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Profile of Gerald Durrell:

Amazing Facts about Gerald Durrell

Gerald Malcolm Durrell was born in Jamshedpur, India, in January in 1925. When Gerald was 3 years old, his father who was a civil engineer and his mother took him along with his four bothers to England. Soon, afterwards they moved to Corfu, an island in Greece and there Gerald starting collecting animals. Gerald was so fond of animals. He collected tortoises, lizards and injured birds found in the island. One day his brother opened a match box to light a cigarette and and found a mother scorpion and baby scorpions in it.
              It was there Theodore Stephanides, a Greek scientist who taught Gerald the importance of scientific analysis. When World War II started, the family returned to Bournemouth, England and he was sent to England. He left with no qualifications and worked for sometime in a pet shop and then became a junior zoo keeper at Whipsnade Zoo. Gerald inherited $4600 from an aunt, left the zoo and went to Cameroon in west Africa to collect animals. he returned home with chimpanzees and angwantibo for the first time seen in England and sold them to various zoos.
                                             His first book Overloaded Ark was based on his hilarious adventures to Africa. In 1956, he published his autobiography My Family and Other Animals. He had altogether written 37 books. His autobiography was adapted into a  wonderful TV series. The following year his brother Lawrence published the first of his acclaimed Alexandria Quartet.
                            When Gerald became a famous writer, with support from his publisher, Rupert Hart Davies he tried to set up his own zoo.
                                                                                    
Bournemouth was his first choice where he would set up his zoo but he was refused planning permission. Finally he established his zoo in Jersey.
                    When the zoo was newly established, it had very few animals but as he went to expeditions, he collected more and more endangered species from Sierra Leone, Mauritius and Madagascar.
                                                                                                     Gerald Durrell died in January 1995 due to successive infection following a liver transplant the previous year.

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  • The logo of Jersey Zoo is Dodo.
  • Gerald Durrell' s International conservation efforts, a memorial has been set up in his name as a tribute to this great animal lover.
  •  At book signings, Gerald and Lawrence Durrell would mischievously sign each other name, recalls John Bodley at publishers Faber and Faber.
  • When Lawrence published his collection of travel writings titled Spirit of Place Gerald Durrell published the book Fillets of Place.
  • The list of endangered species found in his zoo are Living Stone's fruit bats, Madagascar flat tailed tortoises and black lion tamarinds.