David William Snow

David and his wife Barbara Kathleen Snow

David William Snow (born September 20, 1924 in Windermere (Cumbria) , † February 4, 2009 ) was a British ornithologist .

Life

Snow was one of four children. His parents emigrated to Australia shortly after he was born. However, they returned to Britain after a few years. After completing school as a scholarship holder at the elite boarding school Eton , he joined the Royal Navy and served on escort ships in the Atlantic. Immediately after the end of World War II in Europe, but still with the Navy, he traveled through the Mediterranean to India and then on to Southeast Asia and Australia. Whenever the opportunity arose, he went ashore to watch birds. After serving in the Navy, Snow studied at Oxford from 1946 to 1949 . His enthusiasm for birds prompted him to give up the classic subjects and switch to zoology instead . During his studies, Snow took part in several expeditions, including one to São Tomé and Príncipe in 1949 . In 1953 he graduated from the Oxford Edward Gray Institute of Field Ornithology under his doctoral supervisor David Lack with a dissertation on the systematics and ecology of the titmouse genus Parus to the Ph.D. For this work he traveled to northern Lapland for a month at the winter solstice and studied the behavior of Lapland tits and willow tits at temperatures of -37 ° C.

On a subsequent trip, Snow visited the forests in the North African Atlas , where he collected subspecies of all titmouse species that are native there. On this expedition he covered 2,300 miles on an older motorcycle. He gave up studying graycatchers in the Oxford area, instead the blackbirds aroused his keen interest, about which he wrote his first book A Study of Blackbirds in 1958 . After his time in Oxford, Snow worked from January 1957 to 1961 in the field station of the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society ) in the Arima Valley, Trinidad . Here David Snow married his fiancée Barbara Kathleen Whitaker , who was also an ornithologist. She worked as a supervisor at the Lundy Island ornithological station and studied shag behavior for her doctoral thesis. Much of the expedition and research work was carried out by the Snows together. In Trinidad, David Snow studied the relationships between fruit-eating birds and fruit-bearing trees. His work on the Bartkotinga ( Procnias averano ) was one of the first detailed population studies of a tropical bird species and is still considered one of the most extensive today. Further research focuses were the fat swallows ( Steatornis caripensis ) and the ornamental birds (Cotingidae).

In 1963, David Snow became the first director of the newly established Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos Islands. Together with his wife, he implemented a protection program for the giant tortoises and researched the lava gulls ( Larus fuliginosus ), the breeding behavior of the nocturnal fork-tailed gulls ( Creagrus furcatus ) and the flightless Galapagos shark ( Phalacrocorax harrisi ). From 1964 to 1968 Snow was Scientific Director of the British Trust for Ornithology. In 1968 he became head of the British Museum (Natural History), now the Natural History Museum London. In this function, he organized the move of the entire bird collection (approx. 740,000 bellows, 5,000 assembled specimens, 13,000 skeletons, 17,000 alcohol preparations and approx. 1,000,000 bird eggs and nests) from London to the Natural History Museum at Tring in 1971 . During his time with the British Trust for Ornithology worked on several projects with Snow, including 1,967 at one about the walks and the mortality of kestrels and in the same year at one on the Mauser . He also looked at the spread of foot and mouth disease during an outbreak. He was able to show that bird migration is not related to the transmission of this epidemic, as was generally assumed.

Honors

In 1972 David and Barbara K. Snow received the William Brewster Medal in recognition of their studies in the biology of Neotropical birds. The American Ornithologists' Union justified this with the following arguments:

“ The 1972 William Brewster Award winners deserved this award for a number of reasons. You are part of a handful of ornithologists who have produced a monographic study of the biology of various Neotropical land birds. Her contributions on the evolutionary consequences of nutrition from fruits by tropical birds (e.g. "Birds and Berries") stand out. To this end, they compared the courtship behavior of different purrbirds ("Pipridae") and put forward evolutionary theories on lek and courtship behavior. They also studied the breeding and moulting cycles of many birds in the American tropics in relation to their environment. David and Barbara Snow collected the data for this work during their stay in Trinidad and the Galapagos Archipelago . Both have worked closely together and acted as co-authors on various topics. Regardless of their multitude of interests, they have always sought to combine their detailed studies of diet, breeding biology, and behavior into a unified fabric of interactive adaptations. By doing this, they have not only presented us with a classic study of swallows ("Steatornis caripensis"), ornamental birds ("Cotingidae"), or purrbirds, but have set the theoretical framework for future successful research in the neotropics. "

Dedication names

One genus and several animal taxa are named after David Snow. The first was Pseudomeinertellus snowi ( Wygodzinsky 1954) , an insect from the Meinertellidae family from Pico de São Tomé . In 1985, Dante Martins Teixeira and Luiz Pedreira Gonzaga named the Alagoas ant panties ( Myrmotherula snowi ) and in 1971 Kenneth Carroll Parkes named the white- fronted tit subspecies Cyanistes semilarvatus snowi in honor of Snow. In 2001 Richard Owen Prum created the new ornamental bird genus Snowornis for two Piha species originally belonging to the genus Lipaugus .

Works (selection)

• David W. Snow: A Study of Blackbirds , 1958
• David W. Snow: A Guide to Moult in British Birds , 1967
• David W. Snow: Distribution, ecology and evolution of the bellbirds (Procnias, Cotingidae) , 1973
• David W. Snow: The classification of the Cotingidae (Aves) , 1973
• David W. Snow: The web of adaptation: bird studies in the American tropics , 1976
• David W. Snow: Raymond Ching, the Bird Paintings: Water Colors and Pencil Drawings, 1969-1975 , 1978
• David W. Snow: An atlas of speciation in African non-passerine birds , 1978
• David W. Snow & Barbara K. Snow: Relationships Between Hummingbirds and Flowers in the Andes of Columbia , 1980
• David W. Snow: The Cotingas: Bellbirds, Umbrella Birds and Their Allies , 1982
• David W. Snow: The Blackbird , 1987
• David W. Snow: Birds, Discovery and Conservation: 100 Years of the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club , 1992
• David W. Snow: The Birds of the Western Palearctic: Passerines , 1998
• David W. Snow: The Birds of the Western Palearctic: Non-Passerines , 1998

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Auk, Vol 90, No. 1, 1974 Proceedings of the Ninetieth Stated Meeting of the American Ornithologists' Union (English; PDF; 893 kB) Original article

literature

• Frank Dieter Steinheimer: David Snow (1924-2009) . In: Vogelwarte . tape 47 , no. 2 , 2009, p. 144–145 ( online [PDF; 1.8 MB ; accessed on June 8, 2012]).
• Christopher Perrins : Obituary: David William Snow, 1924–2009 . In: Ibis . tape 151 , no. 3 , 2009, p. 611–613 ( online [PDF; accessed June 8, 2012]).
• University of California Press: In Memoriam: David William Snow, 1924-2009 . In: The Auk . tape 128 , no. 3 , 2011, p. 590-591 .