Gerald Durrell's Army

"Gerald Durrell's Army" is a tour of inspection. Edward Whitley visits ten countries around the world to see conservationists who have been specially trained by Gerald Durrell and search for the animals they are trying to help. The news is sometimes good, sometimes harrowing. But comedy - even farce - is close at hand. He starts in the Caribbean where he meets the St Lucian parrot and joins a Rastas' hunt for the ganja-eating Jamaican coney. From there he moves "via" West Africa and Brazil to Madagascar for one of the high points of the book: helping Gerald Durrell track down the giant jumping rat. In Mauritius, home of the dodo, he finds several birds which almost followed in its footsteps. In India he rides one endangered animal, the elephant, to see another, the rhino. He concludes his research in the Philippines, with an unnerving eyeball-to-eyeball encounter with one of the last 46 monkey-eating eagles left on earth. Rather than jump to conclusions, Edward lets local people explain what is going on. Their perspectives are bizarrely different from ours which is why they burn mahogany ("it gives good working heat") or eat lemurs ("they taste almost as good as cat"). He provides, besides a portrait of Gerald Durrell himself, an unprejudiced account of the battle now being fought to save the world's rarest wildlife. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.…