Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Phil Hockey (1956-2013)

2013; Wiley; Volume: 155; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/ibi.12058

1474-919X

Peter G. Ryan,

Orthoptera Research and Taxonomy

Philip Anthony Richard Hockey, the fourth Director of the University of Cape Town's Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, died on 24 January 2013 after a year-long battle with cancer. His career was intimately linked with the ‘Fitztitute’, where he studied African Oystercatchers Haematopus moquini for his PhD from 1979 to 1983 and remained thereafter. He took over as Director in 2008, continuing a period of growth linked to the Institute's recognition as a national centre of research excellence. During his career, Phil contributed to our understanding of the role of birds in inter-tidal ecology and the factors underpinning migration distance. In birding circles, he is perhaps best known as the lead editor of the seventh edition of Roberts' Birds of Southern Africa (John Voelcker Bird Book Fund, 2005), which saw Roberts being transformed into a handbook that made accessible the wealth of scientific information on southern African birds. Born in Bournemouth on 8 March 1956, Phil grew up in rural Gloucestershire. He had a passion for natural history from an early age, collecting fossils, butterflies and reptiles, but his main passion was for birds, with Chew Valley his local patch. Phil's father encouraged his obsession, driving him all over the country to look for new birds, and spending long hours during winter in freezing hides overlooking the Severn Estuary while Phil searched for rare geese. Phil gained a scholarship to Monkton Combe School, Bath, where he completed A-levels in Maths and Science. He then spent a year teaching at Moffat School, Shropshire, before completing his BSc Hons in Ecological Science at Edinburgh University. He subsequently published some of his undergraduate work on wintering Common Pochards Aythya ferina in Scottish Birds (1983). Phil first came to South Africa in 1976 as an assistant to Ron Summers studying the breeding biology of White-fronted Plovers Charadrius marginatus at Langebaan Lagoon. Enjoying the Cape's easy-going lifestyle and pleasant climate, he and his then wife Carole moved to South Africa in 1979 to study African Oystercatchers. They spent their first couple of years based in the Bob Rand House on Marcus Island, where Phil made several significant contributions to rocky shore ecology (South African Journal of Science, 1983). He identified the key role oystercatchers play in structuring inter-tidal communities by removing grazing limpets (Ardea, 1984) and together with his first PhD student, Alison Bosman, he demonstrated how enhanced productivity on island rocky shores was linked to runoff from seabird breeding colonies (Marine Ecology Progress Series, 1986). Even in those early years, Phil demonstrated his versatility as a scientist. I was able to appreciate his skills first hand in 1985 during the Fitztitute's 25th Anniversary Expedition to Chile, where Phil, Alison Bosman and I worked on various shorebird projects. The 5-week trip resulted in no fewer than six papers, including one that explained polymorphism and cryptic mimesis in a limpet due to predation by cinclodes (Veliger 1987). He extended the lessons learned from oystercatcher predation to manage human exploitation of rocky shore communities (Environmental Conservation, 1985; Oikos, 1986), and demonstrated an early awareness of the potential impacts of human disturbance, initiating a study on the impacts of disturbance on African Penguins Spheniscus demersus (South African Journal of Wildlife Research, 1981). He also appreciated the need for solid baseline data, and was involved in setting up the guidelines for the first southern African bird atlas. His first book was the Atlas of the Birds of the Southwestern Cape (Cape Bird Club, 1989). After taking up a teaching position at the Fitztitute in 1986, Phil's main research thrust remained the foraging ecology of coastal shorebirds. He led research teams to tropical Africa and islands in the Indian Ocean, South America, the Canary Islands and the Middle East. His seminal paper on wader migration (American Naturalist, 1992) literally turned upside down the way we perceive the factors underpinning long-distance migration in shorebirds. He showed that, contrary to conventional wisdom, migrant shorebird densities are highest at the southern limits of their migratory ranges, and was able to explain this elegantly in terms of a latitudinal gradient in food production during the austral summer. He was soon recognized as the authority on African waders and in 1995 he published the monograph Waders of Southern Africa (Struik Winchester). Phil combined his interests in conservation and shorebirds in the 1990s, when he launched a highly successful public outreach programme that used African Oystercatchers as a flagship for coastal conservation. In part, this led to the banning of off-road vehicles on South African beaches, a measure that remains in force today and that has done as much to conserve inshore fish populations from shore-based angling as it has coastal birds. His beloved African Oystercatchers are now more numerous than they have been in the last 50 years, although this has as much to do with the invasion of the southern African coast by the mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis (a species first discovered in the region by Phil) as it does with his conservation initiatives. As is often the case in countries with a relatively small research community, Phil published on a wide range of topics and birds. Waders were his first love, but together with his students he also worked on gulls, terns, penguins, gannets, raptors, rails, bustards, cranes, gamebirds, ducks, larks and warblers. This gave Phil an extraordinary breadth of knowledge, which made him a natural choice to lead the revision of Roberts' Birds as a fully referenced handbook. The resultant 5-year project tested even Phil's legendary work ethic, and brought his otherwise prolific publication record to a near standstill. In recent years, Phil became involved in addressing the impacts of climate change on birds. His initial work pointed out the folly of invoking climate change to explain recent bird range changes because most such changes result from other factors such as habitat alteration (Ostrich, 2009; Diversity and Distributions, 2011). Frustrated by the lack of empirical evidence on the impacts of climate change on bird populations, he initiated the ‘hot birds’ programme to investigate how birds in hot, arid environments are likely to be impacted by hotter climates. It is extremely unfortunate that he was unable to carry this project through to full fruition. During his academic career, Phil graduated more than 50 PhD and MSc students and supervised eight Post-doctoral Fellows. Among his better-known students are Morné du Plessis (World Wide Fund for Nature), Olivier Langrand (Island Conservation) and Ross Wanless (BirdLife). He published more than 120 scientific papers, 150 semi-popular articles, 10 books and numerous book chapters, including the family account for oystercatchers in the Handbook of the Birds of the World. Phil retained his enthusiasm for birding throughout his life. He was chairman of the southern African rare birds committee for many years, and was always happy to discuss birds with all and sundry. Together with Ian Sinclair and Warwick Tarboton, he wrote the best-selling regional field guide Sasol Birds of Southern Africa, currently in its fourth edition, as well as numerous other popular books on birds. As a wonderful raconteur and public speaker, he was forever being asked to speak on birds. Indeed, he was passionate about the need to disseminate the science of birds, and their conservation, to a wide audience. These contributions were recognized by the Southern African Network for Coastal and Oceanic Research who named him ‘Marine and Coastal Communicator of the Year’ in 2000 and he was awarded the Stevenson-Hamilton Medal for contributions to the public awareness of science by the Zoological Society of Southern Africa in 2008. Yet despite birds being his first love, Phil was far from one-dimensional. He excelled at sports, especially tennis, which he played for Edinburgh University's First Six and competed in the youth competition at Wimbledon. In Cape Town, he was a fierce competitor on the squash courts, defeating much younger opponents with a blend of power and accuracy. He loved solving problems, and was a member of Mensa. Many a birder enjoyed the crosswords and other puzzles he put together for the Christmas editions of Africa Birds and Birding. He also had an earthy sense of humour, and frequently wrote humorous articles for birders. He remained down to earth and approachable even as Director of the Fitz, often coming to work in shorts and bare feet. He was always up for a party, where he entertained people with his remarkable repertoire of ditties and doggerel, irrespective of the volume of alcohol consumed. As was typical of the man, Phil refused to have any form of memorial ceremony, leaving instructions for a party instead. The number of people who turned up from all over of the world is testament to the many people from diverse walks of life touched by his enthusiasm and energy. Yet it is Phil's intellect, insight and leadership that will be missed most. As renowned intertidal ecologist George Branch reminisced, ‘When I really wanted to chew over some serious scientific issue, Phil was always top of my list because of his incisive, lateral thinking and breadth of knowledge’. Our condolences go to his wife, Samantha, family in the UK, and his extended family at the Fitz.