Reginald Ernest Moreau

Reginald "Reg" Ernest Moreau (29 May 1897 – 30 May 1970) was an English civil servant who worked as an accountant in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and later contributed to ornithology. He also made studies on the migration of birds between Europe and Africa; and on clutch size in nesting birds, compared the life-histories of birds in different latitudes and was a pioneer in the introduction of quantitative approaches to the study of birds. He was also a long time editor of the ornithological journal Ibis. Around this time he injured his right wrist and had to learn to write with his left hand. His father was hit by the open door of a speeding train and the injury led to a nervous breakdown with periodic episodes of manic-depression. The burden of earning and care of the family now went to Moreau's mother but in 1907 they moved from Kingston to Rowledge on the edge of Alice Holt Forest and then in 1913 to Farnham. In his teens he began exploring the neighbourhood on bicycle and through the books of William Henry Hudson took an interest in observing the local birds. In 1914 he wrote the Executive Class Examination for entrance to the Home Civil Service and made it into the 99th place among 100 available positions although his bad eyesight and poor health made him nearly fail. He received a posting in September 1914 at a war office and his job was to scrutinize applications for separation allowance. A year later he was posted at the Army Audit Office in Aldershot. The clerical work for the next five years was interrupted by rheumatoid arthritis. His family doctor suggested that he needed a "complete change". He applied for a transfer to the Army Audit Department in Cairo and got one in 1920. ) Moreau made trips around Africa and wrote on birds as well as letters to the New Statesman. He also wrote some fiction such as The Temple Servant under the pen name of "E. R. Morrough" as, being a civil servant, he was not allowed to publish books. They travelled around Africa and in 1928 C.B. Williams moved to Amani in Tanganyika as Deputy Directory of a research station there and recommended that Moreau should take up work in the accounts department. The Moreau's were also among the first Europeans to note the joking relationships or the utani system that connected tribes in East Africa. In 1934 the station was visited by David Lack and in 1939 by W. H. Thorpe and his wife. Thorpe had made the trip to find a giant coccid. In 1936 they moved the children to England for their education, they only saw them again during their next leave in 1939 and then did not see them again until they returned to England after the war. In June 1946 Moreau developed choroiditis which threatened his eyesight. This led to his leaving Africa and retiring to England. He published nearly 80 papers while at Amani but still had work to be done. David Lack offered him a part-time position at the Edward Grey Institute while Thorpe offered him a place in his Cambridge section of Animal Behaviour. He also was invited to the editorship of the ornithological journal, Ibis. He received an honorary Master of Arts degree from the University of Oxford on 15 December 1951. He retired from the editorship of Ibis in 1960 and from the Edward Grey Institute in July 1964. The British Ornithologists' Union awarded him the Godman-Salvin award at their Annual General Meeting on 3 April 1966.

Ornithological pioneer Moreau was among the pioneering ornithologists who focused on life-history studies of birds. In 1944 he suggested in a paper in the Ibis that birds, even of the same or very closely related species, laid larger clutches of eggs in the higher latitudes than in the tropics. This was based on his studies of birds in Africa through the collection of large amounts of data often collected by his African assistants. This data and the general trend that was confirmed opened up a very active debate on avian clutch size. Theoretically birds should be laying as many eggs as they can across the world. One idea proposed by Alexander Skutch was that the clutch size had evolved so that the death rate is offset so that bird populations are more or less stable. Another theory proposed by David Lack was that the number of eggs laid was fine tuned by the availability of resources such as food that are available for raising the young successfully. This debate would also lead to more fundamental questions related to the unit of selection and ideas on group selection.

Moreau examined the migrations of birds from Europe into Africa and noticed that in the Sahel region, the densities of insectivorous migrants was much greater in the sparse thorny vegetation than in other kinds of apparently richer savanna vegetation just further south of the Sahel. This has been called Moreau's paradox and has been explained as being caused by the difference in insect densities on these plants. The thorny plants are adapted against large herbivore grazing and may have relatively lower chemical defences leading to greater arthropod densities than the larger trees that have foliage protected by chemical defences.

Later life

After returning from Africa, Moreau settled in "the tiny and unregarded Oxfordshire village of Berrick Salome". He wrote, "in 1965 I realized suddenly that, because Berrick was so small and because we were fortunate in still having several people whose clear recollections reached back to between 1890 and 1910, it might be possible to build up for a period about the turn of the century a picture of more than purely local interest." His study was published Oxford University Press in 1968 as The Departed Village: Berrick Salome at the Turn of the Century.

He died at Hereford, England, on 30 May 1970. He is buried, alongside his wife, Winnie, in the churchyard of Sutton St Michael.