OBITUARY | Richard Dean: internationally renowned ornithologist, natural historian and author

Richard Dean, who has died in Prince Albert in the Western Cape at the age of 82, was an internationally renowned ornithologist, natural historian and author who discovered, identified, catalogued and described thousands of specimens for museums around the world.

He co-edited and was the main contributor to the monumental seventh edition of Roberts Birds of Southern Africa, published in 2004, which exceeded in the scope and depth of biological information it contained that of any previous edition.

Dean was born in Durban on August 10 1940, and attended Durban Boys High where he didn’t distinguish himself academically. His great passion was motorbike racing rather than studying. He left school in standard eight and became a printer’s apprentice in his grandfather’s printing business.

While at school he’d begun developing an interest in birds, and in between working as a printer and racing motorbikes he started writing observations about birds for publication. After 10 years of setting type he quit and got a job as a field ornithologist for the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.

He was posted to Angola in the early 70s at the height of the Angolan civil war, where he collected eggs from poorly known birds for protein DNA analysis, impervious to the gun battles which occasionally raged around him. This was before the days of DNA, and egg white proteins were used to look at genetics.

He made several trips to Angola and later in life wrote the seminal book about the birds of Angola, which was published in 2015.

After Angola he was appointed as a research officer at the Barberspan Nature Reserve where he studied the biology of aquatic birds and monitored their movements between the extensive pans of the reserve. Entirely self taught, he began writing his first scientific papers. He subsequently wrote or co-wrote 257 scientific papers.

In 1991, thanks to his substantial body of publications, he got permission to do his Master of Science through the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, which was highly unusual owing to his lack of an undergraduate degree. He followed this up in 1995 with his PhD through the University of Cape Town.

What made Dean one of the world’s leading ornithologists was his insatiable curiosity, which for most of his life was focused on natural history, particularly birds but also insects and plants and their interactions.

In his late 70s he developed a great interest in history, which led to a book on the history of bird collectors in Southern Africa called Warriors, Dilettantes & Businessmen.

He spent three weeks with his botanist wife Sue studying albatrosses and other sea birds on Inaccessible Island, part of Tristan da Cunha, a remote group of cold, wet and windswept islands in the South Atlantic, and their impact on the island’s vegetation. He noticed that the albatrosses’ obsessive clearing of dense vegetation around their nests provided an opportunity for uncommon small plants to grow in those areas.

They stayed in a wooden hut that had been constructed 20 years earlier by a UK university student exploration group and that leaked like a sieve.

Dean, who was in his element in hostile, lonely environments where he did much of his work and from which came several books including one on nomadic desert birds, was never happier, even after his finger was lacerated when he stuck it into the underground nest of a Shearwater bird, which has a vicious hook on the end of its beak.

It left him with a permanent scar to add to one on his leg caused by a scalpel he dropped while skinning a bird.

He was a socially averse, introverted, heavily bearded man who wore raggedy old clothes and hated parties and giving talks or lectures, which he avoided if he possibly could.

He was, however, very good one on one, and the PhD and MSc students he mentored, often travelling to their research sites, a number of them in remote wilderness areas such as the Kalahari, benefited hugely from their interactions.

Allied to his curiosity were extraordinary powers of observation in the field. He picked up minutely subtle signs that most people were oblivious to. Walking along without apparently paying particular attention to his surroundings he would notice from its behaviour and body language that a bird was intending to fly to its nest This was one of the invaluable lessons his students learnt from him.

His extensive field work in harsh environments led to Nomadic Desert Birds, a book about the behavioural and physiological tactics birds use to cope with life in the desert.

After Barberspan he set up the Tzaneen Nature Reserve before moving to the Nylsvley Nature Reserve in Limpopo in 1979 where he spent four years as the officer in charge and met Sue, who was working on the reserve as a student botanist.

After a year spent sorting and cataloguing his collection of birds’ eggs for the Transvaal Museum (now the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History), he moved to Knysna in 1984 to start a boatbuilding business, Shearwater Boatyard.

He built a number of sailing dinghies and, a highly-skilled and meticulous carpenter, made wooden fittings for several steel ocean-going yachts.

He once set sail with a client from Knysna to Cape Town in an old wooden salmon fishing boat he’d restored after it was battered in rough seas en route from Canada. They got no further than Mossel Bay after being almost swept overboard while fighting to bring down the sails in gale force winds.

After three years he realised he wasn’t going to make a living out of building boats and went back to being an ornithologist.

As well as birds, he collected hundreds of unknown species of spiders, some of which have yet to be named. One of them was named Ammoxenus Deani after him.

He documented the collection of Southern African birds at the Natural History Museum at Tring, which houses one of the finest collections of birds in the UK, and for natural history museums in Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin, Stuttgart and Luanda. All in all he wrote up about 10,000 specimens, much of this work included in papers and books he contributed to.

As well as birds, he collected hundreds of unknown species of spiders, some of which have yet to be named. One of them was named Ammoxenus Deani after him.

Ornithologists and natural historians working for universities, as he did off-campus for UCT, were expected to present their work at several conferences a year in SA, the US, Mexico, Europe and the UK, which for someone who hated public speaking as much as he did was an ordeal.

His work was internationally renowned. He spent six months as a guest scientist in Leipzig, Germany, where he published a number of papers on how the activities of birds and ants restored and maintained biodiversity in old German fields and cherry orchards.

He was fascinated by the effect of roads on the distribution of crows and other birds. He drove tens of thousands of kilometres along Karoo roads in his bakkie with a pocket tape recorder in which he would record every bird he saw from doves to crows to raptors. Many of his observations were published, not just as a list of birds but an interpretation of why they were where they were and when they were there.

One of his observations was that roads in SA and the US and Mexico, which he also traversed, led to huge increases in the population of crows, vultures and other raptors.

In 1987 he and Sue moved to the small town of Prince Albert in the Karoo to develop and manage an ecological research station for the National Research Foundation and UCT.

Dean, who was fluent in Afrikaans as a result of his 10 years as an employee of the Transvaal Provincial Administration, where Afrikaans was compulsory, interacted extensively with Karoo farmers because the kind of research he did for UCT was understanding the effects of sheep and ostrich farming on the veld and the birds and insects that lived there.

He observed how different types of grazing affected different plants, and when rest from grazing would most benefit them, and shared this information in frequent talks to farming communities. He also, with Sue, co-wrote a book on veld management for farmers.

In addition to Roberts Birds of Southern Africa he wrote or co-wrote six books, five of which are still in print.

Dean, a smoker from his early teens who died of emphysema, is survived by his wife Sue and two adult children.