DAVID SNOW:DAVID SNOW, who has died aged 84, was one of the most distinguished and popular ornithologists of the last 60 years.
A major part of his work was the study of tropical, fruit-eating and nectar-feeding birds, which took him and his wife Barbara to many parts of central America.
He was a founder and director of the Charles Darwin research station in the Galapagos islands (1963-64) where he helped to develop programmes to protect the islands' giant tortoises and, with Barbara, pioneered studies of three of the world's rarest birds: the lava gull, the nocturnal swallow-tailed gull and the flightless cormorant.
Snow was born in Windermere, Cumberland, the second of four children of a preparatory school head teacher. During his childhood, he developed a love of walking, cycling and sketching, while acquiring from his father a small library of bird books. His father also gave him a pair of pocketable first World War German Goerz binoculars. Trips to places such as Scolt Head island, in north Norfolk, and Skokholm island off south Wales, were relished.
In 1938, he entered Eton college, where he first read Darwin and continued his bird interests. During the second World War, he served in destroyers and a sloop on anti-submarine patrols. He maximised his ornithological shore leave by having his bicycle sent ahead by train to suitable British ports.
Having gained, before the war, a classical scholarship to New College, Oxford, he arrived there in 1946, and switched to zoology. In 1949, he led an undergraduate expedition to São Tomé and Principe in the Gulf of Guinea
off west Africa.
He then became a doctoral student and demonstrator in the university's Edward Grey Institute, where his thesis was on the ecology and variation of the tit species of Europe and northwest Africa. In 1957, he began work at the Beebe tropical research station in Trinidad and, in 1958, he married Barbara Whitaker.
A kind, shy and extraordinarily modest man of tremendous intellect and energy, he was active to the end of his life: a scholarly little note about the feeding of blackcaps wintering in his Wingrave garden appeared in the January bulletin of the Buckinghamshire bird club.
Barbara died in 2007. Two sons, Stephen and Charles, and five grandchildren survive him.
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David William Snow: born September 30th, 1924; died February 4th, 2009