Текст 2

Gerald Durrell

Gerald Durrell books were a part of popular British culture throughout the Sixties — huge bestsellers that financed collecting trips and enabled Durrell to realize his ambition of setting up his own zoo. His productivity is dizzying — 37 books in all. And yet no author more nicely fits the Johnsonian adage: he wrote for money, found the process a fearful grind and probably would never have bothered had it not been the providential means to an end.

"He was a vivid writer; at his best, quirky, exuberant and with a gift for the sparky phrase — a black-and-yellow striped snake "like an animated school tie", the Great Barrier Reef as "an enormous biological firework display". There is something reassuring about a person who discovers his bent at an early age and never deviates.

The breeding of endangered species was Durrell's ambition from a very early age. The Jersey Zoo that he founded in 1959 lurched from one financial crisis to another in the initial years. It emerged flourishing and secure in the Eighties, alongside the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust, thanks to generous patronage and, above all, to Durrell's own efforts. Although he was initially cold- shouldered by the zoo establishment, his ideas and beliefs became orthodoxy and he himself a leading figure in the zoo and conservation worlds.

He cannot have been easy to work with. But his charismatic charm and vigour shine out, along with a kind of innocence. His friend David Hughes observed him at first hand — "a simple man of unshakeable conviction".

In his intensity of outrage about species extinction Durrell was ahead of his time. The partnership between television and such per­suasive advocates as Durrell, Desmond Morris, David Attenborough and others has meant an entire revolution in the past 40 years in the way that animals are perceived. Their presentation in zoos has changed radically — from spectacles to be gawped at, to sources of information and objects of respect. Durrell was a conservation pio­neer, although the debate about methods of conserving endangered species continues.

He has to be admired for his obduracy in the face of setbacks, let alone for the physical defiance that saw off potentially fatal snake­bites and an array of tropical ailments. His biographer sees him as "a latter-day St Francis", while admitting to certain deficiencies in saintliness.