Mike Harris – Obituary

With the death of Mike Harris on 17 December 2023, at the age of 84, the world lost one of its best known, most loved and most outstanding seabird biologists. For no less than 63 years, Mike studied seabirds, and was active in the field and publishing into his last year. Research Gate lists him as having 332 publications in total and 15 927 citations, including his many collaborative studies.

As for his early life, Michael Philip Harris was born in Swansea on the Welsh coast on 28 April 1939. The son of a motor mechanic, he attended local schools and also studied at Swansea University for BSc and PhD degrees. His passions for natural history, marine life and islands were evident from an early age, with much of his boyhood spent exploring the local countryside, and developing the field-craft that served him well through later life. He was inspired by the writings of fellow Welshman, Ronald Lockley, about the very islands and bird populations on which Mike would himself subsequently work. A brief spell acting as assistant warden at the Bird Observatory on Bardsey Island, off the north Welsh coast, helped to hone his skills in trapping, handling and ringing birds.

This was followed by PhD studies on Herring Gulls Larus argentatus and Lesser Black-backed Gulls L. fuscus on Skomer Island. In the summers of 1962 and 1963, this work entailed swapping all the eggs in several Lesser Black-backed Gull colonies with eggs in Herring Gull colonies to investigate aspects of species recognition and migration, forming one of the first large-scale field experiments in British ornithology (Harris 1970). After completing his PhD, his examiner, David Lack, offered Mike a position at the Edward Grey Institute in Oxford, spanning the period 1962–73. He began with studies of gulls, Oystercatchers Haematopus ostralegus and Manx Shearwaters Puffinus puffinus on Skokholm Island, which he combined with being warden of the Bird Observatory there, another link with Ronald Lockley. While still based at the EGI, Mike moved to the Galápogos Islands in the late 1960s to study the nesting ecology of tropical seabirds, notably storm petrels and albatrosses. He discovered that the population of Band-rumped Storm Petrels Hydrobates castro consisted of two sectors, one nesting in one half of the year, and the other nesting in the second half, but both using the same set of burrows (Harris 1969). Over the same period, Mike also produced the first Field Guide to the Birds of Galapagos (1974) still in use today. All this early work was undertaken at a time when fieldwork logistics, especially on remote islands, were much more challenging than today, with no computers, mobile phones or bird-borne data loggers.

While on Galápagos, Mike developed a friendship with Lars-Eric Lindblad who was interested in developing sustainable eco-tourism. He provided the funding which enabled Mike to develop the system of allocating time slots to different cruises, thus regulating the number of people around seabird colonies at any one time. This system persists to this day. Subsequently, Mike acted as naturalist-guide on several pioneering Lindblad Explorer expeditions, thereby gaining his first experience of both Arctic and Antarctic seabirds.

Mike returned to the UK in 1973. He was then without a job, but at that time the Nature Conservancy was looking to appoint an experienced seabird biologist to study a decline in the Atlantic Puffin Fratercula arctica population. Mike got the job, marking the start of a long career studying the seabirds of Scotland. Mike decided to study Puffins in two areas, St Kilda (where numbers were declining) on the west side of Scotland and the Isle of May (where numbers were smaller but increasing) on the east side. The main colony on St Kilda was extremely difficult to access, and entailed travel via a breeches buoy across a deep chasm between the main island (Hirta) to the island where most Puffins were breeding (Dun). Mike and his rock-climber assistant, Stuart Murray, constructed this access route using material mostly scrounged from the military. It served them well over five seasons, allowing the collection of annual data on burrow numbers, densities, nest success and diet.

The Isle of May offered much easier access over a calmer sea, flatter terrain for the work, better weather and reasonable living quarters. All this allowed Mike to catch and ring large numbers of Puffins, either by using mist-nets or by reaching down and grabbing them in their burrows. So in addition to estimates of breeding numbers from year to year, he began long-term studies of individuals, recording their annual reproductive and mortality rates, as well as studies of diets, feeding and growth rates of chicks, and other aspects of Puffin biology. This type of basic information, gained by systematic fieldwork year after year, became the hallmark of Mike's approach, and provided the basis from which more challenging questions could be addressed, including the impacts on populations of such factors as climate change, fishery activities or pollution.

While working on ‘the May’, Mike was based at the Hill of Brathens Research Station near Banchory, and had bought an old, isolated cottage nearby which he renovated with the help of Stuart Murray. He thus gained the first and only home of his own. In the 1980s, another significant change occurred in Mike's life and work. He had first met Sarah Wanless in the 1970s while she was working for her PhD on Northern Gannets Morus bassanus on Ailsa Craig, and had remained in contact over their mutual seabird interests. However, it was not until the 1980s, after her car serendipitously broke down near Mike's cottage that they moved in together, eventually marrying in 1996 (an event which entailed them taking an unprecedented afternoon off work).

Mike had long realized the potential of the Isle of May for seabird research, and in the 1980s he and Sarah, with the help of students, expanded the work to collect data not only on Puffins, but also Common Guillemots Uria aalge, Razorbills Alca torda, Black-legged Kittiwakes Rissa tridactyla and European Shags Gulosus aristotelis. Mike wrote his first book on the Puffin for publication in 1984, and he and Sarah produced a second edition in 2011, incorporating many new findings and insights. However, over the years, Mike became increasingly focused on Guillemots, and in the last year of his life, he and Sarah produced their magnum opus on the ecology and behaviour of this species, based on four decades of meticulously collected data (Wanless et al. 2023).

Work on ‘the May’ tied Mike to Scotland every summer, but he managed to spend two austral summers with the British Antarctic Survey on Bird Island, South Georgia, where he studied the diving behaviour of South Georgia Shags Leucocarbo georgianus. Mike was a workaholic and even his holidays usually involved visiting a colleague's study site and helping with fieldwork, trips that took him and Sarah to Alaska, Western Australia, Argentina, Namibia and South Africa. It is sobering to realize that Mike ‘retired’ in 1999, yet wrote more scientific papers in his retirement than many other field-biologists have produced during their entire careers.

Mike was ambivalent about honours and awards for doing work that he loved, but he was pleased to receive Lifetime Achievement Awards from both the UK (2016) and Pacific Seabird Groups (2007), as well as major awards from the British Ornithologists' Union (Union Medal 1993, Godman-Salvin Medal 2006), the British Trust for Ornithology (Tucker Medal 1998) and the Scottish Ornithologists' Club (Honorary membership 2011). He was also awarded a DSc by Swansea University in 1985, a research fellowship at the University of St Andrews (1986–92), an Honorary Professorship in the University of Glasgow's Division of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology in 1996 and a CEH Emeritus Fellowship on his retirement in 1999. He had little time for interests away from seabirds, but he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Welsh rugby team, and in later life took up gardening, becoming self-sufficient in soft fruit and vegetables for much of the year. He took pride in the fact that, for much of his earlier life, the meat component of his diet came almost entirely from roadkill. He also enjoyed music, particularly choral works and opera, and was fond of the works of Dylan Thomas, who 25 years earlier had attended the same school.

Mike was also notable for the things he found unimportant. He had no interest in mod cons of any kind, or in celebrations, such as birthdays, and saw Christmas day as an excellent opportunity for undisturbed fieldwork. His field clothes were idiosyncratic, and as his former student and current leader of the Isle of May studies, Francis Daunt, commented: ‘The zip on Mike's coat had gone years before and was stuck closed at the bottom, so he had to climb into it like a sleeping bag. His waterproof trousers were held up with a rope around his neck.’ He had no interest in modern devices unless they could be attached to seabirds to yield new information. And he never possessed a mobile phone.

So how can we sum up the life of such a productive and charismatic individual? Mike's legacy as a seabird researcher need hardly be emphasized: hundreds of pioneering publications in peer-reviewed journals, thousands of citations, prestigious accolades over many years. The quality of his work, both singly and with so many collaborators – Sarah pre-eminent among them – will remain for all to see. Mike's success was based on complete commitment. His dedication never waned, and despite failing health, he was in the field collecting data as usual during his last summer, and in his final weeks, he worked to ensure that his Guillemot data were in good shape for others to follow. He mentored a generation of seabird ecologists, many of whom are now leading projects across the world, aiming to replicate his passion and commitment to field research.

To many people, Mike came over as a modest, no-nonsense, hard-working individual, with a strong passion for his work and only limited concern for convention. He had a marked sense of discipline – working hard, but never rushed, and always on top of things, while keeping meticulous records. At the same time, he was warm-hearted, and very good with people, always finding time to talk, considerate and helpful in his dealings with others. He became a friend and mentor to many. Through his publications and memorable persona, Mike left an immense and indelible legacy for which we can all feel gratitude. It was a privilege to have known him.