Almost 60 years have passed since Kirkcudbright’s June Nelson spent a year studying birds in the Galapagos Islands.
Together with husband Bryan, whose research on gannets was already high in the global pecking order, June would often be naked in the searing heat observing boobies – Pacific gannets – and the Floreana mockingbird, of which fewer than 300 now remain.
Such revelations, I learn, formed a lighthearted backdrop to Bryan’s 1968 book Galapagos: Islands of Birds.
