Dick Watling

Richard John Watling (born November 13, 1951 in Kampala , Uganda ), better known as Dick Watling , is an ornithologist, ecologist and conservationist from the Fiji Islands.

Life

After a childhood in East Africa, Watling became a citizen of the Fiji Islands in 1967. From 1970 to 1973 he completed a degree in zoology at the University of Bristol in England, which he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree with honors. From 1973 studied in the Department of Applied Biology at the University of Cambridge , where he in 1977 with a dissertation on the red-vented bulbul ( Pycnonotus cafer ), an introduced species, which was in the Fiji Islands to plague the Ph.D. PhD. In 1977 he became a scientific member of the Zoological Society of London and the British Ornithologists' Club . In 1982 he was elected a lifetime member of the Cambridge Philosophical Society . From 1985 to 1988 he was a research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC In 1986 he was a research fellow at the Institute of Applied Sciences at the University of the South Pacific . From 1988 to 1995 he was editor of the journal "Domodomo" of the Fiji Museum . In 1994 he became a member of the Environment Research Institute at the University of Wollongong . In 1995 he became a member of the Commission for National Parks and Conservation Areas of the IUCN . From 1999 to 2009 he represented the organization BirdLife International in the Fiji Islands. In 2007 he became administrator of the Fiji Nature Conservation Trust. Watling's fields of activity include planning and management in environmental and nature conservation, ecological assessment, nature conservation, wildlife management, management of nature reserves, the ecology of tropical forests, the ecology of terrestrial vertebrates, island ecology and the ecology of mangrove forests. Watling worked in Fiji, American Samoa, the Cook Islands, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Malaysia, Indonesia (especially Java, Bali, Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi), Cambodia, Laos, the Galápagos Islands and Ecuador as well as in Tanzania, especially on Lake Manyara and in the Serengeti .

In 1984 Watling succeeded in rediscovering the rare Macgillivray petrel ( Pseudobulweria macgillivrayi ) on the Fiji island of Gau , a species of bird that has been thought to be extinct since 1855.

In 2017 Watling was one of the co-descriptors of the iguana species Brachylophus gau from the Fiji island of Gau .

Dedication names

In 2004, Trevor H. Worthy Watling honored in the species epithet of the extinct Viti Levu rail ( Vitirallus watlingi ).

Fonts (selection)

• 1982 - Birds of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa . (Illustrated by Chloe Talbot-Kelly). Millwood: New Zealand. ISBN 0-908582-36-6
• 1986 - May Veikau: Tales of Fijian Wildlife . Fiji Times: Suva.
• 1999 - Pocket Poster Guide to the Birds of Fiji . Fiji. ISBN 9829030024
• 2001 - A Guide to the Birds of Fiji and Western Polynesia: Including American Samoa, Niue, Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu and Wallis and Futuna . Fiji. ISBN 9829030040
• 2005 - Palms of the Fiji Islands . (with George Bennett). Environmental Consultants: Suva. ISBN 9829047024
• 2006 - Guide to the Birds of the Kingdom of Tonga . Fiji. ISBN 9789829030078

literature

• Dick Watling - Curriculum Vitae (pdf, online)