Gerald Malcolm Durrell (7 January 1925 – 30 January 1995) was a British naturalist, writer, zookeeper, conservationist, and television presenter. He was born in Jamshedpur in British India, and moved to England when his father died in 1928. In 1935 the family moved to Corfu, and stayed there for four years, before the outbreak of World War II forced them to return to the UK. In 1946 he received an inheritance from his father's will that he used to fund animal-collecting trips to the British Cameroons and British Guiana. He married Jacquie Rasen in 1951; they had very little money, and she persuaded him to write an account of his first trip to the Cameroons. The result, titled The Overloaded Ark, sold well, and he began writing accounts of his other trips. An expedition to Argentina and Paraguay followed in 1953, and three years later he published My Family and Other Animals, which became a bestseller.

In the late 1950s Durrell decided to found his own zoo. He finally found a suitable site on the island of Jersey, and leased the property in late 1959. He envisaged the Jersey Zoo as an institution for the study of animals and for captive breeding, rather than a showcase for the public. In 1963 control of the zoo was turned over to the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. The zoo repeatedly came close to bankruptcy over the next few years, and Durrell raised money for it by his writing and by fundraising appeals. To guarantee the zoo's future, Durrell launched a successful appeal in 1970 for funds to purchase the property.

Durrell was an alcoholic. In 1976 he separated from his wife; they were divorced in 1979, and Durrell remarried, to Lee McGeorge, an American zoologist. He and Lee made several television documentaries in the 1980s, including Durrell in Russia and Ark on the Move. They co-authored The Amateur Naturalist, which was intended for amateurs who wanted to know more about the natural history of the world around them, though it also had sections about each of the world's major ecosystems. This book became his most successful, selling well over a million copies; a television series was made from it.

Durrell became an OBE in 1982. In 1984 he founded the Durrell Conservation Academy, to train conservationists in captive breeding. The institution has been very influential: its thousands of graduates included a director of London Zoo, an organisation which was once opposed to Durrell's work. He was diagnosed with liver cancer and cirrhosis in 1994, and received a liver transplant, but died the following January. He was cremated, and his ashes were buried at Jersey Zoo.

Durrell was born in Jamshedpur, British India, on 7 January 1925. His father, Lawrence Samuel Durrell, was a civil engineer; his mother was Louisa Florence Durrell (née Dixie). He had two older brothers, Lawrence and Leslie, and an older sister, Margaret. Another sister, Margery, had died in infancy. His parents were both born in India: his mother's family were Irish Protestants from Cork, and his father's father, who was from Suffolk, had come to India and married an Anglo-Irish woman. Durrell's father insisted that Louisa leave household chores and parenting duties to the Indian servants, as was expected of Anglo-Indian women of the day, but she was more independent than he wished. She spent much time with her cook, learning to make curries, and had trained as a nurse. It was usual for Anglo-Indian parents to see little of their children, and the household included an ayah (an Indian nursemaid) who helped raise the children, and a Catholic governess.

When Durrell was fourteen months old, the family left Jamshedpur and sailed to Britain, where his father bought a house in Dulwich, in south London, near where both the older boys were at school. They returned to India in late 1926 or early 1927, settling in Lahore, where Lawrence had contract work. It was in Lahore that Gerald's fascination with animals began, first when he saw two large slugs entwined in a ditch, and later when he visited the zoo in Lahore. He was entranced by the zoo, later recalling "The zoo was in fact very tiny and the cages minuscule and probably never cleaned out, and certainly if I saw the zoo today I would be the first to have it closed down, but as a child it was a magic place. Having been there once, nothing could keep me away." The Durrells also briefly owned a pair of Himalayan bear cubs, given to them by Louisa's brother John, a hunter. Louisa soon decided they were too dangerous, and gave them to the zoo.

Durrell's father fell ill in early 1928, and died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 16 April. Louisa was devastated by his death, but Gerald was scarcely affected, having been much closer to his mother and his ayah than his father, who had often been absent as his work had taken him all over British India. Louisa considered keeping the family in India, but finally decided to move back to the UK, and they sailed back from Bombay. The house in Dulwich that Lawrence had bought in 1926 was large and expensive to run, and in 1930 Louisa moved the family to a flat attached to the Queen's Hotel in Upper Norwood, also in south London. Early the following year they moved to Parkstone, near Bournemouth. Louisa was lonely with just Gerald for company; the other three children were at school or studying elsewhere. Durrell later recalled that she began "resorting to the bottle more and more frequently" and eventually had "what in those days was called a 'nervous breakdown'". He was left alone in the house except for a governess, brought in until Louisa returned, at which point he was sent to a kindergarten nearby instead. He enjoyed his time there, particularly because one of the teachers encouraged his interest in natural history, bringing in an aquarium with goldfish and pond snails.

In 1932 Louisa moved them again, to a smaller house in Bournemouth, and the following year she enrolled him at Wychwood School. Gerald loathed the school; the only lessons he enjoyed were in natural history. He would scream and struggle to avoid going. When he was nine he was spanked by his headmaster, and his mother took him away from the school. She bought him a dog, which he named Roger, as compensation for his traumatic time there. He never received any further formal education, though he intermittently had tutors.