| DICK POTTS (1939-2017)
George Richard (Dick) Potts 1939-2017
ick was born in 1939 to a farming family in north Yorkshire. From an early age, he took a keen interest in the wildlife on the family farm, particularly on how the severe winter weather of 1948 impacted on the birds. He studied zoology at Durham University, where he specialised in ecology and entomology, as well as taking part two years running in a Durham University expedi- tion to the Faeroes to study seabirds. After graduation, he undertook a PhD on the breeding ecology of the shag on the Farne Islands, Northumberland. He was lucky to have witnessed at first hand the devastating impact of a toxic algal bloom on seabirds. This reinforced his interest in environmental poisons, initially sparked from observa- tions as a boy on the farm and pursued with the exami- nation of organochlorine residues in shag eggs. Dick was always fascinated by the intrinsic and extrinsic processes that regulated bird populations. He wanted to understand why a species was in decline so that he could devise ways of reversing that decline. He brought this philosophy to his next post, a move to the chalklands of southern England, where he was tasked by The Game Conservancy Trust to unravel why the grey partridge was in decline and what could be done to turn this decline around. The Partridge Survival Project started in 1968 in a Portakabin on North Farm, South Downs, West
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Sussex. With his farming background and ecologi- cal insight, he realised that to understand changes in partridge abundance, he needed to understand changes in the partridge environment. So began one of the most important, longest running and inspirational research projects on the ecology of partridges and arable farmland. From the Sussex work, Dick identified three main causes of the partridge decline: reduced chick survival through herbicide-induced reduction in chick-food invertebrates, lack of suitable nesting habitat reducing settling density, and poor nesting success arising from increased predation pressure. He brought them together in a computer simulation model to predict their relative importance and synergistic interaction, dubbing the trio the ‘three-legged stool’ on the grounds that if one leg failed, the partridge ‘stool’ would collapse. At the same time, with his team of Drs Stephen
Tapper, Paul Vickerman and Keith Sunderland, Dick initiated a detailed study of cereal ecosystems that became known as ‘The Sussex Study’. Such work on farmland ecosystems was truly ground-breaking and controversial at the time, given that previous thinking on conservation concentrated on pristine habitats, not those worked by man to produce food, fuel or fibre. In 1974, he and Paul co-authored a seminal paper entitled Studies on the Cereal Ecosystem in the scientific journal
www.gwct.org.uk
Dick Potts, who was director general of the GCT until 2001, had a passion for partridges and conservation – his ideas were considered pioneering and even before their time. © Charlie Pye-Smith
by Nicholas Aebischer,
Deputy Director of Research and Nick Sotherton, Director of Research
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