ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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William Richmond Postle "Bill" Bourne (* 11) March 1930 in Bedford, Bedfordshire; † May 31, 2021 in Keith, Moray was a British ornithologist. His main interest was seabird research and conservation.

Live life
Bourne spent his early childhood in Exmouth and Hove. At the age of seven, he was introduced by his father to collecting eggs, which he pursued for ten years before destroying his collection and joining the British Trust for Ornithology. In 1940, his family was evacuated to Bermuda, where he spent most of the war, deepening his knowledge of seabirds such as terns, tropical birds, and especially the tube noses. In 1944 he returned to Britain and attended Brighton College, where he was involved in the founding of the Society of Natural History there. He studied zoology and medicine at Christ's College in Cambridge between 1948 and 1954 and completed his medical education at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London.

During his studies, he extensively visited the bird areas in the United Kingdom and abroad. In 1951 he undertook a solo expedition to the Cape Verde Islands, where he crossed the island of Santiago on foot and hired local schooners to visit the neighboring islands. His observations led to his first major publication in the journal Ibis in 1958 and were mentioned in the 1968 work History of the birds of the Cape Verde Islands by David Armitage Bannerman. Impressed by the bright plumage of the purple herons he found near Montanha on the island of Santiago, Bourne collected a specimen and sent it to Paris, where it was named in 1966 by Abbé René de Naurois as a new subspecies Ardea purpurea bournei.

In 1955 he was called to the National Service and was deployed during the Suez Crisis in the Middle East, where he observed lark migrations in Malta, Iraq and Jordan and recognized the ecological importance of Al-Azraq. He was then transferred to Cyprus, where he co-founded the Cyprus Ornithological Society and was its first secretary. After his release, Bourne became an assistant at the Edward Grey Institute in Oxford in 1958, where his discovery in Cyprus that birds can be detected with military radar provided the impetus for an unfinished doctoral project under the title Bird migration in Scotland studied by radar, for which he used data collected from 1958 to 1960 on the radar station of the Royal Air Force Buchan in northeast Scotland.

After that, Bourne resumed his medical career in geriatrics at Watford General Hospital. His continued interest in islands and seabirds came to the fore when, in 1961, he proposed founding the Seabird Group, which was eventually launched in 1965. He became their first secretary while in his function as B