Ronald Lockley

Ronald Lockley
R. M. Lockley in about 1940
Born	8 November 1903 Cardiff, Wales
Died	April 12, 2000(2000-04-12) (aged 96)
Occupation	Ornithologist, naturalist, author
Nationality	Welsh

Ronald Mathias Lockley (8 November 1903 – 12 April 2000) was a Welsh ornithologist and naturalist. He wrote over fifty books on natural history, including a major study of shearwaters, and many articles. He is perhaps best known for his book The Private Life of the Rabbit.

His son is the palaeontologist Martin Lockley.

Lockley was born in Cardiff and grew up in the suburb of Whitchurch where his mother ran a boarding school. While still at school, he spent his weekends and summer holidays living rough in the woods and wetlands adjoining the old Glamorganshire Canal, an area now managed as a nature reserve.

After leaving school, he established a small poultry farm with his sister near St Mellons.

In 1927, with his first wife Doris Shellard, he took a 21-year lease of Skokholm, a small island some four miles off the western tip of Pembrokeshire, which was inhabited only by rabbits and seabirds. Attempts to make a living from catching and selling rabbits and breeding chinchilla rabbits were abandoned when he found he could make a better living writing articles and books. He began to study migratory birds from 1928, establishing the first British bird observatory in 1933, and carrying out extensive pioneering research on breeding Manx shearwaters, Atlantic puffins and European storm-petrels. He was encouraged to record the exact incubation and fledging period of the Manx shearwater by Harry Witherby, the then editor of British Birds. He provided the initial catalyst for the entire British Bird Observatory movement which, following the war-time interruption, reached its zenith in the fifties. He described his research in several books, including Dream Island (1930), Island Days (1934) and I Know an Island (1938). The work brought him to the notice of a wider circle of conservationists and naturalists, among them Peter Scott and Julian Huxley. Lockley's notable scientific monograph Shearwaters is a result of a twelve years' study. He founded the Pembrokeshire Bird Protection Society which later became the West Wales Field Society. He urged the broadening of the activities of the original Society and the extension of its area to include the whole of West Wales and it was at his insistence that the West Wales Field Society was incorporated as the West Wales Naturalists' Trust.