Obituary

As an ‘Easter diversion’ while enrolled in Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, Jamie Smith accompanied his friend John Shanks to Ailsa Craig in the Firth of Clyde to count North Atlantic Gannets Sula bassana. This trip precipitated his switch to the study of Zoology and a lifelong interest in the ecology of bird populations, especially on islands. James Neil Munro Smith, known to most as ‘Jamie’, was born on 1 May 1944 in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, Scotland. Jamie graduated from Edinburgh in 1967 as a Zoologist, and completed a D. Phil. under Mike Cullen at Oxford (1967–71). As a Smithsonian Research Fellow, he studied population variation among Darwin's finches in the Galapagos with Peter and Rosemary Grant. In 1973, he assumed a faculty position in the Zoology Department at the University of British Columbia. For the next three decades, Jamie combined his love of birds, science and nature to make major contributions to ornithology, conservation and education. He lost an 11-year battle to cancer on 18 July 2005 at his home in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Jamie's arrival at Oxford in 1967 coincided with the rapid growth of behavioural and evolutionary ecology. He got involved in the debates about how adaptation and natural selection shaped the behaviour of individuals, population dynamics and avian life histories. Jamie's research on area-restricted searching by foraging songbirds had an immediate effect on the field by drawing attention to the constraints faced by ‘would be’ optimal foragers deciding where to feed and how much habitat to sample. His first paper, published in Animal Behaviour with Richard Dawkins in 1971, used laboratory-reared Great Tits Parus major and controlled the food density of ‘habitat patches’ to test key assumptions about the perception of foraging profitability in birds. His D. Phil. research on food searching and habitat sampling of Song Thrushes Turdus philomelos and Blackbirds T. merula, using field observations and arrays of artificial baits, was published in two papers in Behaviour (1974). With an extension of his D. Phil. research, Jamie and H.P. Sweatman supported predictions that predators maximize efficiency by sampling habitats, spend more time where success is high and depress prey numbers as a consequence, but they also highlighted the constraints to optimal foraging by an individual due to handling time, prey depletion and social factors limiting access to food (Ecology 1974). Jamie's first four papers generated important insights on individual variation and the constraints to the expression of optimal behaviours in nature. Jamie applied his creative blend of tests of scientific theory with empirical field research and simple elegant field and laboratory experiments to questions in life history evolution and population and community ecology throughout his career. Always, his work was grounded in ecological realism. At UBC, Jamie and his colleagues began to elucidate the complexities of avian demography in North America by conducting songbird studies on small islands and the mainland, and successfully applied these data to evolutionary problems of broad theoretical interest. In 1974, Jamie assumed the lead of a 16-year field study, started by F. Tompa in 1959, of an individually marked population of Song Sparrows Melospiza melodia on Mandarte Island, a small islet off the coast of British Columbia. The work focused on critical demographic parameters including the functions of territoriality, food limitation, nestling condition, winter survival, predation, impacts of cowbirds, population regulation, life history evolution and response to natural selection. Jamie's early work on Song Sparrows demonstrated experimentally heritable variation in morphological traits. He also revealed a phenotypic correlation between fecundity and survival that was positive, but in later work with Dolph Schluter a genetic correlation that was negative, perhaps reflecting the positive effect of a common environment on both traits resulting in opposing natural selection. Peter Arcese of UBC inherited the Mandarte Island project in 1991, and continues the field study. With 32 years of data on Song Sparrows from Mandarte Island, several nearby islets and studies on the mainland, the work of Jamie, his colleagues and successors stands out as one of the most extensive analyses of meta-population dynamics in birds. Since Brown-headed Cowbirds Molothrus ater arrived on Mandarte Island about the same time as Jamie, he became interested in the demographic consequences of bird parasites on both common and endangered species of songbirds. Despite the prevailing wisdom that Cowbirds were ecological villains, he set out to determine their ecological role in songbird communities. He first examined how hosts responded, and then focused on the impacts of Cowbirds on host populations. In his multi-authored book on the Ecology and Management of Cowbirds and their Hosts (2000, University of Texas Press), he determined that Cowbirds were not increasing, that there was little evidence that Cowbirds limit the population size of many host species and, most importantly, that Cowbird control often does not result in increased populations of their endangered hosts. On Mandarte Island, however, Cowbirds significantly reduced the reproductive success of Song Sparrows by depressing Sparrow recovery after catastrophic population declines. Also, with a large-scale removal on three heavily Cowbird-parasitized mainland sites, Jamie showed that Sparrows produced more young in Cowbird-reduced populations. This was sufficient to change his experimental removal sites from sinks to self-sustaining populations (Ecology 2002). In his last year, Jamie and co-authors completed a major synthesis of the Mandarte Island work in a book that Jamie illustrated, Conservation and Biology of Small Populations: the Song Sparrows of Mandarte Island (2006, Editors: J.N.M. Smith, L.F. Keller, A.B. Marr and P. Arcese, Oxford University Press). Sadly, he never saw the finished book, but he did have the satisfaction of completing a research synthesis of four generations of a scientific lineage. Jamie and co-authors used the Mandarte Island Song Sparrow Project and other island studies to review the breadth of problems that small isolated populations encounter, and they discuss the progress made on understanding regulatory mechanisms and the impacts of environmental change. Jamie's legacy is most closely associated with his field study of the Mandarte Island Song Sparrows for which he was awarded the Doris Huestis Speirs Award from the Society of Canadian Ornithologists (2000) and the Brewster Award from The American Ornithologists’ Union (2002). Over his career, Jamie took on many ecological orthodoxies such as optimal foraging, survival–fecundity tradeoffs and the role of invasive species in ecosystems. Rather than generating more new theory, he attempted rigorous tests of new and the refinement of established concepts. With collaborators from around the world, Jamie contributed over 100 papers, three books and many book chapters, primarily on birds, but also on insects, plants, amphibians, and marine and terrestrial mammals in arctic, temperate and tropical ecosystems. Many will regard Jamie's most enduring legacy as one of outstanding mentorship and tutelage in science at all levels. Jamie's ‘influence list’ (how many people influenced, how much and whose life was changed) is very long, as indicated by the many students and colleagues who kept in touch with him, some for several decades. His love of nature was boundless and absolutely contagious, inspiring a generation of ornithologists. He supervised over 35 graduate students and nine postdoctoral fellows in addition to countless undergraduate students. Jamie was a wonderful mentor, always supportive, concerned and interested in the personal and professional fortunes of his colleagues and former students. His mentoring style was versatile and provided necessary guidance without hovering, and lots of latitude for students in an independent phase. There was high demand from students and colleagues for his incisive and often cartoon-illustrated feedback on research papers and proposals. His ‘red pen was ripping’ until two days before his death! Jamie and his wife and fellow zoologist, Judy Myers, were renowned for hosting social science events to allow graduate students and colleagues to meet scientists visiting UBC. Daughter Isla, currently completing a PhD in Ecology at the University of Alberta, and son Iain, studying for a BSc in Agro-Ecology at UBC, grew up with gatherings of scientists invading their home. After a relaxed meal and brew, the visitor was often roasted with energy or slow-basted on their research seminar depending on the resident–visitor dynamics. Many graduate students cite this as one of the most positive and influential aspects of their academic development at UBC. To acknowledge the importance of Jamie's mentoring contributions, the Society of Canadian Ornithologists established The Jamie N.M. Smith Memorial Award for Mentoring in Ornithology in 2006. Jamie was active in naturalist societies, served on various conservation boards and panels, gave advice to conservation policy-makers and helped draft early legislation for the Canadian Species At Risk Act. In 2003, Jamie was awarded The Kay Beamish Award for Nature Education by the Vancouver Natural History Society. He was also an active member of the National Science Advisory Committee of Bird Studies Canada, something he could do by email when energy allowed. Jamie Smith will be remembered as a talented synthesist and staunch advocate of rigorous avian science. He was an insightful scientist, passionate conservationist, dedicated teacher and gifted naturalist who maintained a healthy balance of work and play, dedication to family and community service. Jamie accepted the harsh reality of his illness with courage, optimism and immense dignity. To the end, he continued a large email correspondence with friends and colleagues, many of whom did not realize the advanced stage of his illness. Jamie Smith leaves an enormous legacy of high-quality enduring science, and he trained a large cohort of prominent researchers, educators and other science professionals. His untimely loss resonates strongly through many levels of ornithology and conservation.

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