Henry Neville "Mick" Southern was an English ornithologist.
Education
Born in Boston, Lincolnshire, Southern was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School, Leicester where his interest in studying birds started. He studied first classics, supported by an open foundation scholarship, and then a second undergraduate degree in zoology, with a four-year gap spent working for the publishers Ward Lock.
Career
He went up to Queen's College, Oxford in 1927. After graduating for the second time he joined the Bureau of Animal Population at Oxford as a research scientist investigating a new technique for studying rabbits, funded by a Browne Research Scholarship. During World World War II, Southern transferred to work on the control of pests, in particular the house mouse, as part of work the Animal Population Bureau took on for the Agricultural Research Council.
In 1946 the Department of Zoological Field Studies in Oxford was formed from the Animal Population Bureau and the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology and Mick Southern was made a Senior Research Officer.
In this post he conducted a long-term (15 year) population study of the predator-prey relationships between wood-mice and bank voles, and one of their predators, the Tawny Owl. He edited The Handbook of British Mammals (1964), the journal Bird Study (1954-1960) and the Journal of Animal Ecology (1968-1975).
He was awarded a Doctor of Science from Oxford in 1972. 1946-1949 Council member for the British Ornithologists’ Union 1962-1968, 1971-1974 Chairman of The Mammal Society 1964-1967 Vice-President of the British Ecological Society 1965-1967 Vice-President of the British Ornithologists’ Union 1968-1970 President of the British Ecological Society 1974-1980 President of The Mammal Society 1961 Bernard Tucker Medal of the British Trust for Ornithology.