Reginald Ernest Moreau

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Reginald Ernest Moreau, (29 May 1897 – 30 May 1970), was an English civil servant who worked as an accountant in Africa and later contributed to ornithology. He made studies of clutch size in nesting birds, compared the life-histories of birds in different latitudes and was a pioneer in the introduction of quantitative approaches to the study of birds. He was also a long time editor of the ornithological journal Ibis.[1]

Early life

Moreau was born on 29 May 1897 near Norbiton Gate at Kingston upon Thames. His father worked in the stock exchange while his mother's family ran a baker's business in Kingston. The family name was derived from an ancestral French immigrant who had moved to Bayswater as a bookseller. In his autobiographical note published in the Ibis upon his death, he notes that nobody in his family had any academic interests or an interest in natural history. He went to a local preparatory school and became interested in birds through

Cherry Kearton's books With Nature and a Camera and Our Bird Friends. He however did not relate to the birdlife around him. His secondary schooling was at Kingston Grammar School. Around this time he injured his right wrist and had to learn to write with his left hand. His father was hit by the open door of a speeding train and the injury led to a nervous breakdown with periodic episodes of manic-depression. The burden of earning and care of the family now went to Moreau's mother but in 1907 they moved from Kingston to Rowledge on the edge of Alice Holt Forest and then in 1913 to Farnham. In his teens he began exploring the neighbourhood on bicycle and through the books of William Henry Hudson took an interest in observing the local birds. In 1914 he wrote the Executive Class Examination for entrance to the Home Civil Service and made it into the 99th place among 100 available positions although his bad eyesight and poor health made him nearly fail. He received a posting in September 1914 at a war office and his job was to scrutinize applications for separation allowance. A year later he was posted at the Army Audit Office in Aldershot. The clerical work for the next five years was interrupted by rheumatoid arthritis. His family doctor suggested that he needed a "complete change". He applied for a transfer to the Army Audit Department in Cairo and got one in 1920.[1]

Egypt

Around this time he was a member of the RSPB through which he met

C. B. Williams, an entomologist at the Egyptian agriculture ministry. Williams became a close friend and he was introduced to scientific ideas and the two made many excursions into the desert. Williams also encouraged Moreau to publish his bird notes in the Ibis journal, with help in preparing the manuscripts. The drafts were typed by Williams' wife. At Alexandria one March, he spotted a lady picking up buttercups among the wheatears and larks that he was observing and found her knowledgeable about birds. After meeting her, Winnie, a couple more times, he married her in June 1924 at Cumberland. The young couple preferred to live at Maadi close to Wadi Digha where they kept a pet raven and conducted experiments to see if the plumage colours of larks were genetically inherited. They had a daughter whom they named Prinia after a small bird, the Graceful Prinia (Prinia gracilis). A Graceful Prinia had built a nest in the ventilator of the bell tent that was the Moreaus' first marital home. (The bird genus name Buphagus was initially suggested as the name for their son David.[2]) Moreau made trips around Africa and wrote on birds as well as letters to the New Statesman. He also wrote some fiction such as The Temple Servant under the pen name of "E. R. Morrough" as, being a civil servant, he was not allowed to publish books.[3] They travelled around Africa and in 1928 C.B. Williams moved to Amani in Tanganyika as Deputy Directory of a research station there and recommended that Moreau should take up work in the accounts department.[1]

Amani

The Moreaus moved in March 1928 from the desert to the rainforests of the

Edward Grey Institute in July 1964. The British Ornithologists' Union awarded him the Godman-Salvin award at their Annual General Meeting on 3 April 1966.[1]

Ornithological pioneer

Moreau was among the pioneering ornithologists who focused on life-history studies of birds. In 1944 he suggested in a paper in the Ibis that birds, even of the same or very closely related species, laid larger clutches of eggs in the higher latitudes than in the tropics. This was based on his studies of birds in Africa through the collection of large amounts of data often collected by his African assistants.[6][7] This data and the general trend that was confirmed opened up a very active debate on avian clutch size. Theoretically birds should be laying as many eggs as they can across the world. One idea proposed by Alexander Skutch was that the clutch size had evolved so that the death rate is offset so that bird populations are more or less stable. Another theory proposed by David Lack was that the number of eggs laid was fine tuned by the availability of resources such as food that are available for raising the young successfully. This debate would also lead to more fundamental questions related to the unit of selection and ideas on group selection.[8][9][10]

Later life

After returning from Africa, Moreau settled in "the tiny and unregarded Oxfordshire village of Berrick Salome".[11] He wrote, "in 1965 I realized suddenly that, because Berrick was so small and because we were fortunate in still having several people whose clear recollections reached back to between 1890 and 1910, it might be possible to build up for a period about the turn of the century a picture of more than purely local interest."[11] His study was published Oxford University Press in 1968 as The Departed Village: Berrick Salome at the Turn of the Century.

He died at Hereford, England, on 30 May 1970. He is buried, alongside his wife, Winnie, in the churchyard of Sutton St Michael.

References

  1. ^
    doi:10.1111/j.1474-919X.1970.tb00828.x
    .
  2. ^ Moss, Stephen (2018). Mrs Moreau's Warbler: How Birds Got Their Names. Faber & Faber.
  3. ISBN 978-1611493535
    .
  4. ^ Moreau, R.E. (1938). "Artisornis winifredae, sp. nov". Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club. 58: 139.
  5. JSTOR 1157006
    .
  6. doi:10.1111/j.1474-919X.1944.tb04093.x
    .
  7. doi:10.1650/0010-5422(2000)102[0003:lsamte]2.0.co;2
    .
  8. doi:10.1111/j.1474-919x.1949.tb02293.x
    .
  9. doi:10.1111/j.1474-919x.1948.tb01399.x
    .
  10. doi:10.1111/j.1474-919X.1947.tb04155.x
    .
  11. ^ a b Moreau R E, The Departed Village: Berrick Salome at the Turn of the Century, Oxford: OUP 1968, p. 1.

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reginald_Ernest_Moreau&oldid=1185225769"