Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Guy Mountfort, 1905–2003

2004; Wiley; Volume: 146; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1474-919x.2004.00317.x

1474-919X

I. J. Ferguson‐Lees,

Genetic diversity and population structure

Guy Mountfort, who died on 23 April 2003 at the age of 97, was a dominant figure in the BOU in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Elected in 1938, he served as its Honorary Secretary from 1952 to 1962 and then as President for a full five-year term from 1970 to 1975. In between, he was awarded the Union Medal in 1967 and, much later, Honorary Life Membership the year before his death. He was proud of the extent to which the Union's membership had grown during his terms of office, though the post-war years were a period of generally increasing interest in ornithology at all levels. But his BOU work was only one aspect of this remarkable man's contributions to British and European field ornithology and to wildlife conservation worldwide. Perhaps most widely known as co-author of Europe's first field guide to birds, he was also one of the four founders of the World Wildlife Fund (now World Wide Fund for Nature), while the expeditions he led to various parts of southern Eurasia in the 1950s and 1960s resulted in the setting up of a number of national parks and wildlife reserves in eight countries. He was appointed an OBE in 1970; other honours included the Stamford Raffles Award of the Zoological Society in 1969, WWF's Gold Medal in 1978 and Commander of the Dutch Order of the Golden Ark in 1980. Guy Reginald Mountfort was born on 4 December 1905, of prosperous parents who lived comfortably in an elegant Georgian house in Chelsea, London; his father was an established society artist whose portraits were often exhibited at the Royal Academy. But Guy's world collapsed at the age of six, when his father left the family: his mother had to move with her four children to a small terrace house in Croydon and then, two years later, to a cottage at Highcliffe on the Hampshire–Dorset coast, where they stayed for six years. This period of sudden change, little money and then country living may well have defined Guy's life: certainly his interest in natural history was started then, and probably also his unusually determined drive to be a high achiever. Guy left school at 16 and, after a number of dead-end jobs, obtained a post as an advertising assistant at Frigidaire in Paris in 1927; he had few of the qualifications required, but his evidently already considerable charm must have won the day. This was the forerunner of a later long and successful career in advertising. He remained in France for the next ten years and started a deeper interest in birds – putting up nest-boxes, ringing migrants and beginning an eight-year study of Hawfinches Coccothraustes coccothraustes; he also corresponded with Harry Witherby, Richard Meinertzhagen, James Fisher and other well-known British ornithologists of the time. He moved back to England at the end of 1937 as the clouds gathered over Europe. The Second World War then saw him sent to America, North Africa, Italy, Germany and, later, Burma, Australia, New Guinea and the Solomons, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. He was lucky once – a plane that he just missed in India crashed into a hillside – but that period was essential in developing his cosmopolitan outlook. As he wrote in So Small a World (1974): ‘Half a million miles of travel on liaison duties with the allied armies took me through the hinterlands of five continents and to many remote islands … These journeys always rewarded me with a broader understanding of the natural world … The devastation caused by the War, and the far greater damage to the environment brought about by technology during the following decades, instilled in me a deep conviction of the need to save what little remained of unspoilt wilderness and its rapidly disappearing wildlife.’ Guy's business life in advertising developed steadily after the war and he reached his pinnacle as Managing Director of Ogilvy & Mather, retiring in 1967. Ogilvy & Mather resulted from a merger between Guy's previous agency, Mather & Crowther, and a much larger one set up in the United States by his long-time colleague and friend, David Ogilvy. It was while staying with Ogilvy in Connecticut that he went to watch the spectacular raptor migration at Pennsylvania's Hawk Mountain and, by chance, met Roger Tory Peterson, whose American bird guides were already highly successful. The two of them decided to collaborate on a European field guide, Guy writing the text and Roger painting the plates; they co-opted Phil Hollom to prepare distribution maps, still a new concept in ornithology. The result was A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe (1954), which was to sell well over a million copies and be translated into 13 other languages; it has been revised five times and reprinted many more. Although the foundations of modern field identification had been laid down by Bernard Tucker in his ‘Field-characters’ section of Witherby's The Handbook of British Birds (1938–41), and James Fisher had in the 1940s published a Penguin series on Bird Recognition with British distribution maps, ‘Peterson, Mountfort & Hollom’ was the first book to describe, illustrate and map the birds of Europe in a single volume. With its North American counterparts, it was to set a standard that has been followed in most parts of the world, so much so that, nowadays, travelling birdwatchers feel deprived if they cannot find a field guide available for any country they visit. Other bird guides have since covered Europe, each vying to improve on its predecessors by updating identification and sexing and ageing techniques – but in 1954 it was the first, and Guy was the driving force. Guy's next major publication was The Hawfinch (1957), in the Collins ‘New Naturalist’ series, based on his pre-war studies in France and, later, Suffolk. He showed that this often elusive species of the tree-tops was ‘capable of a crushing load of 95 pounds’ in cracking cherry stones with the aid of its massive bill and enlarged jaw muscles which wrap around the skull. Although perhaps not a classic monograph, it is an enjoyable work that demonstrated Guy's ability to write good readable prose, as he was later to show in a series of books over the next 34 years. I first met Guy in 1948, the year I joined the BOU, and subsequently ran into him at various meetings and conferences. In 1954 we came to know each other rather better when, by chance, we coincided on an autumn visit to Fair Isle. Guy did not enjoy the journey across in the Good Shepherd. It was rough, and cold, and he sat before the mast with his hands supported on his walking stick; by the time we arrived, he had almost to be lifted off, frozen into this sculptured position. Two years later he was to be seen in similar straits after a four-hour horse-ride into Andalusia's Coto Doñana: in 1956 and 1957 I was one of a number of ornithologists, ecologists and bird-photographers whom he invited to join his expeditions there. These resulted in papers in several journals, in a television film and, perhaps most significantly, in Guy's book, Portrait of a Wilderness (1958), a highly readable narrative of the organization and daily events of his three trips there – their successes and failures, and the difficulties of journeying and natural history study abroad in a bygone age when commercial flights were still new, and few British birdwatchers ventured far across the Channel – all illustrated by Eric Hosking's photos. In these days of cheap flights and global travel, it may be difficult to understand the complexities of mounting an expedition no farther away than southern Spain, with horses and mules the main means of getting about and eucalyptus trees the only material for building pylon hides. That book and the efforts of those multinational expeditions and their successors were eventually to lead to the setting up of Doñana as one of the most important National Parks in Europe, which UNESCO also declared a World Heritage Site in 1994; it has to be strong enough not only to resist development along its remaining 30 km of unspoilt beach fronting the continent's highest sand-dunes, but also to fight drainage and pollution of the vast marismas, or marshes, of the Guadalquivir delta. It seems ironic that, 45 years later, three of the most influential members of those expeditions – José Antonio (Tono) Valverde, Max Nicholson and Guy himself – would all die within the space of just 14 days. Doñana was followed by a series of Mountfort expeditions and books, which continued with Bulgaria and Hungary (Portrait of a River, 1962), Jordan (Portrait of a Desert, 1965), Pakistan (The Vanishing Jungle, 1969) and India (Wild India, 1985). Many national parks and wildlife reserves resulted, but, of several in Jordan, one of the most significant that eventually largely failed – apart from the establishment of a small research centre and a breeding programme for the endangered Arabian Oryx – was the great oasis of Azraq. There, five freshwater pools backed by roughly 1 km2 of marshland, all fed by a deep aquifer, were supported in winter by a much larger brackish lagoon that gradually dried to mud in spring and early summer; it was a mixed habitat for huge numbers of breeding, migrating and wintering birds in the midst of stony hammada desert. The major proposal for this desert national park was written by Max Nicholson and Guy Mountfort after the 1963 and 1964 expeditions there, followed in turn by a further multidiscipline survey under the auspices of the International Biological Programme in 1966, and finally by Bryan Nelson's year-long study that culminated in his book Azraq: Desert Oasis (1974). Unfortunately, the Jordanian government later decided to pipe fresh water from Azraq, first to Mafraq and then, more significantly, to Amman: by the early 1980s little but the five pools remained. Ten years later, during the Gulf War, Azraq became a refugee camp. Having realized early on that, to make things happen, he had to have the active co-operation of influential people, Guy became driven throughout his life to seek contacts he regarded as important, many of whom became friends. Thus, his autobiography, Memories of Three Lives (1991), is littered with famous names, and the Mountfort expedition teams, particularly those to Doñana and Azraq, included such men as Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke (Churchill's Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the Second World War), Eric Hosking and Roger Tory Peterson as bird-photographers, and James Fisher, Sir Julian Huxley and Max Nicholson as ornithologists. In Jordan, Pakistan and India he dealt at the top with kings and princes, presidents and prime ministers. ‘Whom you know’ can be certainly very useful and back in 1961, when he was still Honorary Secretary of the BOU, a meeting took place between Guy, Julian Huxley, Max Nicholson (then Director General of the Nature Conservancy Council) and Sir Peter Scott (founder of what is now the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust), who decided to join forces in creating what was to become the World Wildlife Fund. HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, agreed to be the President of a British National Appeal and, through him, HRH Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands became President of WWF International. Peter Scott designed the now famous Panda symbol and, with the advertising skills of Guy's old friend and colleague, David Ogilvy, and the expert advice of the IUCN, WWF became a powerful influence throughout the world. Guy was a Trustee, its first Treasurer and, later, a Vice-President. It was this part of his life that made Guy a determined conservationist and, latterly, a passionate and tireless supporter of Tigers in a four-year campaign to raise $5 million and establish 17 reserves. By his expeditions, and often on behalf of WWF, he helped to create wildlife reserves, not only in Spain, Bulgaria, Jordan, Pakistan and India, but also in Bangladesh, Nepal and the Gambia. Increasing awareness of the needs of action for conservation before it was all too late became the theme of two more of his 13 books, So Small a World (1974) and Back from the Brink (1977), while the desperate plight of the cat family and of many birds led to a further three, Tigers (1973), Saving the Tiger (1981) and Rare Birds of the World (1988), the last with the backing and advice of the ICBP (now BirdLife International). Guy was not an easy person to know. He found it difficult to drop his guard. He was not a social person, hating parties, but he had great charm and infectious enthusiasm when talking to colleagues and friends or, for that matter, anyone from rustics to royalty. He was a good listener and, though he would stick to his guns when he thought he was right, he would readily hear, and be persuaded by, the sound arguments of others. Above all, he was an organizer who got things done: if he did not already know the right person to approach for help, he soon found a way to do so. One saying of his was ‘start at the top and go higher’. I am proud and privileged to have counted him as a friend for many years, to have been a member of four of his expeditions, to have been asked to comment on drafts of three of his books and, along with Ian Wallace, to have been invited to collaborate with him and Phil Hollom in revising the text for the 2nd and 3rd editions of the ground-breaking Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe. The last time I saw him was when I sat next to him at Max Nicholson's 90th birthday party, at which both of these grand old men with interwoven lives made speeches. I am privileged, too, to have known Guy's wife, Joan, who – apart from being a gifted linguist, assisting him in all sorts of ways – was his inspiration for the best part of 80 years. They met in 1924, became engaged in 1927, and married in 1931. She shared his life right up to his death, when they were living together in a nursing home; indeed, she survived him by only a month. After he retired, she was able to go with him on some of his travels – including the Indian subcontinent, the islands of the Indian Ocean and Antarctica. Guy and Joan are survived by their two daughters, Penelope and Carol. Special tributes to both Guy Mountfort and Max Nicholson, who died only three days apart in their late nineties, were made by Sir David Attenborough before the WWF Founders Memorial Lecture at the Natural History Museum, London, on 5 November 2003. The lecture, by Adair Turner on ‘Conservation in a Global Economy’, looked forward to problems that both these worldwide conservationists had started us thinking about well before their deaths.