My Family And Other Animals

MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS
Gerald Durrell

Gerald Durrell was born in Jamshedpur, India, in 1925. In 1928 his family
returned to England and in 1933 they went to live on the Continent. Eventually
they settled on the island of Corfu, where they lived until 1939. During this time
he made a special study of zoology, and kept a large number of the local wild
animals as pets. In 1945 he joinedthe staff at Whipsnade Park as a student
keeper. In 1947 he financed, organized, and led his first animal-collecting
expedition to the Cameroons. This was followed by a second expedition in 1948
and a third in 1949, this time to British Guiana. He has also made expeditions to
Paraguay, Argentina and Sierra Leone. In 1962 he and his wife went to New
Zealand, Australia and Malaya to film a TVseries Two in the Bush, in
conjunction with the BBC Natural History Film Unit. In 1958 he founded the
Jersey Zoological Park, of which he is the director, and in 1964 he founded the
Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. Gerald Durrell's other books include The
Overloaded Ark, The Bafut Beagles, Encounters With Animals, The Drunken
Forest, Three Singles to Adventure, A Zoo in My Luggage, TheWhispering
Land, Menagerie Manor, Birds, Beasts and Relatives, Fillets of Plaice, Catch
Me a Colobus, Beasts in My Belfry, The Talking Parcel, The Stationary Ark
(1976) and Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons (1977).

To My Mother
It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted
from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which,
by often rumination,wraps me in a most humorous sadness.
As You Like It
Contents
The Speech for the Defence

2

PART ONE
The Migration
1. The Unsuspected Isle
2. The Strawberry-Pink Villa
3. The Rose-Beetle Man
4. A Bushel of Learning
5. A Treasure of Spiders
6. The Sweet Spring
Conversation

5
8
15
22
31
38
47
55

PART TWO
7. The Daffodil-Yellow Villa
8. The Tortoise Hills
9. The World ina Wall
10. The Pageant of Fireflies
11. The Enchanted Archipelago
12. The Woodcock Winter
Conversation

58
67
77
86
96
106
118

PART THREE
13. The Snow-White Villa
14. The Talking Flowers
15. The Cyclamen Woods
16. The Lake of Lilies
17. The Chessboard Fields
18. An Entertainment with Animals
The Return

122
132
141
152
162
173
186

2

The Speech for the Defence.«Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before
breakfast. »
The White Queen – Alice Through the Looking-Glass
This is the story of a five-year sojourn that I and my family made on the
Greek island of Corfu. It was originally intended to be a mildly nostalgic
account of the natural history of the island, but I made a grave mistake by
introducing my family into the bookin the first few pages. Having got
themselves on paper, they then proceeded to establish themselves and invite
various friends to share the chapters. It was only with the greatest difficulty, and
by exercising considerable cunning, that I managed to retain a few pages here
and there which I could devote exclusively to animals.
I have attempted to draw an accurate and unexaggerated picture ofmy
family in the following pages; they appear as I saw them. To explain some of
their more curious ways, however, I feel that I should state that at the time we
were in Corfu the family were all quite young: Larry, the eldest, was twentythree; Leslie was nineteen; Margo eighteen; while I was the youngest, being of
the tender and impressionable age of ten. We have never been very certain ofmy mother's age, for the simple reason that she can never remember her date of
birth; all I can say is that she was old enough to have four children. My mother
also insists that I explain that she is a widow for, as she so penetratingly
observed, you never know what people might think.
In order to compress five years of incident, observation, and pleasant
living into something a little less...