James Ferguson-Lees
Ornithologist who wrote a string of field guides and set up the British Birds Rarities Committee
JAMES FERGUSON-LEES, who has died aged 88, was one of the last of a pioneering generation of birdwatchers born before the Second World War; in a long and distinguished career as an editor, author and conservationist, he was instrumental in forging links between amateur birdwatching and professional ornithology.
Ian James Ferguson-Lees was born on January 8 1929 in San Remo, Italy, where his father lived after retiring from his position as director-general of public health in Egypt. The family later returned to Britain via France, and following his father’s early death when he was six years old, James was educated at Bedford School.
A keen birdwatcher from an early age, he soon gained a reputation as a leading bird identification expert and in 1954, at the age of 25, he became the youngest ever executive editor of British Birds magazine.
In 1956 the ornithologist Guy Mountfort invited him to join the first of several major foreign expeditions – to the Coto Doñana in southern Spain, then Europe’s greatest wilderness. His Spanish was poor, but he could converse with the local guide Tono Valverde by using the scientific names of the many new species of bird he came across.
This let him down only once – when he heard a croaking sound, which he thought might be an obscure reed-dwelling warbler, and asked what it was. Valverde paused, then announced with a flourish: “adult tadpole”. In 1958, following another trip to Spain, Mountfort published the bestselling book Portrait of a Wilderness.
Ferguson-Lees’s organisational skills, bird knowledge and tireless energy had proved invaluable, as Mountfort noted: “No member was more active in the field, or covered more ground, and none saw so many different species of birds as this tireless young man.”
In 1960, Ferguson-Lees joined Mountfort’s next expedition to the lower Danube Delta in Bulgaria, documented in Portrait of a River (1962). In 1963 and 1965 they went even further afield, to the ornithologically unexplored country of Jordan – described in the final book in the trilogy, Portrait of a Desert (1965).
These expeditions, groundbreaking at the time, featured an extraordinary cast of characters, including Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke and Sir Julian Huxley, along with a Who’s Who of 20th-century ornithology: the conservationist Max Nicholson, photographer Eric Hosking, broadcaster James Fisher, and Ferguson-Lees’s near-contemporary Ian Wallace. Many years later, Wallace affectionately recalled that team photos always featured “the impossibly handsome James Ferguson-Lees”.
From his appointment as editor of British Birds and for the next two decades, Ferguson-Lees set about systematically organising the collection and analysis of bird records. In 1958 he and Phil Hollom established the British Birds Rarities Committee, which continues to ratify sightings of rare visitors to Britain. Towards the end of his tenure, in 1973, he set up the Rare Breeding Birds Panel, to monitor records of unusual nesting birds.
Meanwhile, in August 1962, Ferguson-Lees and Max Nicholson had exposed a long-standing fraud known as “The Hastings Rarities Affair”, in which specimens of very rare birds obtained abroad were passed off as having been shot in Britain, and then sold to collectors. The exposé made the front pages of several daily newspapers, including The Daily Telegraph.
From the 1970s onwards Ferguson-Lees turned to authorship, writing A Field Guide to Birds’ Nests (with Bruce
Campbell) and The Shell Guide to the Birds of Britain and Ireland (with J TR Sharrock and Ian Willis). He also, with Ian Wallace, updated the “birdwatchers’ Bible”, The Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, and
helped to plan the multi-volume Birds of the Western Palearctic.
In later life Ferguson-Lees and David Christie devoted 18 years to producing a comprehensive guide to the Raptors of the World, published in 2001. Although he lived across the border in Somerset, he was closely involved with the birds of Wiltshire, and in 2007 was the senior editor of a comprehensive avifauna of that county.
Ferguson-Lees served on the RSPB council, the British Ornithologists’ Union Records Committee, and the British Ornithologists’ Union council. He was also president and chairman of the British Trust for Ornithology (196973), and planned major events including the XIV International Ornithological Congress, held in Oxford in 1966.
He claimed to have been the first British birdwatcher to use a tripodmounted telescope – in 1972. His last birding trip, in spring 2015, was a visit to the Somerset Levels, where he enjoyed watching hobbies catching dragonflies, and listening to a booming bittern and a cuckoo from the comfort of his electric wheelchair.
He is survived by his wife Karen and a son and daughter from an earlier marriage. Another son and daughter predeceased him.