Ian Wallace
Giant among ornithologists and illustrator whose work won the affection of birdwatchers of all ages
IAN WALLACE, who has died aged 87, was a leading ornithologist described by the author and naturalist Mark Cocker as one of the “godfathers of modern birding”. Talented with both pen and paintbrush, Wallace (who signed himself “dim wallace” and was often known by his initials DIMW) won the affection of British birdwatchers of all ages with regular pieces in popular ornithological journals such as British Birds and Birdwatching.
Though he described himself as an amateur, he contributed important papers on Hippolais warblers and small stints; and as one of the editors of the magisterial Birds of the Western Palearctic he provided the “Field Characters” sections featuring observations about characters and behaviour, as well as painting some of its plates.
Wallace was also a historian of the pastime, his Beguiled by Birds: Ian Wallace on British Birdwatching (2004) an entertaining mix of memoir and anecdote illustrating the development of the hobby from a specialist interest for the Victorian skin-and-egg collecting gentry into a multimillionpound mass leisure pursuit.
An instantly recognisable figure at bird fairs in Tam O’shanter and kilt, Wallace showed a sympathetic understanding for the gun-toting ornithologists of the past. These included the irascible Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, a British soldier and intelligence officer later exposed as having committed the ultimate crime in twitcher circles of “stringing” – submitting falsified records to boost his personal bird list.
No slave to political correctness, in an interview with Keith Betton for Behind the Binoculars (2015, with Mark Avery), Wallace praised gamekeepers for doing more to provide winter bird food than Eu-subsidised farmers, and expressed the view that the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust was more in touch with reality on the ground than the RSPB.
Donald Ian Mackenzie Wallace was born to Scottish parents in Norfolk on December 14 1933 and attended Loretto School, near Edinburgh.
His first memory of birds was, aged four, being shown a puffin on Shetland by his father. At Loretto he became an enthusiastic member of the ornithology society, with which he became involved in monitoring the birds of the Musselburgh foreshore and “trying to make something of ” the passerines in the school grounds, while taking weekend opportunities to cycle further afield.
It was here that he began his lifelong practice of writing up his observations, and he looked back fondly at his four years at the school – a time when “the birdwatching world was still localised – and there was no envy nor zeal!”
Wallace did his National Service in the early 1950s with the King’s African Rifles in Kenya, taking time off to observe not only African bird species but migrants from northern Europe wintering in the Rift Valley. Afterwards he had a variety of jobs including working for Nigerian Breweries in Nigeria, where he identified at least four previously unknown bird species, and in the fish trade in Hull, but ornithology remained his passion.
In 1963 Wallace was among a party of leading ornithologists, led by Guy Mountfort and including Julian Huxley, George Shannon and James Ferguson-lees, who travelled to the ornithologically uncharted country of Jordan. The expedition’s report eventually led to the creation of the Azraq Wetland Reserve and other protected areas in the country.
Wallace was a much sought-after public speaker and a regular exhibitor at the annual exhibition of the Society of Wildlife Artists. His other books included Discover Birds (1979, with a foreword by Peter Scott), aimed at converting others to the joys of birdwatching. However, one reviewer felt that beginners might just as easily be put off as inspired by such advice as “before you spend much time in the field, I advise you to survey the whole avifauna that occurs in Western Europe...”
Perhaps more appealing for the rookie birdwatcher was his Watching Birds (1982, in Usborne’s Young Naturalist series), in which Wallace gave clear instructions on how to work a habitat, take notes, study a roost, understand anatomy, watch the weather, and other vital skills.
His Birds of Prey of Britain and Europe (OUP, 1983) drew on Birds of the Western Palearctic. He provided illustrations for Duncan Wood’s Horace Alexander: 1889 to 1989: Birds and Binoculars (2003) and helped to revise the classic Peterson, Mountfort and Hollom Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe.
Wallace served on many ornithological committees, including those of bird observatories (he was honorary life president of Flamborough Ornithological Group and of Flamborough Bird Observatory) and of the RSPB, the British Trust for Ornithology and the British Ornithologists’ Union. A leading light in the British Birds Rarities Committee – official adjudicator, from 1959, of rare bird records in Britain – he served as its second chairman, from 1972 to 1976.
Wallace was not a “twitcher” obsessively pursuing lists of “target species”. He was not one to travel to the opposite end of the country in pursuit of a rarity blown in from Siberia, but preferred to work local patches, particularly around Flamborough Head and, more recently, in Staffordshire.
His British list, Wallace confessed in a recent article, was “well below the current par for the course”, a fact he attributed partly to “having never lost the truly relaxed attitude to others’ finds of the late 1940s. Then, rarities were so unusual that their occasional announcements evoked little or no envy. ‘Gosh, how nice – lucky you!’ we would say, and then plod on in the hope of, say, a Greenshank or in my case a ‘Lap Bunt’ to leaven early study of bird behaviour.”
He cited redpolls as his favourite bird group.