This is one of the magical autobiographical books by Gerald Durrell. He was a multi-talented whirlwind who changed the face of zoos and helped to educate people and also to help save some endangered species. I have written about him before so I won’t write much now.

This book is set in Argentina. Durrell searches windswept Patangonian shores and tropical forests in the Argentine for additions to his private zoo in addition to filming as much as possible. He spent a great deal of time with his team looking for elephant seals so as to film them and was quite disheartened. They all sat down to lunch having just given up looking and all of a sudden one of them moved, he was about 10 feet away, his camoflage was so good they hadn’t seen him. It turned out there were several on the beach and it took a great deal of effort to spot them. Durrell then regaled his team with detailed information about the sex life and intestines of the elephant seals until he was told off as they really would prefer to eat their lunch.

Durrell managed to meet the most delightful people in his search for animals. The man I’m going to talk about is Luna. He seemed to be one of the most even tempered people I’ve read about. Apparently he spent a lot of time singing, even starting to sing before opening his eyes in the morning and generally the last thing Durrell heard at night was Luna singing. Thank goodness he could sing better than my father who used his singing instead of injections, people couldn’t wait for the drilling to start so he would stop. Luna was a fine singer and knew many, many songs, he regaled the whole party with a good deal of those songs. Sounds like a lovely man.