A Zoo in My Luggage

Description

'For many years I had wanted to start a zoo . . . any reasonable person smitten with an ambition of this sort would have secured the zoo first and obtained the animals afterwards. but throughout my life I have rarely if ever achieved what I wanted by tackling it in a logical fashion.' A Zoo in My Luggage is Gerald Durrell's account of his attempt to set up his own zoo, after years spent gathering animals for other zoos. Journeying to Cameroon, he and his wife collected numerous mammals, birds and reptiles, including Cholmondely the chimpanzee and Bug-eye the bush-baby. But their problems really began when they attempted to return with their exotic menagerie. Not only had they to get them safely home to Britain but they also had to find somewhere able and - most of all - willing to house them. Told with wit and a zest for all things furry and feathered, Gerald Durrell's A Zoo in My Luggage is a brilliant account of how a pioneer of wildlife preservation came to found a new type of zoo. 'If animals, birds and insects could speak, they would possibly award Durrell one of their first Nobel prizes. His creatures are as alive as his style.' The Times Literary Supplement

Gerald Durrell (1925-1995) moved from England to Corfu with his family when he was eight. He spent much of his time studying the island's wildlife and surprising his family by keeping lots of very unusual pets in very unexpected places. He grew up to be a famous naturalist and conservationist, leading expeditions to exotic places such as Argentina, Sierra Leone, Assam and Madagascar. Durrell dedicated his life to the preservation of wildlife, especially the less glamorous kinds, which he called 'little brown jobs' and 'small uglies'. It is through his efforts that creatures such as the Mauritius pink pigeon and the Mallorcan midwife toad have avoided extinction. Over his lifetime he presented many TV shows, and wrote thirty-seven books, including My Family and Other Animals and its two sequels, Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods. He founded Jersey Zoo in 1959 as a centre for the conservation of endangered species, and in 1963 created the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust - later renamed Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in his honour - of which his wife, Lee, is still Honorary Director. He was awarded the OBE in 1982.

A renegade who was right . . . He was truly a man before his time -- Sir David Attenborough Durrell has an uncanny knack of discovering human as well as animal eccentricities * Sunday Telegraph *