According to his mother, the first word Gerald Durrell spoke was “zoo.” As a child, whenever he was asked where he wanted to go, he said, “zoo.” If he didn’t get taken there, he would throw a tantrum. [1]
Gerald Malcolm Durrell, OBE was a British naturalist, writer, zookeeper, conservationist, and television presenter. He was born in Jamshedpur, India, on 7 January 1925, the fourth surviving child of Louise and Lawrence Durrell who had themselves been born in India and were of English and Irish descent. When his father died in 1928, the family moved first to England and then to the Greek island of Corfu, where Durrell spent his formative years.
In 1939 the Corfu idyll came to an end. With the Second World War imminent, the family (along with 3 dogs, 2 toads, 2 tortoises, 6 canaries, 4 goldfinches, 2 greenfinches, a linnet, 2 magpies, a seagull, a pigeon, and an owl) returned to England, where Durrell began work as an assistant at a pet shop and a local zoo.
When he turned 21 in 1946, Durrell inherited some money, so he left his work at the zoo, and set out on the first of his many expeditions to collect wildlife. On all his expeditions, he collected only those animals which were endangered and not the ones which fetched a high price at zoos or from collectors. Thus, he didn’t earn much in return.
Durrell funded his animal conservation work by writing books, about forty in all, mainly about his life as an animal collector and enthusiast. The most famous is his memoir of his family’s years living in Greece, My Family and Other Animals, published in 1956, was made into a successful 4-season TV series, ‘The Durrells.’ Many rare species have been named after him.
In 1959, on the Channel Island of Jersey, he founded the ‘Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Jersey Zoo’. The Trust has now become a world leader in captive breeding programmes, teaching thousands of naturalists, zoo managers, vets, biologists, and zoo architects, running ecological and conservation conferences, and raising awareness of threatened extinction of species.
Gerald Durrell turned 70 in January 1995 and died a few weeks later in Jersey.