Gerald Durrell was born in Jamshedpur, India, the youngest of four children born to Samuel Durrell, a civil engineer and his wife Louisa. His first intelligible word is reported to have been 'zoo'.

Following the death of his father in 1928, the family lived in England and on the continent, eventually settling on the Greek island of Corfu. Years later, Durrell documented his earliest animal adventures there and the activities of his siblings in his best-selling book, My Family and Other Animals.

During his youth, Durrell practised for the day when he would have his own zoo by assembling everything from minnows to woodlice, eagle owls to scorpions. The private tutors educating him concentrated on natural history subjects. In 1945, he became a student keeper at the Zoological Society of London's Whipsnade Park to gain experience with a wider variety of animals.

At the age of 21, he inherited £3,000 with which he financed, organised and led his first animal collecting expedition to the British Cameroons. He led expeditions to many lesser known parts of the world, acquiring animals for the major zoological gardens of England, Europe and America.

During brief interludes between expeditions, Durrell launched his second career. He began writing stories of his animal escapades in 1953 in The Overloaded Ark. He wrote 37 books, including the best-selling The Bafut Beagles, A Zoo in My Luggage, Catch Me a Colobus, The Stationary Ark and, most recently, The Ark's Anniversary and The Aye-aye and I. Durrell's unique insight into the animal kingdom and the engaging humour with which he described his adventures made him one of the most widely read authors of animal stories. His books have been translated into 26 different languages.

Durrell was also a regular contributor to radio and television programmes, originally producing films of his own expeditions for broadcast on the BBC. Subsequent series produced by the BBC, Channel Four and Channel Television have been broadcast repeatedly around the world.

In 1959, Durrell created his own zoo on the island of Jersey in the Channel Islands. Headquartered in a 16th century manor house and surrounded by 32 acres of park and farm land, the Jersey Zoological Park was from the outset an unusual institution. Durrell dedicated his zoo, and later the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust which took over the zoological park, to saving endangered animal species by breeding them in captivity. Now universally acknowledged as an important weapon in the fight to save animals from extinction, Durrell's early captive breeding efforts were denounced by prominent zoologists as unnecessary and irrelevant. During its comparatively short life, the trust has established breeding groups of many species of endangered mammals, reptiles and birds and has begun to return their progeny to the wild.

Durrell's original version for the zoo encompassed more than the breeding of animals. The trust pioneered inter-zoo exchanges of both animals and scientific information and forged co-operative agreements with governments for the loan of animals and joint field research. The zoo established important education programmes, from the early teaching of schoolchildren to awareness campaigns among local people in the homelands of endangered animals.

In 1977 the first 'trainee' came to Jersey. In 1978, Durrell created a mini-university adjacent to the zoo to provide intensive training to conservation workers so that they could begin the process of saving species in their country of origin. A Training Officer was appointed in 1980. By the end of 1997, 879 students from 96 countries had received training at the International Training Centre (ITC). Many of the overseas conservation efforts in which the trust is involved today are conducted by its own graduate trainees.

The Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE), a research and training centre at the University of Kent at Canterbury, was found in 1989 as one of the world's first academic institutions dedicated to establishing conservation biology as a science. Although not associated directly with the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust, the faculty and students of DICE occasionally contribute resources to trust projects.

Gerald Durrell established affiliate organisations in the United states in 1971 and in Canada in 1985. Wildlife Preservation Trust International (WPTI) and Wildlife Preservation Trust Canada (WPTC) conduct fund-raising programmes for international conservation. SAFE (Saving Animals From Extinction), the official UK appeal for the trust was founded in 1991. The trust published newsletters, species bulletins, a children's newspaper and a scientific journal - The Dodo - for distribution to 20,000 members around the world.

In 1977, while on one of his many lecture tours, Gerald Durrell met Lee McGeorge, an instructor in Zoology at Duke University who was studying for a PhD. After their marriage in 1979, they travelled the world together, filming television programmes, jointly authoring books, collecting animals for the Jersey collection and monitoring overseas conservation projects.

Gerald Durrell died in January 1995.

Television
1962 Two in the Bush
1966 Catch me a Colobus
1966 A Bull Named Marius
1966 Menagerie Manor
1974 The Stationary Ark
1980 The Edge of Extinction
1981 Ark on the Move
1983 The Amateur Naturalist
1986 Durrell in Russia
1987 Ourselves and Other Animals
1987 My Family and Other Animals
1992 To the Island of the Aye-aye

Publications
1953 The Overloaded Ark
1954 The Bafut Beagles
1956 The Drunken Forest
1956 My Family and Other Animals
1960 A Zoo in My Luggage
1969 Birds, Beasts and Relatives
1978 Garden of the Gods
1982 The Amateur Naturalist
1992 The Aye-aye and I

Awards
For his contribution to the conservation of endangered species, Gerald Durrell received many international honours. These included a Doctor of Humane Letters from Yale University in 1977, the Officer of the Golden Ark awarded by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1981, a Doctor of Science degree from Durham University in 1988 as well as a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Kent at Canterbury 1989. Queen Elizabeth honoured Gerald Durrrell with the Order of the British Empire in 1982.

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