Gerald Durrell
Gerald Durrell
Gerald "Gerry" Malcolm Durrell, OBEwas a British naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter. He founded what are now called the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Durrell Wildlife Park on the Channel Island of Jersey in 1959, but is perhaps best remembered for writing a number of books based on his life as an animal collector and enthusiast. He was the youngest brother of novelist Lawrence Durrell...
ProfessionTV Show Host
Date of Birth7 January 1925
children giving childhood
My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.
love-you animal wife
Animals generally return the love you lavish on them by a swift bite in passing-not unlike friends and wives.
heaven doubt evening
If naturalists go to heaven (about which there is considerable ecclesiastical doubt), I hope that I will be furnished with a troop of kakapo to amuse me in the evening instead of television.
humble butterfly eye
Among the myrtles the mantids moved, lightly, carefully, swaying slightly, the quintessence of evil. They were lank and green, with chinless faces and monstrous globular eyes, frosty gold, with an expression of intense, predatory madness in them. The crooked arms, with their fringes of sharp teeth, would be raised in mock supplication to the insect world, so humble, so fervent, trembling slightly when a butterfly flew too close.
conservation motto should
In conservation, the motto should always be 'never say die'.
maps add study
They were maps that lived, maps that one could study, frown over, and add to; maps, in short, that really meant something.
children war garden
By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves, in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic war, and we are doing it with all the bland complacency of an idiot child chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors.
writing animal world
Remember that the animals and plants have no M.P. they can write to; they can't perform sit-down strikes or, indeed, strikes of any sort; they have nobody to speak for them except us, the human beings who share the world with them but do not own it.
men branches saws
When man continues to destroy nature, he saws the very branch on which he sits since the rational protection of nature is at the same time the protection of mankind
men ecosystems earthquakes
The great ecosystems are like complex tapestries - a million complicated threads, interwoven, make up the whole picture. Nature can cope with small rents in the fabric; it can even, after a time, cope with major disasters like floods, fires, and earthquakes. What nature cannot cope with is the steady undermining of its fabric by the activities of man.
writing civilization progress
All over the world the wildlife that I write about is in grave danger. It is being exterminated by what we call the progress of civilization.
world firsts delight
There is no first world and third world. There is only one world, for all of us to live and delight in.
mean animal men
You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that we have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is vital not only for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself-a point that seems to escape many people.
book animal charity
Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.