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Young Gerry found a female scorpion carrying her babies on her back in a Corfu wall and hid her in a matchbox on the mantelpiece to watch her. His brother Larry opened the box to light a cigarette, and the scorpion fled across the dinner table shedding babies.
Theodore Stephanides, a doctor and naturalist, answered the ten-year-old's questions with full scientific seriousness and showed him pond life under a microscope. He also took him on specimen-collecting walks as a fellow investigator rather than a pupil. Taking the child's curiosity at adult weight gave it the tools, vocabulary and legitimacy to grow into a lifelong vocation.
The narrator describes his mother and siblings with the same detached, amused eye he turns on geckos, magpies and tortoises. He catalogues their territorial squabbles, rituals and bizarre enthusiasms as behaviour to be recorded rather than judged. Treating people as specimens turns domestic friction into comedy and exposes how animal human habits are.
The boy's mother let him roam the island almost unsupervised, and his tutors bent or abandoned the curriculum to follow his interest in animals. Because he had days of unhurried watching of ordinary creatures, such as earwigs guarding eggs, trapdoor spiders and mating tortoises, he learned behaviour firsthand.