A Zoo in My Luggage

Book excerpt: A British naturalist and his wife acquire a menagerie of animals and set up their own zoo in this delightful memoir by the author of the Corfu Trilogy. For many years I had wanted to start a zoo. . . . Any reasonable person smitten with an ambition of this sort would have secured the zoo first and obtained the animals afterwards. But throughout my life I have rarely if ever achieved what I wanted by tackling it in a logical fashion. After a decade of supplying creatures for other people’s zoos, in 1957 Gerald Durrell and his wife set off on an adventurous journey to the Cameroons in West Africa, where they collected numerous mammals, birds, and reptiles. The wild nature of the animals created quite a bit of chaos, but the Durrells’ problems really began when they attempted to return to Britain with their exotic new friends. Not only did they have to get them safely home, they also had to find somewhere able and—more importantly—willing to house them. Told with wit and a zest for all things furry and feathered, Durrell’s A Zoo in My Luggage is a brilliant account of how a pioneer of wildlife preservation came to found a new type of zoo. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Gerald Durrell including rare photos from the author’s estate.