Edward Max Nicholson

Edward Max Nicholson (12 July 1904 – 26 April 2003) was a pioneering environmentalist, ornithologist and internationalist, and a founder of the World Wildlife Fund.

Max Nicholson, as he was known to all, was born in Kilternan, Ireland to English parents. His family moved to England in 1910, settling in Staines. He became interested in natural history after a visit to the natural history museum and later took to birdwatching, beginning to maintain a list of birds seen from 1913.

He was educated at Sedbergh School in Cumbria and then Hertford College, Oxford from 1926, winning scholarships to both. At Oxford he read history, and visited Greenland and British Guiana as a founder member of the Oxford University Exploration Club. At Oxford he organized bird counts and censuses on the University's farm at Sanford.

He already had published his first work in 1926, Birds in England, and had three similar books published soon after. In The Art of Bird-Watching (1931), he discussed the potential of co-operative birdwatching to inform the conservation debate. This led, in 1932, to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology, of which he was the first treasurer and later chairman (1947–1949). In 1947–1948, with the then director general of the United Nations' scientific and education organisation UNESCO, Julian Huxley, he was involved in forming the International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN) (now International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)).

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