Desmond Nethersole-Thompson

Like most young naturalists of his generation, Desmond Nethersole-Thompson collected birds’ eggs. Nowadays this is both illegal and destructive,, but collecting helped improve his skills in fieldcraft that became legendary and which he put to good use later, in his researches.

It was a reformed egg-collector, Francis Jourdain, one of the respected editors of the seminal ‘Handbook of British Birds’, who advised the young Desmond that studying breeding habits was more important than taking eggs. As a result, and without any formal qualifications in science Desmond went on to become the only ornithologist to write outstanding monographs on no fewer than four different species - four of the rarest, most inaccessible and most iconic of Highland birds; the greenshank, snow bunting, dotterel and pine crossbill.

A present from his Irish grandmother, Seton Gordons’s ‘Hill Birds of Scotland’ was one of the first books that ‘lit the spark’ in Desmond. Although he cut his egg collecting teeth in the South of England, he was soon using savings from his job as a teacher of history and classics, to travel north and study some of these special birds.

In 1932, when he was 24, Desmond first visited Strathspey, returning the following year, to camp onthe high tops of the Cairngorms for weeks on end – ‘living like snow buntings’ with Carrie, his wife-to-be.