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Bryan Nelson with an Abbott's booby, a close relative of the gannet, on his shoulder
Bryan Nelson with an Abbott's booby, a close relative of the gannet, on his shoulder. Photograph: Langford Press
Bryan Nelson with an Abbott's booby, a close relative of the gannet, on his shoulder. Photograph: Langford Press

Bryan Nelson obituary

This article is more than 8 years old
Ornithologist devoted to studying, filming and writing about seabirds, he became the ‘biographer’ of the gannet

Seabirds are to many ornithologists the most fascinating of all bird groups. For Bryan Nelson, who has died aged 83, they became a benign obsession, to which he devoted most of his professional and personal life as an author, zoologist and academic.

His passion for such birds found its outlet in several books, which ranged from a detailed and authoritative monograph on the gannet (The Gannet, 1978) to a concise introduction to the same species in the popular Shire Natural History series (1979). He once described himself as the “major biographer” of the gannet, but his masterwork, published in 2006, was a hefty volume entitled Pelicans, Cormorants, and their Relatives, produced by the Oxford University Press as part of its Bird Families of the World series. In addition to his books, Nelson also wrote numerous scientific papers and popular articles, appeared on radio and television, and made natural history films on seabirds.

Bryan was born in Shipley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire (now West Yorkshire), one of six children of Thomas, a motor engineer, and Ida (nee Wilcock), who worked in a draper’s shop. He left Saltaire grammar school at 16, but later read zoology at St Andrews University, graduating in 1959. He then went to Oxford to do a DPhil in animal behaviour and ecology, initially on blackbirds under the supervision of David Lack, but soon transferred his allegiance to the pioneering Nobel prize-winning ethologist Niko Tinbergen, to study seabirds. He spent hardly any time in Oxford itself; instead he and his wife June (nee Davison), whom he married in 1960, lived for three years – honeymoon included – on Bass Rock, in the Firth of Forth, studying gannets.

Bryan Nelson with his wife June. They spent three years in a wooden hut on Bass Rock studying gannets. Photograph: Langford Press

They had met while sheltering from bad weather at Spurn Bird Observatory on the Yorkshire coast, and June became Bryan’s research colleague. Once he had gained his DPhil in 1963, they headed to the Galapagos Islands, where they lived a Robinson Crusoe lifestyle in a beach tent with few home comforts – often going about naked in the extreme heat.

Although Nelson would later pursue a distinguished career as an academic, he had a passion for communicating to a general audience, and his first book, Galapagos: Islands of Birds (1968), was written in a clear, readable style. The book’s foreword was written by the Duke of Edinburgh, who had acquired a passion for seabirds through his worldwide sea voyages, and had stopped off to visit the Nelsons when the royal yacht Britannia was passing the Galapagos. At the end of the visit the Duke agreed to take Nelson’s precious diaries back to Britain on board Britannia, as Nelson feared they would be seized by Ecuadorian customs officers if he tried to mail them home. When he was back in Britain he made a visit to Buckingham Palace to collect the diaries.

In 1968 Bryan and June headed to Jordan, where Bryan became the first director of the Azraq Desert Research Station, following in the footsteps of the ornithologist and businessman Guy Mountfort, whose pioneering expeditions to Jordan in the early 1960s had led to the discovery of Azraq as a hotspot for migrant birds. In 1973 Nelson published his second book, Azraq: Desert Oasis, illustrated by his friend John Busby. Sadly, over the next few decades the draining of water to supply Jordan’s capital, Amman, led to the virtual destruction of Azraq.

Returning home in 1969, Nelson took up a post as lecturer in the zoology department of the University of Aberdeen, where he remained for the rest of his professional life until he retired in 1985. There he carried out more pioneering work on gannets, especially on their methods of communication, and would entertain his students by impersonating those noisy seabirds as they yelled and jousted with one another using their fearsome beaks. He was one of the first zoologists to use modern photographic techniques such as fast film to capture bird behaviour, notably gannets plunge-diving into the sea at speeds of up to 100km/h.

Elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1982, and made an MBE in 2006, he was based for the majority of his life in Scotland, latterly at Kirkcudbright in Dumfries and Galloway. His final book was On the Rocks (2013), a collection of memories that again featured artwork supplied by Busby.

Before and after retirement, Nelson enjoyed outdoor pastimes, including hill walking, boating and, of course, watching birds.

He is survived by June and by their twins, Simon and Becky.

Joseph Bryan Nelson, ornithologist, born 14 March 1932; died 29 June 2015

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