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Clive Dudley Thomas Minton (1934–2019)

2020; Wiley; Volume: 163; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/ibi.12901

1474-919X

Nigel Clark, D. Lawrence Rogers, Humphrey P. Sitters,

Wildlife Ecology and Conservation

Photo Credit: Joanna Burger On 6 November 2019, the world of wader science and conservation lost its inspirational leader and father-figure when Clive Minton died in a car crash in Victoria, Australia. For more than 60 years, his passion and enthusiasm for waders, his development of cannon-netting as a research tool and his leadership qualities have stimulated a burgeoning of interest in waders across the globe. Born and brought up in England, Clive's first interest in wildlife was egg-collecting, but a teacher at Oundle School encouraged him to start bird-ringing and this rapidly became an all-consuming passion. Then, during a holiday in Northumberland, he caught a wader with his coat and took it to Eric Ennion at Monk's House Bird Observatory for identification. It turned out to be a Sanderling Calidris alba, the first of many hundred thousand waders that he caught during his lifetime. Clive was at Monk's House in 1957 when he noticed 'this beautiful young blonde girl from London' called Pat. They had many interests in common and married two years later, a marriage that endured for over 60 years until Clive passed away. Like many bird-ringers, Clive was probably always a hunter at heart, but realized that many scientific questions about birds' lives could be answered by long-term studies of marked individuals. His bird research took off while at Cambridge University, first for an undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences and then for a PhD in metallurgy (the use of titanium in aircraft engines). During this time he started catching waders on the Wash, Grey Herons Ardea cinerea at Gailey Reservoir and a large-scale study of Mute Swans Cygnus olor. They each involved large numbers of people led and inspired by Clive working together in teams, as well as standardized data collection and storage procedures. Yet despite Clive's organized and professional approach, he was always an amateur, never a trained biologist. His career in the UK was as a metallurgist with Imperial Metal Industries (IMI). The Mute Swan study exemplifies Clive's approach to understanding bird populations because the study was large (1440 km2) and the record keeping meticulous. When Clive moved to Australia in 1978, he ensured that the study was continued by Bert Coleman and his son Jon. Although he was on the other side of the world, he maintained a close interest and in 2001 collaborated with the Colemans in a paper based on the first 39 years of data. By that time they had documented the life histories of 1647 swans and were able to show how the population dynamics had changed over time, results only possible with really long-term studies in which all key parameters are diligently and comprehensively recorded. Clive's trips from Cambridge to Wisbech Sewage Farm to mist-net waders greatly increased the number of waders ringed and started to lead to an understanding of the migration routes of these global travellers. However, Clive was also keen to catch the large flocks of waders that used the mudflats of the Wash and came inland to roost. Early mist-netting trips to the shore convinced him that there was a need to use large powered nets to study the massive flocks that used the Wash. Therefore, he persuaded Peter Scott to lend him the rocket net developed by the Wildfowl Trust for catching geese. In typical Clive style, the first firing caught over 1100 birds. From this the Wash Wader Ringing Group (WWRG) was formed in 1959, and right from the start Clive was its driving force and undisputed leader. However, he was always inclusive and ensured that everybody’s contribution to the team effort was appreciated and acknowledged. As interest in waders grew in the UK, Clive became the founding father of the Wader Study Group, which had its inaugural meeting at his home in Birmingham in 1970. Initially the group was UK-centred, but with Clive's encouragement members went on expeditions to Iceland, West Africa and elsewhere, and soon wader people from other parts of Europe joined, so the group was renamed the International Wader Study Group (IWSG). The IWSG now has a worldwide membership and celebrated its 50th birthday in 2020. As the most professional of amateurs and as a leader of people, Clive and the WWRG often worked together with professional ornithologists to provide the conservation science that neither could achieve by themselves. When proposals were made for large parts of the Wash to be impounded as freshwater reservoirs, Clive ensured that the WWRG's work expanded to provide key information for the feasibility studies. The report on this work by the National Environment Research Council showed, among other things, that 30% more birds used the Wash each year than the sum of the peak counts for all species. Having presided over the capture of 150 000 waders on the Wash, Clive Minton, his wife Pat and their sons Roger and Nigel moved to Melbourne in 1978, when IMI appointed Clive managing director of IMI Australia. It was a good time for Clive to arrive in Australia. A small banding group had recently started to mist-net waders in Port Phillip Bay, Victoria; moreover, soon after he arrived, field surveys for the Atlas project of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union (RAOU) revealed the presence of enormous numbers of waders along the Broome to Port Hedland coast of north-west Australia. Also the Japan–Australia Migratory Bird Agreement (signed in 1974) came into force in 1981, and as a result there was enough funding for the RAOU to launch a national wader counting programme. There were therefore plenty of opportunities to build on the previously sketchy knowledge of waders in Australia – and with his skills, energy and boundless enthusiasm, Clive ensured that wader study and conservation made a big leap forward in Australia and elsewhere along the East Asian–Australasian Flyway (EAAF). Clive introduced cannon-netting to the Victorian banding project soon after his arrival, and in June 1979 it formally became the Victorian Wader Study Group (VWSG), a group that Clive chaired for its first 39 years. He was also the first chair of the Australasian Wader Studies Group (AWSG) from 1981 to 1985, and remained very active on the committee thereafter. In 1981 he co-led an exploratory AWSG expedition to north-west Australia, which confirmed that the region held extraordinary numbers of waders and there was an abundance of potential catching sites. It immediately became one of Clive's favourite places, and he led or co-led annual catching expeditions there for the next 39 years. North-west Australia and Victoria were at the core of Clive's wader activities in Australia. Convinced of the value of long-term studies, he established ongoing catching programmes, and the large skilled teams required to maintain them, in both regions. Clive was there for nearly all the catches, spending at least 50 days in the field annually. In the early days a key focus was to band large numbers of birds to unravel their migration routes, and to collect biometrics and moult data in order to understand their breeding origins, annual cycle and ageing and sexing characters. This banding effort was soon converted to banding and leg flagging as Clive quickly realized that having colour-marked birds would greatly increase the data that could be collected where there were very few banders, but an increasing number of birdwatchers. In the 1990s an additional priority became catching sufficient samples of key species to assess age-ratios as an index of reproductive success. Then in the 2000s, as tracking technology became suitable for smaller birds, geolocators and satellite tracking became part of the armoury to study the migration of Australia's waders. The basic parameters of wader migration in the EAAF are now reasonably wellknown as a result of the programmes Clive led in Australia, and in most species it has been found that there are key staging areas in East Asia, especially on the coast of the Yellow Sea. Clive spent relatively little time in the Asian parts of the EAAF, but he left a large footprint there. In addition to voluminous correspondence with birders in the flyway who saw the birds his teams had leg-flagged, Clive strongly supported the participation of volunteers from the EAAF in Australian fieldwork (especially in north-west Australia). Many of the workers now most active in wader studies in eastern Asia were helped in that direction through the training, friendships and networking that came with participation in Australian fieldwork. Somehow, on top of all the catching, Clive found time for other adventures and projects. Though best known for his banding work, Clive was a strong supporter of shorebird counting programmes in Australia – partly in committee meetings and the like (where he was very good at being heard!) and also in the field; among other things he played a key role in the first complete counts of shorebirds in north-west Australia, and carried out nearly 40 years of annual surveys at Corner Inlet (Victoria's premier shorebird location, which is a tricky site to monitor). Intrigued by the mystery of where Banded Stilts Cladorhynchus leucocephalus breed, he was also a driving force behind the first attempts to find and study breeding colonies on remote inland salt lakes; he was a keen photographer when time allowed, and collaborated with David Hollands on a photographic guide to the waders of Australia. In 1994, Allan Baker of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, joined Clive on an expedition to north-west Australia to obtain genetic samples from as many waders as possible. Allan quickly realized that Clive would be the person to start banding waders in difficult places and invited Clive to join him on an expedition to Tierra del Fuego in 1995. Allan had cannon-netting equipment made according to Clive's specifications, but unfortunately when they arrived in South America no black powder to power the cannons could be found. Clive tried improvising with firework powder which was useless, then with a small amount of nitro-cellulose powder which was far too powerful and blew apart one of the cannons. Only Clive could persuade a local oil industry fabrication yard to make a replacement for the cannon the same day! It was third time lucky, as they caught 850 Red Knots Calidris canutus, way more than Allan thought possible, but they ran out of bands and had to release 200 unbanded. One bird from that catch was later fitted with an orange flag inscribed B95 and went on to be celebrated in the book by Phillip Hoose: Moonbird – A year on the wind with the great survivor B95. Following another South America Red Knot expedition in 1997, Clive ended up in Delaware Bay where the host, Larry Niles (New Jersey Division of Fish & Wildlife), was very concerned about the plundering of breeding female Horseshoe Crabs Limulus polyphemus as fertilizer and whelk bait so he invited the press to a cannon-net catch. Clive not only managed the catch with eight TV crews in tow, but he also went into overdrive doing a whole series of interviews, one after another, usually holding a Knot to explain the incredible journeys that they make and how they depended on the Horseshoe Crabs. The battle over the Horseshoe Crab harvest continued and, as a result, Clive returned to Delaware Bay every May for the next 23 years, helping to lead an international team. It was during cannon-netting operations that Clive’s leadership qualities were most apparent: his skills included careful planning, an extraordinary memory for detail (both ornithological and technical), close attention to recording and archiving data and a voice like a foghorn! With his enthusiasm and good humour he made the uncomfortable and exhausting process of cannon-netting enjoyable, fulfilling and certainly memorable. There are vast numbers of stories about fieldwork involving Clive which are told by the large numbers of people that he inspired. Most resulted in birds being caught against the odds as a result of Clive's intuition and ability to get people to do things that they would never normally contemplate doing. A good example of this is the catch that was made after two people were told to encourage birds back to the catching area after they had flown further along the marsh. When they radioed that they had come to a creek that they could not cross, the message from Clive was ‘just strip off and swim across it’ which they duly did – in a snow storm! It is not possible to estimate how much time Clive devoted to the necessary ‘out-of-hours’ part of fieldwork: raising teams, maintaining equipment and data, provision of feedback and encouragement to volunteers and supporters. It did not leave as much time for analysis and publication as might have been desired, but Clive's publication list is nevertheless long and impressive, and the data he and his teams collected have been made freely available for collaborative studies undertaken by many scientists. In addition to Clive's passion for wader fieldwork he was a people person, always interested in what people were doing and his incredible memory meant that he would ask people about their families or their projects even if he had not seen them for years. This interest in people was vital to his ability to quickly identify those people who he could develop and encourage to get involved in wader studies. There are many tens if not hundreds of people who went on to undertake research on waders and the natural world as a result of a chance meeting with Clive. Many now hold senior positions in science, conservation or government organizations. All three of us were inspired to change direction after getting involved in fieldwork led by Clive. Clive Minton's pioneering work has been recognized by six major awards and honours: Clive Minton's life-long work with waders hugely increased knowledge of their ecology and awareness of their conservation needs. If this leads to the protection of coastal habitats around the world to enable future generations to marvel at these global travellers, it will be his finest legacy.