Gerald Durrell

(1925 - 1995)

Gerald Durrell was born in India in 1925, lived as a small child in England—where he told his mother at the age of six that he would one day own a zoo—and then moved with his family to the island of Corfu in 1935. He became a keeper at the Whipsnade Zoo in England in 1945, went on two animal-collecting expeditions to Africa between 1947 and 1951, and published his first book, The Overloaded Ark, in 1953. Durrell began breeding endangered animals for eventual introduction into the wild in 1958 and opened the Jersey Zoo to the public one year later.