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From: "Peter McCrae" <>
Subject: [W-OBITS] SNOW: David William Snow 2009
Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2009 16:43:38 -0000

David Snow
David Snow, who died on February 4 aged 84, was an eminent ornithologist
whose research ranged from studies of the common or garden blackbird to the
biology of tropical and neotropical bird species such as hummingbirds,
cotingas, and "dancing" manakins.

Last Updated: 7:04PM GMT 17 Feb 2009

The Telegraph.co.uk

Photo: CDF As founder director of the Charles Darwin Research Station on
the Galapagos Islands in the early 1960s, he was instrumental in introducing
conservation programmes to protect the islands' remaining giant tortoises
from further decline.

With his wife, Barbara, Snow made a huge contribution to our understanding
of the evolutionary consequences of fruit-eating in birds. In a series of
studies of tropical birds, he theorised that the colourful plumage and
elaborate mating rituals of male manakins and similar species derived from
the fact that copious supplies of fruit enabled the birds to secure adequate
daily calories with only a small percentage of their time devoted to
feeding. This left them plenty of opportunity to develop elaborate rituals
to impress the dowdier females.

In England, the Snows spent five years carrying out systematic observations
of fruit-eating birds in a small area on the Hertfordshire-Buckinghamshire
borders, publishing their results in the seminal Birds and Berries (1988).

Among other things, they revealed that the reason why so many holly bushes
keep their berries throughout the winter is not, as had been previously
thought, because some hollies bear fruit which is not attractive to birds,
but because they are vigorously defended by mistle thrushes which rely on
the berries to see them through the winter.

In extremely cold winters, however, they found that the thrushes were often
unable to defend their bushes against desperate fieldfares and redwings
despite mounting almost continuous attacks on the invaders. "The
overwhelming of Mistle Thrush defence in the 1981-82 winter," the Snows
recalled, was "one of the more spectacular happenings" in all their years of
field work.

Snow was a kindly but diffident man whose interests lay in field observation
rather than administration. Yet in the Galapagos he organised enforcement of
a "strict tortoise reserve" for the Santa Cruz tortoise and a survey which
revealed that members of two other species, thought to be extinct, were
still alive. This included one tortoise which, Snow reported, had been found
on Espanola "feeding on a fallen Opuntia in company, and in competition,
with 15 goats". Among his parting recommendations was the eradication of
goats on Espanola and Santa Fe islands.

The son of a prep school headmaster, David William Snow was born in
Windermere, Cumbria, on September 30 1924. His father encouraged his early
interest in birds, giving him his first pair of binoculars - a pair of
German First World War Goetz field glasses - when he was 12.

At school, David showed an aptitude for Classics and won a scholarship to
Eton, followed by an open classical scholarship to New College, Oxford.
However, he knew that he did not want a career as a classicist; at Eton he
spent his weekends at a sewage farm in Slough which produced "a constant
succession of excitements", including Temminck's Stints, Spotted Redshanks,
phalaropes and other birds.

His arrival at Oxford was deferred because of the war and he was
commissioned in the RNVR towards the end of 1943. From then until demob,
serving on patrols in the Atlantic and, after V-E Day, in the Far East, he
kept a meticulous diary of all the birds he saw.

By the time he arrived at Oxford, Snow had decided to drop Classics for
Zoology. New College had no one to teach the subject so he studied under
zoologists at other colleges, notably David Lack of the Edward Grey
Institute. After graduation, Snow became a demonstrator at the institute and
took a doctorate on the geographic variation and comparative ecology of tit
species in Europe and north Africa.

In 1952, with his thesis coming to an end, Snow began making observations of
blackbirds in the university's botanic gardens. The birds became his chief
interest over the next four years, and his Study of Blackbirds (1957), now
in its second edition, remains a classic.

In 1957 Snow secured funding for a four-year study of the birds of the Arima
Valley in Trinidad, as part of a project led by the New York Zoological
Society. Working with his wife Barbara, a former warden of Lundy Bird
Observatory, who joined him after their marriage in 1958, he began
researching the feeding, breeding and moult cycles of numerous tropical
American birds.

This work led to the publication of studies on the oilbird, the manakin and
the cotinga (a large family of colourful passerines which include
Cock-of-the-Rocks, umbrellabirds and bellbirds). He is commemorated in the
name of the cotinga genus Snowornis and the critically endangered Alagoas
Antwren Myrmotherula snowi, a species in the Thamnophilidae (antbird)
family. In 1972 the Snows were jointly awarded the American Ornithologists'
Union William Brewster Memorial Prize for their studies on the biology of
neotropical birds.

After a year on the Galapagos, Snow returned to England in 1964 to take up a
post as Director of Research at the British Trust for Ornithology at Tring,
Hertfordshire. He expanded and improved the trust's bird ringing, nest
recording and bird census schemes and oversaw the publication of its first
Breeding Atlas of the Birds of Britain and Ireland.

>From 1968 until his retirement in 1984, Snow worked as senior scientist in
the bird section of the British Museum (Natural History), now the Natural
History Museum, where he campaigned, against stiff opposition, for
co-operative action by the world's museums to prevent the over-collection of
specimens of rare or threatened species.

Snow was a superb synthesiser with a gift for communicating complex
scientific data in readable prose. He did the bulk of the work on condensing
(with Christopher Perrins) the monumental nine-volume Birds of the Western
Palearctic into a concise two volumes, and edited the Natural History
Museum's Atlas of Speciation in African Non-Passerine Birds (1978). He also
edited several journals - The Ibis, Bird Study and the Bulletin of the
British Ornithologists' Club, whose 100th birthday in 1992 he marked with
the publication of a collection of essays. His other books include A Guide
to Moult in British Birds (1967) and The Web of Adaptation: Bird Studies in
the American Tropics (1985).

Following his wife's death in 2007, Snow published Birds in Our Life (2008),
an account of his own life and their ornithological partnership.

He is survived by their two sons.

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• [W-OBITS] SNOW: David William Snow 2009 by "Peter McCrae" <>