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Frank Fraser Darling

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Sir Frank Fraser Darling (born Frank Darling, June 23, 1903 - 1979) was an English ecologist, ornithologist, farmer and author.

Darling was born in the stable loft of a farm near Chesterfield, England. His mother was the daughter of a prosperous family from Sheffield, and their plan was for the child to be fostered and forgotten about. However, Frank's mother would not cooperate and refused to part with him. His father, who he never met, left for East Africa around the time of his birth, and was killed in action on the Kenya-Tanganyika border in 1917.

Career

After running away from school at the age of 15, Darling was sent to work on a farm in the Pennines. He then studied at the Midland Agricultural College (now part of the University of Nottingham), in Leicestershire, and obtained diplomas in agriculture and dairying. Soon afterwards he married Marian Fraser ("Bobbie") and took the double-barrelled surname Fraser Darling, which, although he was divorced from Bobbie in 1948, he used to the end of his life.

While working as a Clean Milk Advisor in Buckinghamshire, and longing for a research post in Scotland, Fraser Darling heard about the work of the Institute of Animal Genetics at Edinburgh University, and in the early 1930s the Director, Francis Crew, offered him a place there to study for a PhD.

Living at Dundonnell and later in the Summer Isles, Fraser Darling began the work that was to mark him as a naturalist-philosopher of original turn of mind and great intellectual drive. He described the social and breeding behaviour of the red deer, gulls, and the grey seal repectively, in the three academic works A Herd Of Red Deer, Bird Flocks and the Breeding Cycle and A Naturalist on Rona.

The outbreak of World War II put an end to Fraser Darling's hopes of further work on the grey seal, and being too old for active military service, he chose to farm rather than leave the West Coast of Scotland for wartime civilian work. Between 1939 and 1943 Fraser Darling reclaimed derelict land to agricultural production on Tanera Mor in the Summer Isles. In 1942 the wartime Secretary of State for Scotland, Tom Johnston, asked Fraser Darling if he would run an agricultural advisory programme in the crofting areas of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. He agreed, and for two years he travelled, taught and wrote articles that were later published in book form as Crofting Agriculture.

In 1949, Julian Huxley, UNESCO's first Director-General, invited Fraser Darling to be one of UNESCO's representatives at the United Nations conference on conservation at Lake Success on Long Island. Huxley had been interested in Fraser Darling's studies on animal behaviour since the early 1940s, and the two had corresponded while Fraser Darling was living on Tanera Mor.

His 1969 Reith Lectures were an important contribution to the growing debate on man's responsibility for his environment.

Achievements

Bibliography

  • Colour Inheritance in Bull-terriers (1932) chapter in book by T.W. Hogarth
  • The Physiological and Genetical Aspects of Sterility in Domesticated Animals (1932)
  • Biology of the Fleece of the Scottish Mountain Blackface (1932)
  • A Herd of Red Deer (1937)
  • Bird Flocks and the Breeding Cycle (1938)
  • The Seasons and the Farmer: a Book for Children Cambridge University Press (1939)
  • A Naturalist on Rona (1939)
  • Island Years G. Bell and Sons (1940)
  • The Seasons and the Fisherman (1941)
  • The Story of Scotland (1942)
  • Wildlife in Britain Collins (1943)
  • Island Farm G. Bell and Sons (1943)
  • The Care of Farm Animals (1943)
  • Crofting Agriculture (1945)
  • Natural History in the Highlands & Islands (1947) revised edition with J Morton Boyd, The Highlands and Islands (1969) ISBN 0-00-631955-6
  • Alaska: An Ecological Reconnaissance (1953)
  • West Highland Survey: An essay in human ecology (1955)
  • Pelican in the Wilderness: Odyssey of a Naturalist (1956).
  • An Ecological Renaissance of the Mara Plains in Kenya Colony (1960)
  • Wild life in an African territory: a study made for the Game and Tsetse Control Dept. of Northern Rhodesia (1960)
  • Impacts of Man on the Biosphere (1969)
  • Wilderness And Plenty: the Reith Lectures 1969 BBC (1970) ISBN 0-563-09281-5

References

  • Boyd, John Morton (editor). Fraser Darling in Africa: A Rhino in the Whistling Thorn. Edinburgh University Press, (1992) ISBN 0-7486-0368-9
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