In 1959 he founded the Jersey Zoological Park, and in 1964 he founded the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. His first television programme, Two in the Bush¸ which documented his travels to New Zealand, Australia and Malaya was made in 1962 he went on to make seventy programmes about his trips around the world.

He later undertook numerous further expeditions, visiting Paraguay, Argentina, Sierra Leone, Mexico, Mauritius, Assam and Madagascar. In 1945 he joined the staff of Whipsnade Park as a student keeper, and in 1947 he led his first animal-collecting expedition to the Cameroons. He returned to England in 1928 before settling on the island of Corfu with his family.

Gerald Durrell was born in Jamshedpur, India, in 1925. My Family and Other Animals was intended to embrace the natural history of the Greek island of Corfu, but ended up as a delightful account of his family's experiences that were, according to him, 'rather like living in one of the more flamboyant and slapstick comic operas.'Īs a 10-year-old boy, Gerry left England for Corfu with 'all those items that I thought necessary to relieve the tedium of a long journey: four books on natural history, a butterfly net, a dog, and a jam-jar full of caterpillars all in imminent danger of turning into chrysalids.' Durrell's descriptions of his family and its many eccentric hangers-on (he stresses that 'all the anecdotes about the island and the islanders are absolutely true') are highly entertaining, as is the procession of toads, scorpions, geckos, ladybugs, glowworms, octopuses, the puppies Widdle and Puke, and the Magenpies. As a self-described 'champion of small uglies,' English writer Gerald Durrell (1925-1995) devoted his life to writing and the preservation of wildlife, from the Mauritius pink pigeon to the Rodriques fruit bat.

Gerald durrell family and other animals