READER IN ZOOLOGY

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32031, 4 July 1969, Page 10

READER IN ZOOLOGY

Dr Stonehouse Resigns

Dr Bernard Stonehouse, a former Fleet Air Arm pilot who became a world authority on rare birds of the Antarctic, has resigned from a post as reader in zoology at the University of Canterbury. He left New Zealand on leave last year to visit the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge. He also visited Yale University, and has taken a temporary post as visiting professor at the University of British Columbia.

Dr Stonehouse originated the university’s Antarctic research programme in 1961 and was the leader for the first five years. He first went to the Antarctic as a flyer for the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey for two years under Sir Vivian Fuchs.

But he became stranded there when a relief ship could not get through. Keenly interested in bird life, he discovered a colony of Emperor penguins and carried out the first breeding studies on them since Edward Wilson’s observations with Captain Scott’s expedition. No scientist until that time, he returned to England, entered University College, London, took honours in natural science, and then a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford University.

He spent the next two years in the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology at Oxford, and then was selected as the leader of the two-year centenary expedition of the British Ornithological Union to Ascension Island.