Camille Ferry, Honorary Fellow of the AOU since 1982, passed away on 24 September 2007. Born in Dijon, France, on 15 June 1921, he was educated locally, completing his studies in medicine in Dijon. Medicine is a tradition in his family; his mother and one of his sons are physicians. In 1943, Camille was intern and Chief of Clinic in a hospital in Paris, until he voluntarily joined the Leclerc Division of the French army in 1944. His meritorious military service as Head Doctor earned him the prestigious award “Legion d’honneur.” After World War II, he served as surgeon and practiced in a private clinic before becoming, in 1967, Professor of Surgery at the University of Medicine and Head of Surgical Service in the main hospital of Dijon. In 1988, he retired as a surgeon but remained extremely active in ornithology. This exceptionally active man actually led two parallel lives. He was primarily a renowned surgeon as well as a very active ornithologist. He trained in natural history with famous naturalists such as Paul Paris and Henri Jouard. In the early 1950s, Camille was a pioneer in devising new techniques of bird censusing. In 1966, during the XIV International Ornithological Congress in Oxford, he organized a small meeting with a handful of European ornithologists interested in bird censuses. This was the origin of the International Bird Census Committee (IBCC), which subsequently merged with the European Atlas Committee in the European Bird Census Council (EBCC) that is still very active in atlas and monitoring projects. This so-called “French school” of quantitative ornithology, with these new techniques of bird census (e.g., Studies in Avian Biology 6:414–420, 1981), resulted in a series of groundbreaking studies on the structure and dynamics of bird communities in forested habitats. Camille contributed significantly to the study of bird communities in ecological successions (e.g., Proceedings 16th International Ornithological Congress: 643–653, 1976), which made him an expert on the consequences of forestmanagement techniques on bird species assemblages. His studies and those of his associates have been used to compare the fates of bird communities in the managed forests of western Europe with those of the remaining tracts of forest that are still more-or-less pristine in eastern Europe (e.g., the Bialowieza forest in Poland). The Auk 125(2):502–503, 2008 The American Ornithologists’ Union, 2008. Printed in USA.
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Apr 22, 2013
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