The Boy Who Kept Scorpions in Matchboxes

As a child on Corfu, Gerald Durrell once stashed a mother scorpion and her babies in a matchbox and left it on the mantelpiece. His brother Lawrence — the novelist, the serious one — reached for a cigarette, opened the box, and discovered the family. The dog barked. The gardener dropped a plate. Gerald was delighted.

He never really stopped.

Durrell grew up to become one of the twentieth century's great naturalists, leading expeditions across West Africa and South America, writing bestselling books about the chaos of collecting animals in the wild. He called himself a "champion of small uglies" — the species too drab, too strange, or too obscure for anyone else to bother saving. He built his own zoo on the island of Jersey, designed not to entertain visitors but to breed endangered species back from the edge. Its symbol was the dodo: the reminder of what happens when no one pays attention.

The approach was considered eccentric. Zoos were for elephants and ticket sales, not captive-breeding programs for Mauritius kestrels. Durrell did it anyway. The kestrel — down to four birds in the wild — now numbers around a thousand. It is the national bird of Mauritius.

In 1984, he founded a training academy for conservationists. Its graduates have gone on to lead institutions across the world, including London Zoo.

The same London Zoo that once refused to hire him.