Robert Prys-Jones

Robert Parton Prys-Jones (* 1949 in Denbigh , Clwyd , Wales ), often written as Prŷs-Jones , is a Welsh ornithologist . His main research interests are the avifauna of the Seychelles and research into fraud and misinformation regarding ornithological collections.

Life

In 1970 Prys-Jones graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology from the University of Nottingham . In 1977 he received his doctorate with a thesis on Comparative physiological ecology of two species bunting for Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in bird biology at Linacre College of the University of Oxford . From 1974 to 1978 he worked at the Royal Society's research station on Aldabra . He conducted field studies on the now extinct aldabrabush warbler ( Nesillas aldabrana ), which was discovered in 1967. At the end of 1975 he managed to find six specimens, all of them males, to ring and photograph them. From 1979 to 1980, Prys-Jones was a postdoctoral fellow in the zoological department of the University of Queensland in Australia in the fields of behavioral ecology and biogeography in birds. From 1980 to 1982 he was a research fellow at the University of Stirling , where he studied the energy metabolism of birds (Avian Energetics). From 1982 to 1987 he lectured at the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town . From 1987 to 1992 he was head of the estuary department of the British Trust for Ornithology in Thetford . Since 1992 he has been the curator of the bird department of the Natural History Museum at Tring . Prys-Jones is responsible for the museum's non-fossil bird collections. Further tasks are the organization and participation in the collection management program of the ornithological working group, the access to the collections and the provision of information about them. Most recently, Prys-Jones has set itself the goal of developing and applying methods that are intended to improve the reliability and documentation of preparations in order to detect fraud and misinformation relating to bird hides. Through the research and research work of Prys-Jones, which took place in collaboration with Pamela C. Rasmussen , for example, the ornithologist Richard Meinertzhagen was able to prove fraud because he had given many of the 20,000 bird hides in his collection new labels that indicated a wrong area of ​​origin . One of the best-known frauds that have been identified is that of the Blewitt-Kauz , which, thanks to the educational work of Prys-Jones and Rasmussen , was rediscovered in 1997 in its correct distribution area in the Satpura Mountains after 113 years .

Prys-Jones undertook bird expeditions around the world that took him to the Arctic and the tropics. The Seychelles formed a special focus . In 1978 he took part in a field study on birds and bats on the Caribbean island of Dominica . Prys-Jones has written numerous book chapters and scientific papers on avian biology, which have been published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society , the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club , the Journal Ibis , the Journal of Zoology and the Journal of Applied Ecology , among others .

literature

• John E. Pemberton: Who's Who in Ornithology , Buckingham Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0-9514965-8-9 , p. 300

Web links

• Profile page of the Natural History Museum
• Bird Collection Fraud (examples of misinformation from the Meinertzhagen collection identified by Prys-Jones)