Obituary: David Snow

David Snow, who has died aged 84, was one of the most distinguished and popular ornithologists of the last 60 years. A major part of his work was the study of tropical, fruit-eating and nectar-feeding birds, which took him, and his wife Barbara, to many parts of central America. He was a founder and director of the Charles Darwin research station in the Galápagos islands (1963-64) where he helped to develop programmes to protect the islands' giant tortoises and, with Barbara, pioneered studies of three of the world's rarest birds: the lava gull, the nocturnal swallow-tailed gull and the flightless cormorant. Snow was born in Windermere, Cumberland, the second of four children of a preparatory school headteacher. During his childhood, he developed a love of walking, cycling and sketching, while acquiring from his father a small library of bird books, a key work being EM Nicholson's How Birds Live (1929),...

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