John Lister-Kaye

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Sir John Lister-Kaye (born 1946 in Yorkshire) is an English naturalist, conservationist and author.

Having been born into a family who for many generations had been successful industrialists with interests in both quarrying and mining^[1], John Lister-Kaye's early fascination with natural history was something his family hoped he would eventually grow out of. In 1959, at the age of 13, his parents sent him to public school in Devon. Fortuitously for him, but not his parents, the school was situated within an 800 acre nature reserve and near the wilderness of the Lyme Regis landslip (to which he returned with his daughter, as documented in Nature's Child). After five years in such an environment Lister-Kaye's love of nature was deep and permanent^[2].

After leaving school in 1964, an inevitable career in industry was temporarily avoided when Lister-Kaye took a job at a new wildlife park at Westbury on Trym, near Bristol^[3]. However, a few years later his career was back on track when he went to work as a management trainee in the steel industry at Port Talbot in Wales^[4].

After visiting the site of the ecological disaster that resulted from the sinking of the supertanker Torrey Canyon off the south coast of England in 1967, John Lister-Kaye then knew that a long-term career in industry was not for him^[5]. The escape finally came in 1969 when he was invited by naturalist and author Gavin Maxwell, who he had met whilst working at the wildlife park, to move to Maxwell's home on Eilean Bàn (White Island) in the Scottish Highlands, to help him work on a book about British wild mammals and to assist with a project to build a zoo on the island.^[6] Lister-Kaye readily accepted Maxwell's invitation, resigned from his job, and moved to Scotland. After Maxwell's unexpected death from cancer later that same year, both the book and the zoo project had to be abandoned, and John Lister-Kaye became both jobless and homeless^[7]. Rather than return to a career in industry he remained in Scotland and went into isolation to write a book about the short but eventful time he had spent with Maxwell on Eilean Bàn. The book, The White Island, was published in 1972.

In 1970, after the completion of The White Island, Lister-Kaye formed Highland Wildlife Enterprises, a natural history guiding service based at the village of Drumnadrochit, near Loch Ness^[8]. Initially he was assisted in the venture by friend and ex-employee of Gavin Maxwell, Richard Frere. This later became Scotland's first field studies centre, and two years later, in 1972, Lister-Kaye and the field centre moved to a remote valley near Glen Affric^[9].

Four years later, needing to accommodate a growing family and to be able to extend the facilities of the field centre, Lister-Kaye persuaded the Inverness-shire County Council to sell him the remains of a Victorian sporting estate near Beauly called Aigas, which had previously been used by the council as an old peoples home^[10]. In 1977, the Aigas Field Centre was opened by Sir Frank Fraser Darling, Scotland's most celebrated ecologist^[11].

Lister-Kaye's second autobiographical work, The Seeing Eye: Notes of a Highland Naturalist, which was published in 1980, continues the story of his life from when he left Eilean Bàn in 1970 up until his purchase of Aigas in 1976. In Song of the Rolling Earth: A Highland Odyssey, published in 2003, Lister-Kaye continues his autobiography and chronicles the development of the Aigas Field Centre from its humble beginnings in 1976, to what is now Scotland's premier field centre, winning international awards for environmental education and hosting travel study groups from all over the world.

In 2003 John Lister-Kaye was awarded an OBE for services to the Scottish environment, In 2006 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews, and was made a Vice President of the RSPB^[12].

1 Bibliography
2 References
3 Notes
4 External links

[edit] Bibliography

The White Island Longman (1972) ISBN 0-582-10903-5
Seal Cull: The Grey Seal Controversy Penguin Books, paperback (1979) ISBN 0-14-052336-7
The Seeing Eye: Notes of a Highland Naturalist (illustrated by Sarah Norton) Allen Lane (1980) ISBN 0-7139-1306-1
Ill Fares The Land - A Sustainable Land Ethic for the Sporting Estates of the Highlands and Islands Scottish Natural Heritage Occasional Paper No. 3 (1994)
One for Sorrow Balnain Books (paperback, 1994) ISBN 1-872557-36-8
Song of the Rolling Earth: A Highland Odyssey Time Warner Books (2003) ISBN 0-316-86176-6
Nature's Child Little Brown (2004) ISBN 0-316-72731-8.

[edit] References

Lister-Kaye, John (1972). The White Island. Longman. ISBN 0-582-10903-5.
Lister-Kaye, John (1980). The Seeing Eye. Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-1306-1.
Lister-Kaye, John (2004). Song of the Rolling Earth. Abacus. ISBN 0-349-11761-6.