John Morton Boyd

The textile town of Darvel, in the mining district of Ayrshire is perhaps an unlikely setting for an ecologist and conservationist in the making, but it was here that John Morton Boyd was born and grew up. In ‘the kintry’ (‘neighbourhood’) of farmland nearby he included finding birds’ nests and collecting eggs amongst his pursuits. His first major field trip was to a local gull colony with some classmates, to collect fresh eggs for the pot.

Morton (as he was always called) was easily distracted from his school work, and one frustrated headmaster advised that he would make ‘a good brickie’, another recommended that he study natural sciences. His parents wished him to follow a profession and after national service in the RAF, he went to Glasgow University to study engineering.

Poetic and romantic, with a lifelong interest in nature, Morton finally decided to change direction and follow his heart. He had always been ‘thrilled by a thousand sights of nature, from my first goldfinch . . . to an aurora borealis’ and this cultivated in him ‘a passion for knowledge, adventure and spiritual fulfilment as an explorer and naturalist’. The books of Seton Gordon and, in particular, Frank FraserDarling conveyed ‘a special longing, because they spoke to me of my own country’.

An undergraduate project on sand dune snails first took him to Tiree in the Hebrides, where he continued a PhD on earthworms of the machair, frequently diverted by orchids and other machair flowers and the birds of the island. While still at university, and inspired firstly by the Kearton brothers’classic ‘With Nature and a Camera’, and then by Robert Atkinson’s ‘Island Going’, he resolved to visit St Kilda, where he instantly recognised the research potential in the Soay sheep, seabirds, the wren, mice and other island specialities.