Christian Jouanin

Who is Christian Jouanin?

Christian Jouanin is a prominent French ornithologist and expert on petrels. He worked for the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris and is a former Vice President of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. He has done many major projects in the field, notably with petrels in the Indian Ocean and Madeiras, and has described a number of species.

Jouanin began working professionally with birds in 1940 at the age of 15, when he started working for the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle under the tutelage of Jacques Berlioz, then the head of the ornithology department. At the age of 22 he married his wife, Nicole, with whom he has had two daughters. While working at the museum he, along with his colleague Jean Dorst, who later replaced Berlioz as the head of the ornithology department, helped write the species description for the Djibouti Francolin, a critically endangered francolin endemic to Djibouti whose type specimen was brought to the museum. He also developed a lifelong interest in two distinctly different bird families, the hummingbirds and the petrels.

In 1955 Jouanin published his first independent species description after realizing that the new species, named Jouanin's Petrel, differed significantly from the Mascarene Petrel. This description began a long period of his life dedicated to the research of petrels in the Indian Ocean. While his primary goal was to find the breeding grounds of the Mascarene Petrel, he discovered another new species, Barau's Petrel, breeding on the island of Réunion. He also analyzed the differences between the Réunion and Seychelles populations of Audubon's Shearwater.