Fair Isle

His first trip abroad after the war was to Cyprus in 1949, followed in the

same year by a return to the Orkneys. He went on north from the Orkneys  to Fair Isle, known for the number and variety of migrant birds recorded there, and for its bird observatory which opened the year before Collingwood’s visit. There he met the crofter-naturalist George Stou, sketched himt and wrote about him for the Illustrated London News (Nov. 7^th 1949).

The Bird Observatory on Fair Isle – that small precipitous island lying in mid-ocean between the Orkney and Shetland Groups – has recently been given considerable publicity in the Press but one has heard little or nothing of the man who, encouraged by that great student of bird migration Dr Eagle Clarke, has been mainly responsible for placing that isolated fragment of land on the ornithological map. That man’s name is George Stout, a crofter who has lived and worked the whole of his sixty-odd years on the island, a born ornithologist endowed with keen vision and an acute sense of hearing it seems that very few avian visitors to Fair Isla have escaped his notice. It can be said without the slightest fear of contradiction, that in the whole history of the science no single person has added a comparable number of new or rare birds to the Brritish list. ……