Edmund Meade-Waldo

Edmund Gustavus Bloomfield Meade-Waldo (8 February 1855 – 24 February 1934) was an English ornithologist and conservationist. He is probably best known for his efforts to preserve the red kite in Wales.

Meade-Waldo was born in Hever Castle and educated at Eton College and Magdalene College, Cambridge University. He spent his life managing the family's country estate, Stonewall, in Kent. He conducted fieldwork and collected birds in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, the Canary Islands and Spain, the presumably-extinct Canary Islands oystercatcher Haematopus meadewaldoi being foremost among them. He was Vice-President of the BOU in 1923 and was an active member of the Zoological Society of London, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Society for the Protection of the Fauna of the Empire and the Society for the Establishment of Nature Reserves. He was also Justice of the Peace for Kent.

Meade-Waldo's discovery of sandgrouse breeding behaviour in 1896 was for a long time discredited as fantasy. His acute observations noted male sandgrouse, by deliberately soaking their breast feathers in water, bringing water to its chicks at the nest. Sixty years later he was proved right.

References

• ACAD – A Cambridge Alumni Database accessed 19 June 2012
• Hanson, T., 2011. Feathers: The Evolution of A Natural Miracle [ISBN 978-0465028788]
• Mearns, B. & Mearns, R., 1988. Biographies for birdwatchers: the lives of those commemorated in western palearctic bird names, London: Academic Press.
• P. R. L., 1934. Obituary of Edmund Gustavus Bloomfield Meade-Waldo. Ibis. 76(2), pp399-402.