Gerald Durrell
Overview
 
Gerald "Gerry" Malcolm Durrell, OBE (January 7, 1925 – January 30, 1995) was a naturalist
Natural history
Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...

, zookeeper
Zookeeper
A zookeeper is a worker in a zoo, responsible for the feeding and daily care of the animals. As part of their routine, they clean the exhibits and report health problems...

, conservationist
Conservationist
Conservationists are proponents or advocates of conservation. They advocate for the protection of all the species in an ecosystem with a strong focus on the natural environment...

, author and television presenter. He founded what is now called the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust
Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust
Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust is a conservation organisation with a mission to save species from extinction.Gerald Durrell founded the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust as a charitable institution in 1963 with the Dodo as its symbol...

 and the Jersey Zoo (now renamed Durrell Wildlife) on the Channel Island
Channel Islands
The Channel Islands are an archipelago of British Crown Dependencies in the English Channel, off the French coast of Normandy. They include two separate bailiwicks: the Bailiwick of Guernsey and the Bailiwick of Jersey...

 of Jersey
Jersey
Jersey, officially the Bailiwick of Jersey is a British Crown Dependency off the coast of Normandy, France. As well as the island of Jersey itself, the bailiwick includes two groups of small islands that are no longer permanently inhabited, the Minquiers and Écréhous, and the Pierres de Lecq and...

 in 1958, but is perhaps best remembered for writing a number of books based on his life as an animal collector and enthusiast. He was the youngest brother of the novelist Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence George Durrell was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer, though he resisted affiliation with Britain and preferred to be considered cosmopolitan...

.
Durrell was born in Jamshedpur, India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

 on 7 January 1925.
Quotations

Right in the Hart of the Africn Jungel a small wite man lives. Now there is one xtrordenry fackt about him that he is the frind of all animals.

Written by Durrell at age ten (1935), from Gerald Durrell: An Authorized Biography by Douglas Botting (2000, ISBN 0-786-70655-4), p. 43

Gradually the magic of the island settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen. Each day had a tranquillity, a timelessness, about it so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us, glossy and colourful as a child's transfer and with the same tinge of unreality.

I said I liked being half-educated; you were so much more surprised at everything when you were ignorant.

So, until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.

An immensely tall, angular figure ... His gown hung round him in long folds like the wings of a bat, and his wig was perched slightly askew over a lantern jawed face with a blue chin, soulful spaniel-brown eyes and a turned-down mouth like a slit. But for his garb, you would have said that he was a dyspeptic undertaker in a town where nobody ever died.

His pen squeaking like a demented wren as he wrote copious notes.

 
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