Gerald Durrell was a peer of Sir David Attenborough for much of his adult life. His name may not be familiar to you because Sir David Attenborough has outlived him by nearly three decades and has continued his conservationist work throughout. Gerald was a British native, but when he was ten, his family, minus his father who passed when Gerald was only a toddler, left England to live on the small Greek island of Corfu in 1937. This story is about Gerald or Gerry as his family called him, and his time living with his family in Corfu until they were forced to leave due to the advent of WWII, five years later.
Gerry was born with an enduring fascination for wildlife. Corfu was about as close to heaven as Gerry could get here on earth. Corfu of 1937 was mostly untouched by industry and the island and its surrounding sea were teeming with wildlife for Gerry to investigate and explore. Gerry wrote this book when he was approaching 30 years old, and it is amazing the detail to which he recants his stories of living on the island. He had originally intended the book to just serve as a means to convey his childhood observations of the Corfu wildlife, but the characters in his family – mom Louise, sister Margo, his brothers Larry and Leslie, along with Corfu locals Spiro and Theodore, he found, were too entertaining to omit. Hence the title, My Family and Other Animals.
The book intersperses Gerry’s animal and wildlife adventures with comical scenes and banter provided by his family and the Corfu locals he has befriended. One example of an animal encounter is pictured on the front cover. Gerry goes into amazing detail, over the course of about eight pages, of the encounter between a large praying mantis and a gecko in his bedroom one night. I arrived at this portion of the book just as I was getting ready to turn the lights out for bed, but I could not put the book down without finding out who prevailed in the encounter. It was close, but the mantis made a tactical error by grabbing the gecko’s detachable tail and thus forfeited an arm. To compound this, he remained distracted by the wiggling detached tail and then lost his head. The gecko lost his tail and sustained quite a bit of temporary damage, but was rewarded with quite a large meal.
To be continued…