The meerkat enclosure has cameras in the artificial burrow so visitors can watch them underground, and the cameras log which chambers are used. Chamber 6 was pumped full of concrete when the burrow was rebuilt. Its camera was removed. Its feed is on the system every night, and there are meerkats in it.
I am the small mammals keeper and the burrow cameras are on my morning list because the screen at the fence is what the visitors come for.
How the burrow is set up.
Eight chambers in a cast burrow under the enclosure, each with a camera and an infrared light, feeding a system that records and shows the live pictures on the screen at the fence. The system logs which chamber is occupied by movement, so I can see where the mob is sleeping without going in.
In 2019 the burrow was rebuilt. Chamber 6 had a persistent damp problem and the decision was to fill it: the camera came out, the entrance was blocked, and the chamber was pumped full of concrete. I watched the truck do it. The plan was redrawn with seven chambers.
Chamber 6 is on the system.
Its feed is live every night from about eleven. Infrared, the way all the chambers look, showing a chamber of the burrow's shape, and meerkats in it, asleep in the heap they sleep in.
There is no camera in chamber 6. There is no chamber 6. There is a block of concrete where it was, and I have had a core taken through it to be sure, and the core is concrete all the way.
What has been checked.
The system. Reinstalled, and the camera list rebuilt from the seven that exist. On the first night, chamber 6 was on the list again, with a feed.
The cabling. Seven cables come out of the ground to the cabinet. The system reports eight inputs. The engineer from the camera firm traced the eight inputs on the recorder to seven cables and one input that is, in his words, receiving a signal from nothing connected.
The picture. It is not one of the other seven. The chamber's shape is different, and the heap of animals is a different size, and the animals are the wrong colours: paler, the way meerkats look on an old infrared camera, the kind we replaced in 2019.
The count.
I count the mob every morning and every evening, and it is eleven, and it has been eleven for two years.
Chamber 6's feed shows, most nights, between seven and nine animals in the heap. On the nights it shows nine, the other seven chambers show eleven between them. On those nights the burrow is holding twenty meerkats and I have eleven.
Nine is the number the mob was in 2019, before the rebuild, before the two years of losses and births that made it eleven. Nine was the mob that slept in chamber 6.
What the feed shows that I wish it did not.
Meerkats stir in the night. On chamber 6's feed they stir, and one of them, at about two, sits up, the way the sentry does, and looks at the camera.
At the camera that is not there. Straight down the lens of a camera that came out of the ground in 2019 and is in a box in my office, and it holds the look, the way a sentry holds a look, and then it lies back down.
What is done about it.
Chamber 6 is not shown on the screen at the fence. The system is set to show seven, and the eighth feed records to the disk and nowhere else, and the recordings are kept because the system keeps recordings and I have not found a way to tell it not to that I am comfortable with.
The licensing inspector has the plan with seven chambers and has never seen the eighth feed, because it is not on the screen, and I have not shown him, because I would have to say what it was.
What I do.
I look after the mob.
The one thing I have changed is that I do not do the morning check from the fence screen.
I used to. It was quicker than walking round, and the screen shows all seven chambers at once.
I walk round now, and the reason is a morning in the spring when the screen at the fence, set to show seven, showed eight, because a visitor had pressed something, and the eighth was chamber 6 in daylight, which it has never shown before, empty, its concrete walls grey and wet, and on the floor of it a meerkat, on its side, not asleep, that I recognised, that we lost in the damp in 2018, which is why the chamber was filled.