Bernard Stonehouse (1926-2014)

Abstract

Bernard Stonehouse's long and varied career commenced with pioneering studies on the breeding habits of the two species of Aptenodytes penguins. As well as undertaking fieldwork in remote places, he taught in both schools and universities, wrote academic and popular books, and latterly led a long-term study on the ecological impact of tourism in Antarctica. Stonehouse was born on 1 May 1926 at Kingston upon Hull. After learning to fly in the Fleet Air Arm he served as a meteorologist with the Falklands Islands Dependencies Survey (now British Antarctic Survey). He was posted in February 1947 to the base at Stonington Island, in Marguerite Bay, where during his second year he discovered a colony of Emperor Penguins Aptenodytes fosteri on the tiny Dion Islands. That summer the pack-ice remained solid and the base could not be relieved. Stonehouse was able to put his third, enforced, winter to good use by spending 2 months on the Dion Islands where, camped in a tent with temperatures dropping to −40 °C, he made the first detailed study of the breeding habits of the Emperor Penguin, a species that lays its egg in the middle of the Antarctic winter. After his return to Britain, Stonehouse graduated in zoology and geology at University College, London, and moved to the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology at Oxford University. He received special dispensation to spend 18 months at South Georgia to study the breeding behaviour of the King Penguin Aptenodytes patagonicus. With Nigel Bonner as assistant, he set up camp in a garden shed near a large King Penguin colony and was able to elucidate the species' unusual protracted breeding season. In 1957 Stonehouse was appointed leader of the British Ornithologists' Union Centenary Expedition to Ascension Island which would study the breeding cycles and breeding seasons of 11 species of seabirds and four species of introduced landbirds living in a near tropical environment. Of particular interest were the Sooty Tern (locally Wideawake Tern) Onychoprion fuscatus, Yellow-billed Tropic Bird Phaethon lepturus, Red-billed Tropic Bird P. aethereus and Brown Booby Sula leucogaster which have unusual shorter than annual breeding cycles. The team on Ascension Island consisted of Stonehouse, his wife Sally as camp manager, Douglas Dorward and Philip Ashmole, with shorter visits by Richard Allan, Michael Cullen and Eric Duffey. Stonehouse was appointed senior lecturer at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1960. He was able to return to Antarctica and continue the study of penguins. Aerial surveys were used to discover new colonies of both Adélie and Pygoscelis adeliae Emperor Penguins and record annual population fluctuations. An important strand of Stonehouse's research was the impact of human activity on animal populations and he persuaded the New Zealand and American authorities to restrict visits to penguin colonies. He was also concerned about the emergence of Antarctic tourism but he soon realized that tourists had more regard for wildlife than many of the administrators and scientists working in Antarctica. In 1972 Stonehouse moved to the University of Bradford to set up a School of Studies in Environmental Sciences. Eleven years later, he moved to Cambridge and, from 1983 to 1992, was editor of the Polar Record. In 1991, he initiated Project Antarctic Conservation to investigate the development and impact of the growing shipborne tourism. He noted that ‘On the whole, the tourists have done far less damage than some of the scientists’. Bernard Stonehouse was known to his colleagues as an efficient and unflappable organizer with an aptitude for improvisation, and by his many students for his ability to make them think critically and for unselfishly sharing his own knowledge. The International Steering Committee of the International Penguin Conferences recognized him with a Lifetime Achievement Award to celebrate his achievements in a lifetime of penguin research, the New Zealand Antarctic Society awarded him their Voycey Trophy for Antarctic Conservation and he was given an honorary D.Sc. by the University of Hull. The BOU awarded Bernard the Union Medal in 1971 (Ibis 1971, 113: 404–405). He is generally credited as the true father of penguin biology.