Durrell to host big birthday bash

Wednesday 07 January 2015

Jersey’s world famous wildlife conservation charity is hosting a big bash to mark what would have been its founder’s 90th year.

Gerald Durrell would have been celebrating his big birthday today so the team continuing his efforts to save species from extinction plan to celebrate for him at the Glorious Ugly Bug Ball in the autumn.

The charity hopes to raise £100,000 at the event being staged at Trinity Manor in September. 

The well known author and naturalist died at the age of 70 in January 1995 but 20 years on on his work continues though the Trust's army of conservationists now working in the field, something his wife Lee believes he would be very proud of.

Paying tribute to him Lee Durrell said: "I am sure Gerald would have been amazed and delighted by and immensely proud of the progress made by Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. Some of the species he and his team rescued in the 1970s have been saved, such as the pink pigeon and kestrel of Mauritius, the pygmy hog of Assam and the parrot of St Lucia. Many others are benefitting from the Durrell approach, such as some of the lemurs and other endangered species of Madagascar, the tamarins of South America and amphibians of the Caribbean islands, as are their habitats and the human communities also dependant on those habitats. The number of people trained in conservation by Durrell staff, a programme particularly close to Gerald’s heart, has swelled to nearly 4,000 from two-thirds of the countries of the world."

Lee says her late husband would have been enraged by the current global situation - the loss of habitat over the last 20 years and the increase in the number of threatened species but he'd have been delighted to see the work that Durrell has been doing over the years to try and reverse it.

She said: "Gerald never was keen on maths and, as a boy, would learn something only if the exercise involved animals. But have a look at the graph at http://www.durrell.org/durrell-index/red-list-index/, newly worked out by our scientific team, which quantifies Durrell’s success in saving species from extinction. This would have been the best birthday present of all - a demonstration of real hope for the future!"