ADU travels, expeditions and events

Les Underhill Awarded Gilchrist Medal for Services to Marine Science

On 5 July 2002, the Director of the Avian Demography Unit, Professor Les Underhill, was awarded a Gilchrist Memorial Medal by the South African Network for Coastal and Oceanic Research (SANCOR) at the Southern African Marine Science Symposium held that week in Swakopmund, Namibia. The medal is awarded every few years to distinguished persons who have made significant contributions to marine science in southern Africa. Because Les Underhill was not able to attend the meeting (he was in Siberia at the time), the medal was collected on his behalf by John Cooper of the ADU, who also read out the following citation to acclaim at the closing banquet. All members of the ADU are very proud that its Director has been honoured in this way.

Citation text:

Les Underhill is a large man: large hands, large mind, large heart. The hands can pull a Swift Tern searching for its penned chick out of the sky, or make a mist-netted Lesser Double-collared Sunbird disappear (and this from a man who calls his dentist "banana fingers"!), the mind can recognize talent in a mature student determined to make research her career, and also develop exciting new ways of analyzing biological data; the heart is always ready to support students and staff through difficulties and personal problems.

Les Underhill has been Director of the Avian Demography Unit in the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Cape Town since 1991. His whole working career has been at UCT, graduating with a PhD in Mathematical Statistics in 1973. His father, George, sadly no longer with us, was influential in introducing him to the study of birds, through his amateur bird-ringing activities. This hobby has developed into the main thrust of his career. A seminal influence was his active participation in the Western Cape Wader Study Group in the 1970s. This small group, which had no more than a dozen members at any time, brought amateurs and professionals together to study Palaearctic waders (charadriid shorebirds), by ringing and by regular counts. The research conducted by the group led to Les accompanying, as the sole South African, the International Arctic Expedition to the Taimyr Peninsula in Siberia in 1991, and the fascinating finding that in years when lemmings are scarce, Arctic Foxes switch to eating wader chicks, in turn leading to fewer juvenile Curlew Sandpipers over-wintering at Langebaan Lagoon. The amateur-led counts the Western Cape Wader Study Group has undertaken at Langebaan, ongoing for over a quarter of a century, were essential to this finding. So, glasnost has helped Les' career, and now with South Africa's own renaissance, Les is once more in Siberia by invitation at this very moment.

Recognizing the valuable inputs that amateurs can make has led to a series of investigations by the ADU that have collected and analyzed large data sets. The renowned "Atlas of Southern African Birds" is the major product to date, but ongoing work by the ADU atlassing frogs, recording birds in reserves (BIRP), counting waterbirds at wetlands (CWAC), and roadside surveys of cranes and bustards (CAR) will surely result in significant publications in time. This shows another facility of Les': the invention of acronyms, although CROAK for the frog project seems to have eluded him so far.

Sea and shorebird research has now become the main thrust of the ADU. Ongoing work, with a large suite of students, over half of whom are female, is now taking place at sub-Antarctic Marion Island, on Robben and Dassen Islands in the Western Cape, as well as in Siberia. This work is a melange of ecological and physiological research on individual species; policy research on international conventions; and the analyses of large data sets, often with the development and use of novel statistical methods. Much of this research is "cutting edge", surely rebutting an old view held by some that in some way the ADU is a lightweight body, not suited to be based on a university campus.

Much of this research has been influenced by conservation needs: witness the ADU's involvement in the last decade with the Apollo Sea and Treasure oil spills that affected so many African Penguins. Indeed the saga of Peter, Percy and Pamela, the penguins that swam home from the Eastern Cape, were followed by thousands on the ADU web site, leading to Time Magazine making it its "web site of the week".

Les will be the first to acknowledge that all the ADU's efforts and successes to date could only have been undertaken and achieved with the support of its research and support staff, its grantors, donors and supporters, and its collaborators in other institutions. Not for nothing was the Marine and Coastal Management Directorate of the South African Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism made the recipient of the ADU's inaugural "Partner of the Year" award this year. But all successful efforts require good direction, and it is as ADU Director that Les has made and is making his best contributions to marine science in southern Africa.

Les Underhill's statistical abilities, the many collaborative programmes he has started, and the ADU's growing body of postgraduate students, have contributed and will continue to contribute to the body of knowledge about the marine birds of southern Africa and the environments in which they live. He is thus a worthy recipient of a Gilchrist Medal in 2002. Close by to Swakopmund is Walvis Bay, which supports many thousands of shorebirds. Perhaps we should ask an over-wintering juvenile Curlew Sandpiper to go home early, so as to let Les know as soon as possible in Siberia of the honour we have awarded to him today.

Southern African Marine Science Symposium
Swakopmund, Namibia
5 July 2002

Nomination:

LESLIE GORDON UNDERHILL
GILCHRIST MEDAL NOMINEE, 2002

Les Underhill is hereby nominated for the 2002 Gilchrist Medal for his contributions to marine science since the early 1970's.

He graduated with a PhD in a theoretical branch of Mathematical Statistics in 1973; on the 25th anniversary of the award of his doctorate he was heard to say that he had solved (in that work) a problem which no one has had for quarter of a century.

Already in 1975, he had rebelled against abstract mathematics passed off as statistics and was retraining as an applied statistician. For example, he spent a sabbatical in New Zealand visiting Professor George Seber (inventor of the Jolly-Seber method) to learn how to estimate survival rates from capture-recapture data.

Meanwhile he had trained as a bird ringer, and was a founder member of the Western Cape Wader Study Group, and devoted a huge amount of time to gathering data on shorebirds along the coastline and at the estuaries of southern Africa. As a statistician, he was roped in to doing the analysis of the resulting data. As a consequence, he co-authored a series of papers on shorebirds, most of them migrants from the Siberian tundra. Where new statistical methods were needed to analyse unusual types of data, he developed them from scratch.

These publications did not go unnoticed in Moscow, and he was the only South African to be invited to participate in the annual International Arctic Expedition of the Institute of Evolutionary Ecology of the then Soviet Academy of Sciences. He spent the northern summer of 1991 at 76°N on the northeastern Taimyr Peninsula in Siberia, the breeding grounds of many of the species he had studies in South Africa. On the tundra, he was part of a team of scientists which successfully tested the idea that breeding success of the migrants to South Africa was linked to the abundance of lemmings - when lemmings were abundant, Arctic Foxes preyed on them and the waders had high breeding productivity; when lemmings were scarce after being abundant but hunted the previous year, the foxes quartered the tundra, destroying virtually all nests at the egg stage. Thus Les Underhill helped demonstrate the remarkable fact that lemming cycles in Siberia were visible at Langebaan Lagoon, within sight of Table Mountain.

Unlike the majority of statisticians, Les gets actively involved in fieldwork. Besides the Russian tundra experience, he has participated in several expeditions; most recently he was Scientist-in-Charge at Prince Edward Island, during the Prince Edward Islands Millennium Expedition. He motivated his colleagues to search for rings on Wandering Albatrosses; they found a bird that had been recorded breeding on Prince Edward Island in 1973, and which had originally been ringed off Australia in 1960.

His involvement with marine research broadened from estuarine and coastal birds to genuine seabirds, and now includes fisheries. His commitment to the African Penguin dates back to a ringing expedition to Dassen Island in 1973, and has continued ever since. He was deeply involved with the Apollo Sea spill of 1994, and maintained a project which followed up the fortunes of the 4000 oiled and cleaned penguins. A paper summarizing the results of the first five years of this work was presented to Mr Horst Kleinschmidt (Head of the Marine and Coastal Management Branch of the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism) on the ferry to Robben Island on 25 June 2000, just two days after the Treasure sank, and when it was becoming apparent that we were facing the biggest penguin oiling event ever.

The paper demonstrated unequivocally that cleaning oiled penguins made conservation sense, and undoubtedly helped secure immediate government support for the operation. During this spill, Les Underhill was responsible for the website that depicted the travels of "Peter", "Pamela" and "Percy", still the world's most famous penguins. This story drew world attention to the plight of the 19 000 oiled penguins that were steadily being cleaned by SANCCOB. His involvement with penguins continues at various levels; for example, he is a director of the newly-reconstituted SANCCOB as a non-profit company.

In 1991, Les Underhill initiated the Avian Demography Unit of the University of Cape Town. The ADU brought the Atlas of Southern African Birds into existence. This work includes distribution maps of all bird species occurring in the region, including those associated with marine environment. Currently, Les Underhill leads a strong team of staff and students, with co-supervisors drawn from the pool of expertise outside of the universities; this group is tackling a wide array of marine projects. Some of these projects have a focus on species of seabirds, shorebirds and seals. Others have a statistical focus, modelling patterns and processes. An important new area is the development of indices of the health of the marine environment.

In summary, Les Underhill has made a major contribution to several diverse aspects of marine science over a long period of time, and particularly in the three-year time frame outlined in the call for nominations. He is a worthy potential winner of the Gilchrist Medal for 2002.

Prof Tim Dunne
Professor and Head of Department of Statistical Sciences
University of Cape Town