MOURNING AT THE ZOO

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXI, 10 April 1937, Page 9

MOURNING AT THE ZOO

i FAMOUS TOLAR BEAR DEAD I I (By Air Mail—From Our Own ! Correspondent) ! LONDON, 18th March, i London Zoo has sustained a great loss. Barbara, the famous Polar bear, is dead. For eighteen years she and her brother Sam, whom most visitors mistook for her husband, have been one of Ihe Zoo’s chief attractions. It was a constant delight, to adults and juveniles, to watch them making their | graceful slow dives into their bathing ' pool, or gamboling together in what I seemed fierce but actually was ' friendly catch-as-catch-can style. But though so playful with each other, these huge shaggy monsters, whose j every movement conjured up visions ;of icebergs and the frozen North, were perhaps the most savage creatures in the Zoo. They had a playful habit, too, of leaping suddenly up towards the bars of their old cage, and slashing out with villainous talons like steel hooks. Many a pretty sunshade has gone in ribbons whilst its startled owner shuddered at a sudden revelation of Nature in the raw. Now Barbara is dead of old age, and Sam, refusing to be fobbed off with Susie, the Polar bear next door, seems inconsolable.