Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
to Hickling, Horsey and Wheatfen (British Association for the Advancement of
Science 1961). Ellis's
Country Life
article concluded:
The meat of coypu has long been appreciated abroad and, incidentally,
consumed under various pseudonyms in this country. A few Norfolk people
are beginning to overcome their scruples and are eating casseroled coypu
regularly now, but there is no organised demand for the local product so far.
(Ellis 1960:1591)
In Ellis's work the coypu comes to signify a happy foreignness in the landscape:
A warm summer day will sometimes bring them forth to frolic in quiet
waters. On such occasions they may be seen floating with their tails stiffly
erect, or wallowing for pure pleasure, like hippopotamuses in an East African
river. They tend to remain mute during the day, even when taking part in a
communal water frolic.
(Ellis 1965:226)
As with the bittern, the sound of the coypu plays a key role, although this is a rather
differently meaningful sonic ecology. Ellis's July 1957 radio talk on
Night
Excursions
and Alarms on the Broads
used sound to negotiate the coypu's alienness and its
appeal. Ellis had been comparing the vegetation of the Yare valley to jungle:
We have South American music on the Broads now: genuine jungle stuff—
not the sort they imported from Spain. It echoes across the valley when the
moon is full. If you've ever heard a cow in trouble at any time, imagine
listening to one lamenting the loss of a calf in the middle of every reed-swamp.
That's the nearest description I can give of a coypu's love-call…. I wouldn't
say they make the night hideous with their cries, but they're very mournful
under the moon's influence. [Give the coypu's cry here— MNAAHW—
MNAAHW—]
(Ellis 1957a; also 1965:226)
Sound suggests the coypu as authentically lost, its authentic 'jungle' cries provoking
sympathy. If the Yare valley vegetation is like a jungle, although not a jungle, then
the coypu's jungle cries almost belong, but not quite. The animal seems
melancholy, and its sound provokes a melancholic and sympathetic curiousity in the
local human listener.
If the coypu was a matter of shifting opinion from the 1930s to the 1970s, one
strand of local thinking consistently favoured the animal, admiring and valuing its
resilience, its fur, its meat. Alan Savory ran a coypu farm at Brundall from 1933
until he joined the RAF Air—Sea Rescue in 1941, showing his 'nutria' fur at a
Crystal Palace fur show in November 1934. Savory, who was keen to stress that it
was not his farm from which coypus escaped (Savory 1956:46, 83), presented the
