By james art So, in 1975, the late monarch called in Mike Lubbock, a curator at the Trust, who was called to the palace to try to sort out the problem. “How are we going to get the geese to breed, Mr. Lubbock?” The Queen is said to have asked him – and he had several ideas, which included changing the birds’ food, diverting the royal helicopters away from their nests and keeping the corgis at bay. “One more thing,” he said according to The Times. “Is it possible to stop the garden party guests from going all the way back to the moats and island areas?” The Queen replied that it might be difficult and would involve a departure from a centuries-old tradition.
That summer, Lubbock was invited to a garden party, where he noticed that the island had been cordoned off, just as he had suggested. He never found out if it made things better for the birds – but just a few months later the Palace phoned. The Queen was delighted that three of her geese had laid eggs and invited Lubbock to advise her at Sandringham. Lubbock became a regular visitor, even acquiring a flamingo for her late majesty.
Earlier this week, it was announced that Mike Lubbock died in September at the age of 80 after a long illness. Born in Taunton to a former game warden in the Kruger National Park, he grew up helping out on his parents’ farm in the Blackdown Hills, which gave him an early love of bird’s nests and eggs. As a child at prep school he was allowed to keep an owl, and at Pangburn Naval College as a naval trainee he had a pet ferret which he pretended was a natural history project.