Since bird watching became a recognised activity, the past 120 years or so have seen a steady stream of the nation’s top naturalists make their way to Oxford. Being a university town has obviously attracted many of these luminaries, firstly to study and then often to teach the next wave of naturalists and ornithologists. Bernard Tucker, the Reverend Francis Jourdain, W B Alexander, Max Nicholson and Bruce Campbell are just a selection from the past. The list contains many more as the university continues to produce mighty talent to this day. However, surprisingly, it is a rather academically woeful scholar whose name is connected to a lasting establishment for Oxford to continue producing such scholars in the field, the Edward Grey Institute. Sir Edward Grey, a Liberal peer for more than 30 years and Britain’s longest serving Foreign Secretary (1905-1916) was actually rusticated in 1884, but returned to Oxford and obtained a poor degree in jurisprudence, ironically becoming Chancellor of the University some 40 years later. To escape the rigours of both Parliament and London, Grey and his wife kept a small cottage at Itchen Abbas, in Hampshire, where, on the River Itchen, he pursued his other great love, fly fishing.

With his wife, Dorothy, Grey would make the journey from the capital to their cottage every weekend and for many years until Dorothy’s death kept a diary of the wildlife in the surrounding area. This was an age that we can only wonder at now, as our present countryside and its bird life has undergone such vast changes. In the diary, Grey notes red-backed shrikes, wheatears, and stone curlew within a very short distance of the cottage in 1899 and cirl buntings nesting alongside his back door in 1900.

More than once Grey stopped his bicycle while on his way to fish the river to watch wrynecks alongside the road.

His seminal work, The Charm of Birds, is one of the classics of ornithology and in 1909 he privately published a small number of copies of The Cottage Book, fortunately commercially reprinted in 1999, a wonderful record of Sir Edward Grey’s world. I’m sure he would be delighted at the progress ornithology has made in Oxford, if saddened at the decline of so many birds he knew and loved in our countryside.