By Ian Newton
It seems appropriate to open this website with a few words about Reg Moreau who was the first to draw attention to the wonders of the Palearctic-Afrotropical migration system. His knowledge and ideas are summarised in two major review papers1 2 and in a book entitled ‘The Palearctic-African bird migration systems’3 which was published in 1972 soon after his death. In these publications, he emphasised the sheer numbers of birds involved (estimated by him at 5000 million), the huge land area from which these migrants were drawn (from Ireland across Eurasia to Alaska), and the sheer length and difficulties of the journeys involved. From the western Palearctic, birds had to cross the Mediterranean Sea and Sahara Desert, and from the eastern Palearctic many had to cross the deserts of central Asia and the Middle East. The most easterly breeding birds travelled more than 30,000 km each year between their Siberian-Alaskan breeding areas and African wintering areas.
I am one of the few still-living ornithologists who knew Reg Moreau personally. For several years, I occupied a room near to his at the Edward Grey Institute of Ornithology (EGI), part of the Zoology Department in Oxford University. At that time, Reg was in his 60s, I was in my 20s, and for years he was one of my main mentors.
I look back on Reg Moreau as one of the most remarkable people I have ever known. Owing to family circumstances, he left school aged 17, and had no formal education thereafter. In desperation, be took a menial job as a clerk in the British Civil Service, concerned with the military. However, he suffered from the family affliction of arthritis, so on a doctor’s advice to move somewhere warm, he accepted a transfer to a similar post in Egypt. As a boy, Reg had shown only a casual interest in nature, but on the journey by boat to Cairo he experienced bird migration for the first time: on a misty day some birds landed on the ship and stayed for some days – an exciting event which sparked his interest. Once settled in Cairo, he made every effort in his spare time to explore the surrounding area for birds, travelling around on a rented donkey and later on an old bicycle that someone gave him. With help from others, he made trips into the desert where he once found dead birds dehydrated under bushes and rocks, an experience which impressed upon him the hardships of trans-Saharan migration. After some years in Egypt, he met his future wife, and through other influential people he met, he was offered a job as secretary at a British agricultural research station at Amani in what is now Tanzania. In this position, he worked for the first time with active scientists, and in his spare hours he studied the local forest birds, publishing and gaining a reputation for himself. While there he was visited, among others, by David Lack, a meeting which was to have a big effect on his later life.
In all, Moreau spent more than 20 years in Africa, taking every opportunity to travel, and gaining a unique and comprehensive knowledge of African birds. He was first to assess the grand scale of trans-Saharan migration. He considered its development through post-glacial times, realising how recently current migrations systems had developed following the retreat of the glaciers from northern regions. He was one of the first to appreciate the demands of migration and to show an interest in migratory fattening.
In the late 1940s, around the age of 50, he retired from the Civil Service on health grounds, and returned with his family to England. David Lack had recently become Director of the EGI in Oxford, and was able to offer Reg a room there, which Reg retained for the rest of his working life.
Once I got to know Reg, it became evident that he was, in effect, entirely self-taught, and not only in ornithology. He was extremely well-read in a range of subjects, especially history, and was fluent in five languages, including Arabic and Swahili, as well as English, German and Spanish, together with smattering of several others. He had a remarkably engaging way with the English language: it was not just what he said (which was always worth hearing), but also how he said it. He had a wonderful way of expressing things, always succinct, usually amusing and often spiced with spontaneous wit. In discussing other ornithologists, especially those he thought somewhat pompous, he produced some memorably funny character descriptions.
Reg also possessed great skill as an editor. This ability was recognised by his early employers, and for some years in Africa he edited The East African Agricultural Journal, concerned with matters in which he had no background whatever. Once back in England, encouraged by Lack and others, he took on the editorship of the Ibis, raising it within a few years into one of the world’s foremost ornithological journals, and by far the most readable. Editing a journal was different then than now; it was done single-handedly, with no routine peer review. My own first sobering experience of Reg’s editorial skills came as I was struggling to write my PhD thesis, when, having struggled over a few pages and feeling pleased with the outcome, I decided to show them to Reg. He returned them a little later, covered in blue pencil, having reduced my four pages to about two paragraphs that said everything relevant in succinct elegant prose. I have never managed to achieve anything like it myself.
Based in Oxford University, under the wing of David Lack, Reg had at his disposal one of the best ornithological libraries in the world. But he also carried out an immense correspondence with other ornithologists, anyone from amateur birders in Africa to luminaries such as Erwin Stresemann in Germany and Ernst Mayr in North America. In the Institute, I used to marvel that, while as a student I rarely received a letter of any kind, Reg’s pigeon-hole was always stuffed full of letters and packages, adorned with colourful stamps from around the world. Also, as editor of Ibis, he handled a continual flow of papers on all aspects of ornithology. I soon realised what an exceptional person he was, a much respected and much loved figure of the ornithological establishment of the time.
As well as around 170 papers in scientific journals, he produced two biological books, one on the bird faunas of Africa, and the other, mentioned above, on the Palearctic-African migration system. This book was written in a hurry, and sadly Reg died before it was published. It was seen through the press by his good friend, the medical doctor James Monk, who some years earlier had succeeded Reg as editor of the Ibis. As proofs were being checked, Reg died in hospital on the morning after his 73rd birthday. He had pondered on the Palearctic-Afrotropical migration system for most of his working life, so I guess this was his major motivation for writing this book. But because he was largely house-bound at the time, he had little chance to discuss it with friends face-to-face, relying even more on his prodigious postal correspondence.
From what Reg Moreau accomplished during his life, you might think that his lack of formal education had no effect on his subsequent achievements and career. But I think it did. He was based in the University of Oxford only because he had met and had helped David Lack years before, and when Lack became director of the EGI, he was able to provide Reg with a base. But because Reg had no university degree, he could not, at Oxford, teach or supervise students. Nor could he apply for academic grants, and nor could he establish a research group, as he might today. These constraints explain, I think, why most of his later work was in the nature of synthesis. At this process, however, he excelled, drawing attention to important issues, but usually not being able to follow them up by new personal or student-led research in the field. In 1951, he was awarded an honorary degree from Oxford University in recognition of his contribution to ornithology, and for the rest of his life this remained his only formal academic accolade.
Moreau lived in Africa from 1920s to the 1940s, at the time when natural landscapes were still largely intact over much of the continent and when large mammals were still widely spread. It was in this bygone world that his ideas were formed. Since then, of course, as in other countries, the human population in Africa has greatly increased, the climate has changed, wide-scale habitat destruction has occurred, agriculture has expanded and in some countries pesticides are in routine use. And needless to add, birds have massively declined, including the Palearctic migrants, which have now become major subjects of study, a carry-over from the legacy of Reg Moreau.
Professor Ian Newton is the author is numerous books on ornithology, including Bird Migration and The Sparrowhawk. The second edition of The Migration Ecology of Birds is published in December 2023.
Photo: Spotted flycatcher (Muscipaca striata). © Christoph Moning | Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab
References
Tales from the flyway 