Ted Parker: a personal memoir

Extract

It is now two years since the death of Ted Parker, and I still find it extremely difficult to talk or write about him in the past tense. Indeed, I doubt whether anyone linked with him through ornithology or conservation has yet come to terms with the enormity of the loss. At one level, it is simply that he knew so much of Neotropical birds and their habitats, in so much depth and so much breadth: no-one was his match, and no-one expected ever to be so. At another, it is simply that he was so distinct and vivid a personality, much more than merely “charismatic”: superhumanly energetic, trenchantly assertive, irrepressibly good-natured, subversively frank; and always, inexhaustibly, himself. This mix of features made him larger than life — legendary, even — and awesomely enriching to know, even to someone such as myself who, although corresponding with him for years, met him only twice.