Roger Safford

Roger James Safford (born August 16, 1967 in Richmond , Surrey ) is a British ornithologist and conservationist. His main research interests are the avifauna of Madagascar and other islands in the western Indian Ocean .

Life

In 1988 Safford graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Science from the University of Cambridge . From 1989 to 1993 he worked for the Mauritius Wildlife Appeal Fund as a project manager for protection measures for endemic passerine birds. From 1990 to 1993 he was the national coordinator of the African Waterfowl Census in Mauritius . Since 1991 he has been a member of the IUCN Species Survival Commission . In 1994 he was with a thesis on the protection of forest birds in Mauritius ( Conservation of the forest-living birds native of Mauritius ) for Ph.D. PhD from the University of Kent . In August 1995 he became project coordinator for South East Asia at the Royal Holloway Institute for Environmental Research, University of London . Safford visited the Comoros three times , where in 1992 he succeeded in rediscovering the Anjouan scops owl ( Otus capnodes ). He then traveled to Ethiopia, the Seychelles, Réunion and Rodrigues. In Vietnam, he was involved in conservation and management projects for wetlands. On behalf of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, he captured four of the rare Bernier Ducks ( Anas bernieri ) in 1993 for a conservation breeding program at the Jersey Zoo. Since all four specimens turned out to be males, breeding could not begin until 1995 after two females were caught. In 1991 Safford was a founding member of the IUCN Working Group on Birds of the Malagasy Region and in 1994 he co-founded the African Bird Club. In 1995 Safford was one of the first to describe the Nechisar nightjar ( Caprimulgus solala ) from Ethiopia, which is only known from one wing. Since 2001 he has been supporting BirdLife International's conservation work in Madagascar. He published scientific articles in various journals, mainly on the faunistics of the Indian Ocean and Africa and on nature conservation. He was also a co-author of the works Tropical Lowland Peatlands of Southeast Asia (1996), Field Guide of the Birds of the Malagasy Region (2002), The Birds of Africa, Vol. 8: The Malagasy Region (2013) and Birds of Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands (2015).

Dedication names

In 2018 Guy M. Kirwan and Hadoram Shirihai named the subspecies Aerodramus francicus saffordi of the Mauritian Salangane after Roger Safford.

literature

• John E. Pemberton: Who's Who in Ornithology , Buckingham Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0951496589 , pp. 323-324