Birds, Beasts, and Relatives

Birds, Beasts, and Relatives is the second volume in Gerald Durrell’s beloved Corfu trilogy, continuing the story of the eccentric Durrell family’s years on the Greek island in the late 1930s. Where My Family and Other Animals established the framework — young Gerry’s obsessive interest in wildlife, his long-suffering family, the sun-drenched landscape — this volume deepens and enriches it.

The book introduces a new cast of animals that Durrell befriends, studies, and often brings home to the consternation of his family: a giant tortoise, a collection of scorpions, an imperious pelican. The natural history is as precise as ever, but what distinguishes the trilogy is the way Durrell makes these creatures morally present — they have personalities, grievances, and social lives as vivid as any human character.

The human comedy continues with full force. Larry, Leslie, Margo, and their mother remain some of the funniest family portraits in English literature. Durrell’s Corfu exists outside time — golden, slightly absurd, abundant with life — and this second volume extends that world with the same warmth and precision that made the first book a classic.

Reading Guides

• Gerald Durrell Books in Order
• Where to Start with Gerald Durrell

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Birds, Beasts, and Relatives apart: Perfect companion to the first book; Vivid natural history observations; and Durrell’s comic writing at its best. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Birds, Beasts, and Relatives give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Wildlife observation as a form of love. Family as comedic cast. Corfu’s extraordinary biodiversity. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Reading Experience

Birds, Beasts, and Relatives is the kind of book that changes slightly depending on when you read it. The surface — plot, character, setting — remains constant, but the reader brings different things to it at different points in life, and the book meets them there. This is a property of enduring work, and it distinguishes Birds, Beasts, and Relatives from titles that are consumed once and not returned to.

Limitations

Slightly looser structure than My Family. Assumes familiarity with the first book. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers who loved My Family and Other Animals and want to continue the Corfu trilogy

Deepening the World

Where My Family and Other Animals had the advantage of establishing the Corfu world fresh — introducing the family, the landscape, the creatures, the tutors, the Greek neighbours — Birds, Beasts and Relatives can assume all of that and go deeper. Durrell is older in this volume, his observations more systematic, his understanding of the animals he encounters more sophisticated. The natural history is consequently more detailed, and the comedy has acquired a layer of retrospective feeling that the first book, written in the full flush of rediscovery, did not quite possess.

The animals in this volume include a giant tortoise of formidable slowness and apparently immense age, a collection of scorpions observed through the entire cycle of their seasonal behaviour, and a pelican of imperial self-importance who arrives at the family’s villa and declines to leave. Each animal chapter is a small essay in applied natural history — Durrell tells you what the creature actually does, how it actually lives, what the scientific literature says about it and where the scientific literature falls short of the actual animal — but the scientific content is delivered in a prose that makes it feel like gossip rather than a lecture.

The Human Comedy

The family comedy in Birds, Beasts and Relatives has the quality of a cast of characters who have now been established and can be played with greater freedom. Lawrence, who in the first book was still arriving at his literary pomposity, is here in full flight: his correspondence with other writers (glimpsed through Durrell’s affectionate parody), his theories about the proper relationship between the artist and his family, his alarm when animals breach the boundaries he has established around his working space. Leslie’s enthusiasm for firearms and wildlife management continues with undiminished energy. Margo pursues romance and health with equal determination. Their mother remains the still centre of the household’s perpetual motion, her equanimity unshaken by whatever Gerald has introduced into the villa this week.

Corfu’s Extraordinary Biodiversity

The Corfu that Durrell describes across the trilogy was, and to a degree remains, one of the most biologically diverse corners of Europe. The island sits at the boundary between the Italian and Balkan faunas, with a climate warm enough to support Mediterranean species and a landscape varied enough — mountains, wetlands, coastal maquis, olive groves — to provide habitats for an unusual range of wildlife. Durrell’s observations of the Corfu fauna in the 1930s constitute a genuine baseline natural history record of the island before the post-war changes that have since altered the landscape substantially.

This scientific value is not incidental. Durrell went on to found the Jersey Zoo in 1959 and the Wildlife Preservation Trust, and the trilogy can be read as the origin story of a conservation career: the child who observed these animals with such total attention became the man who made their preservation his life’s work. Birds, Beasts and Relatives is the middle chapter of that origin, and it earns its place in the sequence.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A wonderful continuation of the Corfu trilogy, matching My Family and Other Animals in warmth and wit. Durrell’s love for the island’s wildlife shines through every page.