My friend Michael Wilson, who has died aged 79, was a linguist who used his skills to enable British ornithologists to access works unavailable in English.
Mike and I grew up in Somerset villages separated by the Mendip Hills. Our mutual passion for birds absorbed our time and energy in our teenage years. He excelled at identifying bird calls as he walked the Somerset levels. If he heard an unfamiliar call or song he would doggedly wait, listen, search and commit it to memory.
At 15 our bikes took us to search for a little bittern in some reedbeds beside the A38. We stayed in a truck drivers’ lodge in a dormitory room full of snoring men, to be on site at first light for the best chance to see the elusive bird. Mike was wonderful company, considerate, thoughtful and a prolific note-taker.
After O-levels at the Blue school, Wells, in the long hot summer of 1959 we hitched to Scotland with an old Army bivouac to see the first successful nesting of an osprey at Loch Garten. We joined the watch rota set up by the RSPB to look out for egg thieves and record the birds’ feeding behaviour.
Mike was the first to eat part of a trout dropped by an incoming bird that we recovered from below the nest. Supervising, Peter Conder, later the RSPB chief executive, fried it up in a pan.
Such bonding sealed a lifelong friendship. In the 1970s Mike joined my family’s holidays in the birding hotspots of Cley, Dungeness and the Isles of Scilly.
Born in the hamlet of Keward, near Wells, Mike was the son of Violet Hutchinson and Walter Wilson, a dealer in vintage cars who did electrical work for EMI in Wookey. At the Blue school, he was drawn to languages and studied German and Russian at Edinburgh University in 1963. That led to posts teaching English in Minsk and Voronezh, where he got to know many Russian ornithologists.
While teaching at Sherborne school and at Hedley Walter school, Brentwood, Mike joined an editorial team under Stanley Cramp, the chief editor of The Birds of the Western Palearctic (BWP), volunteering to translate bird literature from German and Russian.
In 1980 he became a full-time team member in the Alexander Library of the Edward Grey Institute, Oxford, to research, write and edit BWP volumes 3-9. It was a joy in 2019 to see Mike receive the Janet Kear Union Medal from the British Ornithologists’ Union in recognition of his distinguished service to ornithology.
He is survived by his sister, Penny.
