(Ethiopia and Eritrea have a fascinating and unique avifau...)
Ethiopia and Eritrea have a fascinating and unique avifauna. Poorly known in comparison to many parts of Africa, knowledge on bird distribution in the two countries is scattered throughout the literature. For more than 35 years, the authors have been painstakingly collecting bird records in the region and plotting them on half-degree maps, including published records, data from museum specimens, sightings from their own extensive travels and, more recently, records from the many birdwatchers that now visit Ethiopia. The resulting atlas provides, for the first time, an accurate assessment of the distribution of each of the 870 species known from the two countries, including valuable information on breeding. Extensive introductory chapters cover topics such as topography, geology, vegetation, climate, habitats, conservation, migration, breeding seasons, bird ringing, and the history of ornithology in the region.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1408109794/?tag=2022091-20
(Somalia, with seven endemic species, is one of the most i...)
Somalia, with seven endemic species, is one of the most important bird areas in Africa; it is also one of the least well-known. Its essence is to provide an atlas of 654 maps showing the distribution of all the species known from the country; each species account gives where relevant a bird's preferred habitat, its relative abundance, and details of migration, breeding season and clutch size. Much of the ornithological content of the book is based on personal experience. About 70% of the observations on the maps were provided by the authors and they claim to have seen all but one of the 654 birds on the Somali list. Besides adding over 50 first time records to it, they were also responsible for finding and adding to science one new species and four new subspecies of birds in Somalia. Chapters summarise the available knowledge on bird migration and breeding seasons within Somalia.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1408190311/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679409343/?tag=2022091-20
John Sidney Ash was born in Gosforth, Northumberland, on 26 May 1925, the eldest of four brothers in a family that was related to the socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and hence both to the flawed ornithological giant Richard Meinertzhagen and to Meinertzhagen's niece Theresa Clay, whose consuming interest in avian ectoparasites John shared.
After attending Pocklington School, Yorkshire, he studied agricultural entomology at Durham, 1942 - 1945, before joining the RAF for the mandatory 2 years. He went back to academia to obtain first a Diploma of Imperial College (DIC), 1948–51, during which he met and soon married Helen Jonquil Gudgeon, who was training in tropical pest control, and then in the years 1951 - 1954, a PhD, ‘A study of the Mallophaga and other ectoparasites of birds, with particular reference to their ecology’, while he was working for the then ICI Game Research Station at Fordingbridge.
John Ash had a long, varied and prolific ornithological career.
After graduating from the University of Durham and Imperial College London, he started work for what was to become the Game Conservancy Trust. Throughout the 1950s his research focused on breeding in the gray partridge, and he corresponded with the conservationist Rachel Carson at the time the world was waking up to the threat posed to wildlife by the pesticide DDT.
In the years 1947–50, whenever free of his national service and academic commitments, John ringed large numbers of seabirds, notably European Shags Phalacrocorax Aristotelian, on the Farne Islands, a project so successful it was placed on a permanent basis by the Northumberland and Durham Natural History Society.
Just as he started this work, considerable numbers of birds and some farm workers were being poisoned by dinitro herbicides. By 1952, John was documenting incidents in which more than 100 adult Grey Partridges and hundreds of other species were killed by Schradan, an organophosphate insecticide. Given that their employers were ICI, John and his colleagues had to be extremely cautious about implicating commercial agricultural poisons.
Nevertheless, they called for an urgent investigation into the use of ‘dangerous chemicals’ under field conditions and submitted crucial evidence to the Zuckerman Inquiry. This report urged further research into agricultural sprays on-farm wildlife, including ‘the effect on birds of the killing of large numbers of insects’. During this time, John also set up what is now the National Game Census, to monitor population trends in response to agrichemical use.
For this, he painstakingly mapped the movements and recorded the survival of more than a thousand individually marked partridges - grueling work in the days before GIS. Throughout, he also kept meticulous records of raptor abundance and control, in addition to his work on parasites.
Most importantly, from 1955, he documented avian mortalities caused by dieldrin seed dressings, but in 1959, the then Chairman of ICI's Metal Division, Dr. Beeching, in a foretaste of the logic he was soon to deploy on the British railway network, closed down his company's game research team while developing its body of game advisors. Regrouping with dedication, determination and frighteningly meager resources, in 1961 Middleton and Ash founded the Game Research Association (GRA), with John as its senior scientist and from 1966, its director.
In parallel with Rachel Carson in the USA, John was producing crucial evidence of the impact of chlorinated hydrocarbons on bird life, resulting in a series of critically important reports co-authored with Stanley Cramp for the British Trust for Ornithology and Peter Conder for the RSPB, including a landmark journal publication.
Nevertheless, despite these major contributions, in 1968, under the chairmanship of V. C. Wynne Edwards, the Nature Conservancy, which was supporting the GRA programme, instigated a review of its external funding. The Wildfowl Trust and BTO were considered to have justified their public subsidy, but the GRA was not so fortunate and John's partridge research at Fordingbridge was truncated for a second time. This must have been a crushing blow to a man who, now well into mid-career, had done so much to secure not only the British countryside but also his fellow citizens from the insidious effects of certain pesticides.
With the redoubtable Helen Brotherton, among others, he helped set up the bird observatory at the Old Lower Light in 1960, and on a visit, the following year identified Britain's first Calandra Lark Melanocorypha calandra as it flew in off the sea. After 1962, for which he compiled the observatory's annual report, he traveled increasingly to Europe, Africa and the Middle East in a series of holidays and expeditions, resulting in papers on, for example, a raptor decline in France, probably, attributable to pesticides, autumn migrants on Rab island, Croatia, spring migrant weights in Morocco following his participation in two of the four ‘Defilia’ expeditions and, with Hilary Fry and James Ferguson-Lees on an official British Ornithologists' Union (BOU) expedition, spring migrants at Lake Chad.
With the dismantling of the GRA this personal interest in migration proved decisive for the direction his career was to take in 1969. Combined with his professional interest in pathology and the infectious disease it made him the perfect choice for a new job studying the role played by migratory birds in the transmission of parasites and pathogens. This took him to Ethiopia for 8 years with funding from the US Navy's Medical Research Unit, in an intriguing reflection of the US Army's Migratory Animals Pathological Survey (MAPS), which ran in Asia from 1963 to 1975 under the direction of H. E. McClure – a man who, like John, lived to the age of 88 and similarly ringed some 100 000 birds.
In the Horn of Africa, forming an alliance with John Miskell, he again used a half-degree grid-square system and sought systematically to record birds across it; and, again, he found a new species, Ash's Lark Mirafra ashi, plus a handful of new subspecies, while increasing the number of species known from the country by over 50.
Retiring at the age of 57, he and Jonquil proceeded to divide their time between their New Forest home and travel to many parts of the world, often for extended periods. In 1982– 1983, they spent 6 months in Bali, Indonesia, where John discovered a major migration of small raptors, revisiting the island in 1990 to gather more data on the phenomenon. Returning to Uganda in early 1983, he found a new species of weaver, Ploceus victoriae, although this one proved to be a hybrid.
A small FAO contract took him to the Maldives in 1984 and he went back there in 1993 to produce the latest and fullest account of birds in the islands. He was invited to work in Nigeria in the mid-1980s, duly found Grey-necked Picathartes Picathartes oreas in the country and hugely increased our knowledge of the baffling Ibadan Malimbe Malimbus ibadanensis. When the Derg was overthrown in Ethiopia he was soon back for a visit, during which he rediscovered the Yellow-throated Serin Serinus flavigula.
John died on 6 January 2014, just three days after his wife Jonquil.
John Ash is known for his fieldwork. John established baseline maps and qualitative abundance estimates for Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. It is hard to think of an instance where so much was done in so short a period by a single individual to advance the understanding of an entire regional avifauna.
If the long life of John Ash can be characterized as one of unswerving dedication to ornithology, his professional career is remarkable for the way it fell into two very different parts. In the 1950s and 1960s, the focus of his work was on issues relating to the management of game birds, particularly Grey Partridges Perdix, and he was almost certainly the first ecologist in Britain to recognize the damage that pesticides could inflict on farmland bird populations. In the 1970s and 1980s, his attention turned to fieldwork in Africa, resulting in the discovery of two new bird species to science, two major books and a host of important observations in other countries.
In Ethiopia, John discovered and named the Ankober serin finch, while in Somalia he encountered a lark that was named after him (Ash's lark). He also found a bird he named for his daughter Turdoides squamulatus carolinae and co-discovered the vanishingly rare Liben lark.
(Somalia, with seven endemic species, is one of the most i...)
(Ethiopia and Eritrea have a fascinating and unique avifau...)
John went to extremes in defense of birds. Fury made him nimble: scaling trees to rescue captive decoys, sprinting in pursuit of cats and outfacing petty officialdom.
Potted accounts of John's life list his many other achievements, his honors and his service to various institutions, but they can scarcely do justice to his genius as a field observer or to his character as a human being. Some idea of the former can be derived from his success in finding Ash's Lark and other cryptic taxa, and from the titles of his many short notes in British Birds, but the really important qualities that allowed this genius to flourish were an unabated vigilance and a relentless sense of order – he was always on the lookout, he kept his attention fixed firmly on the issue of the moment, and he unfailingly documented the evidence. But it would be a mistake to assume that such steely discipline reflected a steely personality.
Wherever John went, his patience, kindness, courtesy and good humor – he could not speak three sentences without launching into a colorful anecdote, invariably accompanied by his characteristic short back-of-the-throat laugh – stood him in good stead, and he left behind him his friends and goodwill in equal measure. Phil Hall tells how everyone in a large village near Ibadan, expecting a visit from Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in his capacity as President of World Wildlife Fund, mobbed John when he dustily materialized out of the bush, assuming he was the anticipated royalty: John, confused but amused, carried himself with such aplomb that nobody ever suspected the mistaken identity. On reflection now, with his interest in game and exploration and with his benign and charming personality, John had all the makings of a prince in his own right.
Everyone who knew him will recall him always with the greatest respect, the sincerest gratitude and the deepest affection.
In 1951, John Ash married Jonquil Gudgeon, a zoologist. They had a daughter Caroline.
