Fillets of Plaice, by Gerald Durrell (25 page)

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 joined the staff of Whipsnade Zoo as a student keeper, and in 1947 financed, organised and led an animal-collecting expedition to the Cameroons. This gave rise to the first of his immensely popular books,
The Overloaded Ark
. Since then he has been on other expeditions to the Cameroons, British Guiana, Paraguay and Argentina. In 1958 he founded the JerseyWildlife Preservation Trust, and in 1961 went to New Zealand, Australia and Malaya — the expedition which formed the basis of
Two in the Bush
. In 1965 he went to Sierra Leone with a B.B.C. film unit to film
Catch Me a Colobus
. His first novel,
Rosy is My Relative
, was published in 1968.