becoming a supermodel.

While the story of how M.F. Chapman hired 23 men to capture as many chinchillas as possible and that it took these men three years to capture eleven adults is well known, as is the story of their arrival in the U.S.A. in 1923, it is more difficult to find out what happened as the stock was built up in the ranch Chapman built and in the chinchilla ranches that followed in terms of genetic origins.

The general view is that Chapman’s eleven original chinchillas were a montane form of Chinchilla laniger or lanigera (see below on spelling) — the Long-tailed Chinchilla. A smaller form, from lower altitudes (costina) was said to have been trapped out by the time Chapman started his collection.

However, one also reads that, later, some costina form and a few brevicaudata were imported into the U.S.A. and crossed with the chinchillas in ranches. Chinchilla brevicaudata (now known as Chinchilla chinchilla under the rules of priority) — the Short-tailed Chinchilla — is recognised as a separate species. It is written (and repeated) that the male brevicaudata x laniger(a) crosses were sterile but that the females were fertile. When the females were back-crossed, two-thirds of the offspring were sterile.

Because it is said that all chinchillas in the fur and pet trades are derived from the chinchilla ranches of North America, it has been inferred that to a greater or lesser extent the captive population is of an interspecific hybrid derivation. The implication of this inference has, of course, been that the present population must be discounted as a source of animals for possible re-introduction into the wild.

This view also appears to have gained some credence from the breeding of chinchillas for their brevicaudata-type appearance. However, artificial selection can result in markedly changed morphology and the appearance of animals with some of the characters of C. brevicaudata (C. chinchilla) does not mean that the latter species was present in a hybrid ancestry.

However, more recently, and with the ‘re-discovery’ of C. chinchilla in the wild, the conclusions on the hybrid nature of the captive, domestic population have not been supported.

All the information on Chinchilla laniger(a) has been pulled together by Angel E. Spotorno, Carlos A. Zuleta, J. Pablo Valladares, Amy L. Deane, and Jaime E. Jiménez in Mammalian Species Number 758, pages 1-9, published on 15 December 2004 by the American Society of Mammalogists.

Incidentally, and to get nomenclature out of the way, these authors consider the correct name for this species to be Chinchilla laniger — not lanigera. I would say hooray to that since I always knew the species as C. laniger. My edition (4th) of Walker’s Mammals of the World (1983) uses laniger. E.T. Bennett in 1829 changed Molina’s (1782) laniger to lanigera seemingly in a fit of cod-latinitis and recent authors have tended to use lanigera. To add to the confusion, Corbet & Hill’s World List of Mammalian Species (3rd edition, OUP 1991) gives lanigera in the text and laniger as a caption to a drawing. I shall stick with Chinchilla laniger.

To get to the main point of this post and quoting from the paper on the species by Spotorno and colleagues, cytochrome-b gene sequences from mitochondrial DNA showed: no traces of C. brevicaudata variants... were found in any of 5 domestic C. laniger (Spotorno et al. 2004 [Journal of Mammalogy 85:384–388]).

In other words, current evidence favours the view that the domestic chinchilla is pure Chinchilla laniger. That finding, especially if confirmed with larger numbers from diverse sources, does have implications for the conservation of this species. Conservation of the two species is a topic I will turn to in a future post.

A Hong Kong Tiger. A Reminder of What Has Been Lost

Searching for something else, I came across this account of a tiger in the New Territories of Hong Kong in 1934-1935.

I first became aware of tigers in Hong Kong after arriving in the Zoology Department of the University of Hong Kong in 1965 when it was housed in the now-demolished Northcote Science Building on Pokfulam Road. There was a photograph on the wall of the main laboratory/museum showing a tiger killed in the New Territories in 1915

I had also seen Herklots’s summary of sightings and killings of tigers in Hong Kong in his book, The Hong Kong Countryside (South China Morning Post, Hong Hong, 1951) and, like him, had been puzzled why such sightings were met by disbelief in the light of very clear evidence. Hong Kong is, after all, within the range of the tiger and, even until recently, the New Territories was sparsely populated. Moreover, there was no enormous fence separating Hong Kong from the ‘mainland’. And the vast city of Shenzen just over the border wasn’t even a twinkle in a planner’s eye.

This is the article from Hong Kong Naturalist, 1934, 5, 322-323.

TIGER IN THE NEW TERRITORIES 

On the 2nd of November 1934, one Kwai Hing from the village of Lo Wai, Tsun Wan, came to the writer and told him that a “tiger” had appeared at the village the previous night and carried off a pig of approximately 60 catties. The next day the fore foot of the victim was found under a bush,—the tiger having devoured almost the whole animal at one sitting. We were at first sceptical and thought it might have been the work of a couple of wolves. 

Approximately a fortnight later the same man came and reported that the tiger had again made its appearance and killed 3 pigs of about 20 catties each. Two were left behind but the third was carried away and eaten. In a conversation with the writer, the officer in charge of Tsun Wan Police Station stated that he saw the carcass of the two dead pigs and the marks of the killer’s fangs. Towards the end of November a large pig belonging to a villager of Tsung-lung disappeared. Next day one of the village dogs was seen carrying the snout of the lost pig but the remaining part of the animal was never discovered. This must have been the work of the same maurauder [sic] as it would require very many dogs to kill and consume a large pig. Besides, a pig when attacked by dogs would squeal and run, or even attack them, before it could be brought down for good,—which is an almost impossible job for village curs when we consider the size of the victim. 

After, this, all trace of the killer was lost. It had not even left the marks of a single track by which its identity could be determined. We were, however, certain it was either a leopard or a tiger judging from the marks of the teeth on the sides of the two young pigs’ necks.
On Sunday 30th December, 1934 the writer with two Tang cousins from Pat Heung went out shooting Francolins on the hills behind the village of Tai-wo and walked in a south-westerly direction going higher and higher until Tang-Um was reached, when it began to rain rather heavily. At this moment we heard what seemed to be a very distant roar and the two Chinese immediately said it was a tiger but we imagined it to be the sound of a bamboo horn blown by some villager. Within a minute another roar was heard and a Ha-Ka who was felling pine trees drew our attention to a tiger which was about 400 or 500 yards away. The four of us had a clear view of a magnificent animal as it walked quite unconcernedly into the heavily wooded hillside directly on the northern side of Pak-siak-kiew. This place is approximately 3 miles from Lo Wai, Tsun Wan, as the crow flies. It was impossible for us to shoot him-as we only had a light shot-gun. 

On the morning of New Year's Eve the same Chinese who first brought news of the beast came and said that the tiger had again appeared at Lo Wai the previous Saturday—i.e. December 29th, 1934,—exactly one day before the writer and the 3 Chinese saw him near Pak-siak-kiew. This time he took no pig from the village but chased a deer from the hill just behind it. The poor creature was so scared and puzzled that in actually ran through the village, bounded across the vegetable patches for which Tsun Wan is so well known, and continuing downwards got stuck in the marshy pig-weed pond just opposite the Catholic Mission and not more than 30 yards from the main road. Here it was easily caught by a Chinese. The tiger, however, was wise enough not to continue in its chase through almost half a mile of scattered houses and vegetable patches but it had the courage to run right through a narrow village alley which is at right angles to the foot of the hill. On coming to the cemented and cobbled rectangle in front of the houses it jumped across a low wall down into an enclosed vegetable patch where it roamed for some time trampling on the young vegetables. Here the writer saw numerous tracks which measured 7½ inches across both ways excluding ⅛” on each side to make allowance for the crumbling of the earth around the sides. lt must have gone back the way it came for though the earth is soft all around no tracks, except those already mentioned, were seen. 

Thinking it might be somewhere around we scoured the surrounding hills for half a day and sat up all night waiting for it but without any result. 

At present all trace of the animal is again lost but we feel sure it will soon reappear to claim another victim. This tiger is no man-eater or it would long ago have carried off one of the numerous women who spend their whole day up the hills cutting grass for fuel. Judging from what we have seen this tiger must be around two hundred pounds in weight. We have seen three tigers in their wild state in Malaya and participated in trapping a tigress which weighed nearly two piculs and this Tsun Wan beast seems to be slightly smaller. 

R. A. PEREIRA
5/1/1935.

Then a follow-up (Hong Kong Naturalist, 1935, 6, 81-82)

ADDITIONAL NOTE 

The next time the writer heard of the tiger was when walking across the Tsun Wan range into Pat Heung by way of Tsung Lung. 

An old woman grass-cutter of the last named village out cutting grass encountered he beast approximately a mile fro her home. The Creature walked up to her and started to circle round the terror-stricken woman but when it approached too close she mustered sufficient courage to give it a few blows with the grass-cutter’s pole she carried and this had the effect of scaring away the animal. Through the kindness of a missionary friend the writer was able to meet the above mentioned woman who, when interviewed was still in hysterics, brought about by her terrible encounter.

On the 28th of January this year the tiger again descended to its favourite place,—Lo Wai, Tsun Wan,—but this time it failed to secure anything. That was the last we heard of the animal. 

R.A.P.

This sketch by A.M. Hughes depicting Perreira’s account of the grass-cutter’s encounter is from The Hong Kong Countryside:

So where were these sightings? I have not been able to trace the smaller villages named by Pereira. However, the main ones are still there but no longer small. I have put pins in this modern Google satellite view to show Lo Wai and Pat Heung:

So, if you are on the Airport Express from the airport at Chek Lap Kok to Hong Kong or Kowloon, look out left as Tsing Yi Station is announced. Those hills were once roamed by tigers. Sadly, any chance that they will ever do so again appear to be zero.