With the death of Norman Moore aged 92, on 21 October 2015, Britain lost one of its most influential conservationists. To ornithologists, Norman was perhaps best known for his work on pesticide impacts on birds. He led the team at Monk's Wood Experimental Station that studied the biological impacts of DDT and other organochlorines in the 1960s. This work eventually contributed to a banning of these chemicals from agricultural use in Britain and elsewhere. However, he was an all-round naturalist with a particular interest in birds, dragonflies and butterflies. He became a world authority on dragonflies and their conservation, and was one of the first to appreciate the problems for wildlife of agricultural intensification and habitat fragmentation, and the value of hedgerows in modern farmland. Norman firmly believed in the importance of integrating nature conservation with other land-uses, whether agriculture or forestry. He realized that small nature reserves alone could not save biodiversity in a country as highly developed and populated as Britain. He was a founder and first Chairman of the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG). This was a charitable trust which aimed to find practical ways of conserving wildlife on working farms, thus bridging a widening gulf between farmers and conservationists. As a person, Norman was well-informed, charming and modest. With his naturally gentle and thoughtful manner, he became widely regarded as one of conservation's elder statesmen, much loved and respected by all who knew him. Norman was born on 24 February 1923, the son of a doctor, Sir Alan Moore. In 1934 the family moved from Lewes to near Battle in rural Sussex. From boyhood, Norman was a keen naturalist. Birds were his first love, but by his teens butterflies and dragonflies had caught his attention. His first scientific paper, ‘Rare Lepidoptera and Odonata in East Sussex’, was published in 1939, when he was aged 16. He was educated at Eton College and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences, specializing in zoology. While in Cambridge, he became President of the University Bird Club. Like so many of his generation, his studies were interrupted by war service. He was called up in 1942 and served as a gunnery officer in the Royal Artillery, with active service in Belgium and the Netherlands. When manning observation posts, he kept two notebooks: one with reports on German military activity and the other on wildlife seen at the time. Late in 1944 he suffered a serious leg wound and was captured by German forces. He was one of only four British prisoners in a camp housing 23 000 Russians. Conditions were appalling. On a pint of mangel-wurzel soup per day and one small loaf of bread per week, prisoners were starving, and deaths in the camp numbered more than a hundred per day. On being liberated by the US 7th Armoured Division in April 1945, more than 9000 men from the camp were hospitalized and de-loused with the new wonder chemical, DDT. After his return to Britain, Norman trained gunners on Salisbury Plain before returning to Cambridge to complete his zoology degree in 1948. After a brief post-graduate expedition to The Gambia, Norman moved to teach zoology at Bristol University, where he spent much of his research time studying dragonflies, with emphasis on their territorial behaviour. His thesis led to a PhD in 1953. These insects, which became a lifetime passion, formed the subject of his first book, Dragonflies (1960), co-authored with Cynthia Longfield and Philip Corbet and published in the well-known New Naturalist Series. In 1953 Norman accepted the post of regional officer for Southwest England in the recently formed Nature Conservancy, a position in which he had sufficient freedom to do what he thought was important. Based at Furzebrook Research Station in Dorset, he documented the loss and fragmentation of the once continuous heathland as area after area was turned to farmland or tree plantation. He was among the first to realize the significance of habitat fragmentation to flora and fauna, demonstrating how species numbers dwindle as the fragments of remaining habitat become smaller and more isolated. He later examined the same phenomenon in woodland, and found similar trends in bird populations, with the rarest species disappearing first. While in the southwest, he helped to select and establish some of the first National Nature Reserves in the region, including Yarner Wood, Hartland Moor and Morden Bog. With the help of the British Trust for Ornithology, in 1954 Norman organized a nationwide survey of the Buzzard Buteo buteo, whose major prey-species, the Rabbit Oryctolagus cuniculus, was being drastically reduced by the newly introduced viral disease, myxomatosis. However, his work was to highlight another factor limiting Buzzard numbers. The resulting paper, published in British Birds, showed two maps side by side. One map depicted the density of Buzzards in different parts of Britain while the other showed the densities of gamekeepers in different parts of Britain. The one was almost a mirror image of the other, hinting strongly at what really limited Buzzard numbers in Britain at that time. Soon afterwards, from the late 1950s, came a conservation problem of quite different magnitude, as thousands of seed-eating birds and their predators were found dead and dying in newly sown cereal fields across the country. The grains that killed them had been treated with some new organo-chlorine pesticides, called aldrin and dieldrin. These events brought another major change in Norman's career. In 1960 he was appointed Head of the Toxic Chemicals and Wildlife Section at the newly created Monks Wood Experimental Station near Huntingdon. His task was to organize research on the effects of pesticides on wildlife. His colleagues included several young men soon to become well known, including Derek Ratcliffe (who discovered eggshelll thinning caused by DDT) and Ian Prestt (who studied raptors and herons, and eventually became Chief Executive of the RSPB). Moore's group began an extensive programme of monitoring the pesticide residues in a wide range of birds found dead and sent in by members of the public. This programme survives to this day in changed form, albeit no longer at Monks Wood. The group found organo-chlorine chemicals in almost every species examined, birds and others, but at highest levels in predatory species that were in severe decline, from Peregrines Falco peregrinus to Otters Lutra lutra. The team also conducted field studies on the most-affected species, including Peregrine and Sparrowhawk Accipiter nisus, Grey Heron Ardea cinerea and various seabirds. Support for the work rose with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), which heightened public concern over the effects of DDT and other organo-chlorines. Norman himself performed a crucial behind-the-scenes role in all this work, serving on committees, and tirelessly battling with representatives from the Ministry of Agriculture and the agro-chemical industry. In his book on the Peregrine (1993, p. 353), Derek Ratcliffe provided a fitting and heartfelt tribute to Norman's role: ‘In Britain the brunt of this wearisome task of convincing the unwilling fell on Norman Moore… The successful outcome, in the form of progressive restrictions and phasing out of the most harmful compounds is a tribute to Norman's skills of diplomacy and persuasion, and to his scientific authority.’ Although it took years before the use of organo-chlorine pesticides was reduced sufficiently in Britain to allow wildlife to recover, the work of Norman Moore's group attracted international acclaim, as did Monks Wood Experimental Station in which it was based. As part of his other work on farmland wildlife, Norman Moore began to study hedges, realizing that, in modern farmland, they provided an important refuge for many kinds of plants and animals. At that time, hedges were being torn out over much of the country with the help of ministry grants in order to create more cropland with bigger fields. He and his colleagues produced maps from past and present to show how the loss of hedges was transforming the lowland landscapes of eastern Britain from patchwork quilts to open prairies. Along with colleagues Max Hooper and Ernest Pollard, Norman contributed to another new Naturalist book, Hedges (1974), providing the first comprehensive study of these familiar but under-rated landscape features. The Conservative Government's ideological decision to split the Nature Conservancy's conservation and scientific arms, to form the Nature Conservancy Council and the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, changed conservation in Britain, probably for the worse. It also changed Norman's career, breaking up the interdisciplinary team of biologists, toxicologists and chemists he had assembled at Monks Wood, to his great distress. In 1975, Norman became Chief Advisory Officer to the new Nature Conservancy Council (NCC), accepting a post created especially for him. He prepared the NCC's policy paper on Nature Conservation and Agriculture which called for a rural land-use strategy that took account of nature conservation alongside food production. The Conservative Government of the day was unreceptive to the idea. But gradually, through public pressure, the tide began to turn. At a public enquiry over the fate of Amberley Wild Brooks in Sussex, at which Norman gave evidence, nature conservation won one of its first victories over land drainage and agriculture. Public opinion eventually forced the Government to provide better protection for wild places, and Norman played an influential role in shaping the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act. From 1979 to 1983, during his last years in the NCC, Norman was also a Visiting Professor of Environmental Studies at Wye College, then part of the University of London. Always incredibly busy, he found time for everyone. He retired from the NCC in 1983, having been the first British biologist to have spent his entire career in nature conservation, excelling in research, planning and diplomacy. He once commented that you could get a lot done if you let others take the credit. He had seen and battled through the worst effects of agricultural intensification that occurred in Britain from the late 1950s into the 1980s. After ‘official retirement’ he continued to work with FWAG and to chair a specialist dragonfly group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). In retirement, Norman wrote his autobiographical The Bird of Time (1987), which won a Conservation Book Prize, arguing the case for conservation as an underlying principle of wise land-use. Under the name of sustainability, this principle has become enshrined in a limited way in public policy. He chaired the dragonfly group of the Species Survival Commission of IUCN, producing a plan for worldwide dragonfly conservation in 1997. When he retired from NCC, his colleagues paid for a small pond to be created in his garden especially for dragonflies. His final and more personal book, Oaks, Dragonflies and People (2002), describes the history of this pond, and the animals it attracted, together with further thoughts on conservation. Norman was an Honorary Fellow of the Linnean Society and of the Royal Entomological Society, and a Vice-President of the British Ornithologists' Union, the British Ecological Society and the British Naturalists’ Association. He received the BOU's Union Medal (1972) for his work on pesticides, the Zoology Society's Stamford Raffles Award (2001) for his ‘distinguished contribution to the ecology and behaviour of dragonflies’, and the Royal Entomological Society's Marsh Award for Insect Conservation (2002). His name is commemorated in several species of dragonflies and damselflies, and in an award administered by the British Dragonfly Society. In 1950 he had married a fellow Cambridge zoologist, Janet Singer, who died the year before Norman. They are survived by three children and eight grandchildren. Norman died at his home in Swavesey, Cambridgeshire, on 21 October 2015, and will remain long and fondly in the memories of all who knew him. Of all the people one meets through life, he was one of the very best.