Photo Credit: Mike Harris Bill Bourne died in his 91st year on 31 May 2021 in Keith, north-east Scotland. His death marks the end of an era in the development into a science of seabird research and conservation, in which he was a pioneer in moulding a template of collaborative effort that was replicated around the world. His vision, drive and encyclopaedic knowledge of seabirds immeasurably influenced and inspired subsequent generations of seabird biologists, and as such he was a leading light in raising the global profile of seabirds and literally putting them on the map. He amassed 190 publications including 14 in Nature, with hundreds more in the ‘grey’ literature and countless, immaculately typed letters to the press. His practical achievements apart, it was impossible to ignore Bill: he was larger than life, with a legendary disregard for authority and convention; in Who’s Who in Ornithology (1997, Buckingham Press), he lists one of his interests as ‘throwing metaphorical bricks at stained glass windows’. He also had no qualms about being forthright and irascible with his peers, rubbing many up the wrong way, but equally he was unfailingly generous in encouraging others, especially young aspiring seabird workers, and formed many enduring friendships. In 1978, David Jenkins and George Dunnet encapsulated Bill as ‘…an enigma, a classic stormy petrel, but an original and commanding character in an era when it was fashionable to conform.’ (Br. Birds 71, 123–125). Bill was born in Bedford on 11 March 1930 and spent his early childhood in Exmouth and Hove. Having acquired an early passion for birds from three maiden aunts, at age seven his father introduced him to egg-collecting which he pursued for ten years before seeing the error of his ways, destroying his collection, and joining the British Trust for Ornithology. In 1940 his family was evacuated to Bermuda where he spent most of the war, learning about boats and honing his seabird skills on terns, tropicbirds and notably the Procellariiformes which were to be a consuming interest for the rest of his life. In 1944 he returned to the UK to attend Brighton College where he helped found its natural history society. He won a scholarship to read Medicine and Zoology at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he expanded his ornithological knowledge, contributing to the resurgence of the Cambridge Bird Club in the 1950s and serving as its co-secretary in 1949. During his university years, he travelled extensively to classic bird sites in the UK and abroad, most notably making an intrepid solo expedition in 1951 to the Cape Verdes where, showing great stamina and resourcefulness, he walked across all of São Tiago and enlisted local schooners to access neighbouring islands. His observations resulted in his first major publication (Ibis 97 (1958), 508–556) and contributed to the Bannermans’ History of the birds of the Cape Verde Islands (1968: Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh). Struck by the paleness of the Purple Herons Ardea purpurea he encountered in São Tiago, Bill collected and sent a specimen to Paris where, years later, it was named by the Abbé René de Naurois as a distinct subspecies, Bourne’s Heron Ardea purpurea bournei, the first of Bill’s several taxonomic contributions. Bill went on to complete his medical training at London’s Bartholomew’s Hospital. In 1955 he was called up for National Service and was sent to the Middle East during the Suez crisis, spending time in Malta, Iraq and Jordan where he observed lark migration and recognised the ecological significance of Azraq. He was then transferred to Cyprus where he co-founded the Cyprus Ornithological Society and was its first recorder. Once demobbed, in 1958 Bill became field assistant at the Edward Grey Institute, Oxford, where his discovery in Cyprus that birds could be detected by military radar inspired a sadly uncompleted DPhil project under David Lack entitled ‘Bird migration in Scotland studied by radar’, using 1958–60 data collected at RAF Buchan in NE Scotland. Thereafter, Bill resumed his medical career as a geriatrician at Watford General Hospital but his continuing enthusiasm for seabirds began to shape the legacy for which he is best known. It started with an approach by Gerald Tuck, Chairman of the Royal Naval Bird Watching Society (RNBWS), sparking Bill’s lifelong commitment to the Society. He initiated the standard RNBWS recording forms and codified the collection of seabird- and landbird data from ships at sea, including the Ocean Weather Ships in the eastern Atlantic. Bill would meticulously analyse these reports for annual publication in Sea Swallow, often typing them at sea during his ten years of service as a medical officer with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. His voyages took him from the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans to the Southern Ocean, throughout which his personal observations greatly advanced our knowledge of seabird distribution. Bill would seize on any vessel of opportunity, even submarines; Commander Tony Norris (Sea Swallow 70 (2021), 78) describes Bill’s excitement at the periscope views of a surrounding mass of Wilson’s Storm Petrels Oceanites oceanicus. The networking experience gained by Bill’s involvement in the RNBWS may have helped bolster an idea that he had been incubating for several years. In 1965, following a BOU meeting dedicated to seabirds, Bill took soundings from the seabird community on the possible formation of a ‘British Seabird Society’ to promote and coordinate cooperative research into seabirds. With the largely positive responses received and collated in the first Sea-Bird Bulletin he produced, the ‘Seabird Group’ was up and running, with Bill as Secretary of its executive committee for the next 12 years. In 1969 when the annual Seabird Report replaced the bulletin, Chair Stanley Cramp averred that ‘In its relatively short existence the Seabird Group has achieved much of scientific and conservation value which would almost certainly have been left undone had it not come into being.’ The Seabird Group’s first major initiative was ‘Operation Seafarer’, an ambitious and unprecedented attempt to locate and count all the seabirds breeding around the coast of the British Isles. With Bill a driving force, the census was carried out largely by volunteers in a pioneering demonstration of the power of citizen science, culminating in The Seabirds of Britain and Ireland (Cramp, Bourne and Saunders, 1974), a book which was at once a classic of its kind and a benchmark for subsequent national seabird counts. In the aftermath of Operation Seafarer’s success, burgeoning North Sea oil and gas exploration alerted the Seabird Group to how little was known about seabirds offshore. With funding for a feasibility study secured from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), Bill was appointed as Director of Research under George Dunnet to lead a project (1970–1975) based in Aberdeen to examine the distribution and ecology of seabirds at sea. Bill’s long-standing links with the navy, ferry operators and oil industry were pivotal in facilitating the ship-based surveys which were central to the study. While the project fell short of its aims, it did help to open up a field of research and marine conservation which we now take for granted, and in 1979 led directly to the JNCC’s Seabirds at Sea team taking up the survey challenge on a wider and more systematic scale. The Seabird Group was the precedent for Bill’s greatest legacy, the global network of Seabird Groups that sprang up in its wake, including the Pacific, African, Australasian, Dutch and Japanese. In 1997 the Pacific Seabird Group honoured him with their Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2014 the (UK) Seabird Group followed suit at its 12th International Conference in Oxford. In the 1970s Bill relinquished his Secretarial role in the Seabird Group but continued to take a keen interest in its direction and procedures. He was a stickler for protocol, sitting like a vigilant skua on its shoulder, and it was beholden on successive Chairs to ensure that everything was ‘Bill-proof’ ahead of Annual General Meetings. Bill’s passion and determination also made him a powerful campaigner against threats to seabirds both at home and abroad. On behalf of the Seabird Group in the 1960s, he gave birdstrike evidence to the Roskill Commission enquiry into the ill-starred proposal to site a third London airport on the Essex coast. He also campaigned against, respectively, the establishment of mink farms on Orkney and the building of the North Sea gas facility in the Loch of Strathbeg area of NE Scotland. On the international stage he fought for the protection of numerous seabird-rich islands and archipelagos, notably Aldabra, Chagos and Henderson. Bill took a special interest in Madeira and proposed the name Zino’s Petrel Pterodroma madeira for the locally known freira in recognition of the conservation efforts of that species by Frank Zino and his family. The seabird world owes a huge debt to Bill Bourne, a dominant figure who defined an era and made a massive contribution to seabird science and conservation. In 2000, he retired to Dufftown, Aberdeenshire, with his beloved and supportive wife Sheila to be near their daughter Mary and two grandchildren.